A Trip Through A Kid’s Card Collection

By: Matthew Kohl
Email: virtualsportsman@gmail.com
Twitter: @virtuallymatt

The baseball off-season can be fraught with peril for some. Especially if you don’t care for many,
or any, of the winter sports. Baseball fans who aren’t content to follow the free agent game or the trade rumors have a few options to scratch the baseball itch. For example, I like to take a trip through my childhood baseball card collection. My card binder is one of very few things I have left from my youth and it’s the oldest thing I own that I purchased with my own money. It’s interesting to see who I thought was worth putting in the book versus who got clipped into the bike spokes since I only collected cards from players and teams I liked. I didn’t care if they were stars, though many were, and I didn’t care if they played for a rival team. Sometimes a card would get promoted from the box to the binder and sometimes they would get demoted, a practice which accounts for entire pages with only a single card on them in some instances. I don’t change it these days even though the order of cards and grouping of players is ramshackle at best and absolutely maddening when I’m looking for something specific.

Whenever I go through the book, I’m reminded of cards I had that would be worth having today or in the future had I kept them. I didn’t care enough about the players at the time to do so. Allusions of monetary gain be damned as I firmly stand by those edicts that decided what or whom was worth keeping, mysterious as they were. Mariano Rivera’s 1992 Bowman rookie card may disagree with me tossing it aside, but what kid keeps a baseball card featuring some twit standing in khakis and a polo shirt in his collection? Besides, he played for the evil empire. Sometimes though, I get confused as to why I kept something in the book.

WHO THE HELL?

“Who in the hell is Mariano Duncan?” That’s usually the first question I ask myself whenever I peruse the book. He’s on the first page. He was a 2B/SS and career .267 hitter who is currently the hitting coach for the Chicago Cubs AA affiliate Tennessee Smokies by the way. I learned that from Wikipedia just today! Even though his career may have been a bit underwhelming, I don’t dare take the card out. For one reason or another an eight year old me thought it belonged in the book and I don’t doubt that reason was a good one. Its placement on the bottom right corner leads me to believe it’s one of the first nine cards I ever put in there. It’s possible it could even be from my very first pack of cards.

I probably kept him because he had good fundamentals.

Another player who I have several cards from that also has a Cubs connection is Pat Listach, though I know why I kept his cards. He was second place to only Kenny Lofton in stolen bases and won Rookie of the Year honors in 1992. All but one of the cards I have from him are from that season. Coincidentally, he didn’t do much else the rest of his playing career. He’s currently the Cubs third base coach and was voted Pacific Coast League Manager of the Year in 2008 for leading the Iowa Cubs to the postseason. So he has that.

These are great looking cards though.

THE WEIRDNESS

There are also some strange phenomena that permeate my card binder. One of which I call the “Doc Strawberry Page.” It’s weird that two players who got famous in two different decades that both practically ruined their respective careers through drug use ended up grouped together. I knew about the drug problems they had even as a kid. Maybe I thought if I kept them together, but segregated from the other cards, the other players couldn’t do drugs with them. I really loved Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden. I was disappointed to see their careers go downhill for such stupid reasons when they both had such great natural talent. I never really gave up on either of them though. That’s probably why I’m so unforgiving of players today.

Another bit of weirdness is what I like to call the Eric Karros Quartet. I’ve grown to dislike him even more as an adult due to his lackluster commentary but I absolutely hated Karros as a kid. Why I kept any of his crap let alone four of the same card is completely unexplainable. In hindsight though, he looks a lot like my cousin Gary. Maybe I thought he was just moonlighting as a police officer.

Fuck you Eric!

I don’t have a name for this one but probably the strangest thing that appears in my collection is the random presence of a Damon Berryhill card every other page or so. It begins on the tenth page mysteriously adjacent to Mike Scioscia. Then he appears again on the very next sheet next to Gary Gaeti, another player whose inclusion I have no explanation for. This continues on for another 15 pages until the second to last one where a wall dedicated to Ryne Sandberg ends the curse. I don’t really think I liked him as a player and I can’t imagine I would have liked anything about him other than the fact that he was a catcher, but even that’s a sketchy theory. I didn’t even really care for the Cubs too much until later in 1998 or 1999 so it’s weird that I would have so many of his cards let alone put them in my binder. I can’t figure out why they’re so scattered either. Unless somebody else can come up with a reason, I’ll just have to leave this mystery to future generations.

A selection of Berryhills. Maybe I liked his name?

THE HEROES

One of the heroes of my youth.

Still, there are some cards that really do deserve to be in my collection. In fact, one of my favorite pages in the book is the Bo Jackson page. I loved everything about Bo Jackson when I was young. I loved him so much I even picked up a Raiders hat when I had no connection whatsoever with football. In fact, Bo Jackson was the reason I began watching football. If it wasn’t for Bo, I would have entirely missed the final years of Joe Montana’s amazing career (another player I idolized as a child) and the best days of Steve Young’s. I was excited as all hell when he came to the White Sox, and now that I really think about it, he was the reason I started paying any attention at all to my local sports teams. Well, he and Mark Grace, who I was never lucky enough to get a card of…

…but whatever.

Of the stranger memories regarding Bo Jackson was the cartoon with him, Wayne Gretzky, and Michael Jordan. It was called Pro Stars and it was ridiculous.

Through Both Lenses: Zen Baseball Thoughts

by: Mauricio Rubio Jr.
email: mr@99sportsproblems.com
twitter: @MRubio52

Son, this isn’t the land of the living. It’s the land of the dying. Get over it. Ask not for whom the bell tolls….

-Craig Branch

I’m watching what could be Chipper Jones’ final season in baseball. There’s something about the passage of a baseball career that gets me. The old guys are going away, as they always will over the course of time. Finally the generation of baseball players that I grew up with, the brightest stars of my baseball card collection, is going away. Some are still going strong, Jeter is hitting .400 for some reason, some are fading away, Giambi and Thome are finding different roles as part time players, and some may have passed into the history books abruptly, Mo Rivera might have pitched his last Major League inning. They leave the game in fine hands as the younger crop of budding stars took over. It’s turning back into a young man’s game with an emphasis on speed and defense, and that’s what baseball should be. Home Runs are only cool to a degree, but for my money a 450 ft. moon shot, while certainly valuable, will not be as entertaining as that moment when the runner tags up from third on Bryce Harper. Baseball is at it’s best when Jemile Weeks tests the arm of Ichiro, when Starlin Castro is stretching a double into a triple, when Josh Reddick absolutely guns some poor soul down at third. It hearkens back to a different time, a different brand of baseball.

Baseball is about history. It’s true that nothing will ever happen the same exact way twice, but what happens on the diamond always has roots in the past. Baseball goes through cycles, and sometimes those cycles will repeat. I think that as it stands now this iteration of baseball has the chance to look a lot like the game as it was played in the 1970’s, when you could see all sorts of things on the diamond. Starters went for 250+ innings, closers saved 30+ games, SB artists swiped 60+ bags, sluggers hit 30+ HR’s, great hitters had averages in the .330’s. It was an athletic competition that pitted outfielders against daring baserunners, great pitchers against great hitters, and it was probably the best representation of what baseball could be. Given the dearth of young talent that is already here and the talent that has yet to reach the Major League level, we could be looking at that again.

History

The last time the Cubs went 27 up, 27 down was on September 9, 1965. Sandy Koufax struck out 14 and let none reach base against the 8th place Cubs at Dodger Stadium. The Cubs have always managed to get a hit since then. It’s the longest streak of its kind in the Majors. The Yankees have the second longest official streak at 44 years, 263 days.

That fact came to me as I was watching Tommy Hanson throw a few no-hit innings at Wrigley. It got me thinking about all the history Wrigley must have seen over the years. I bring all of this up because there is a slow realization that is coming to me as I am witnessing what I think are the final years of Wrigley Field. At least the Wrigley Field as we know it. There are numerous plans to renovate Wrigley Field, most of them revolve around a Jumbotron in center field, and some even have the Cubs scrapping the old stadium all together and building up a brand new stadium. I know a lot of fans are heavily resistant to the idea of tearing Wrigley down. Over time, I’ve grown to accept that it can happen, and for the long-term success of the team, it probably should happen. The more importantly I’ve grown to accept that it’s ok.

Wrigley is currently the second oldest stadium in the Majors. Fenway is older by 2 years. Weeghman Park opened in 1914, Fenway opened in 1912. Weeghman park was the home of the Federal League Chicago Whales for 2 years before the Cubs took over the park in 1916. Since then it’s seen a lot of history, some of it good, most of it bad. Wrigley saw Babe Ruth call his shot. Gabby launch one into the gloamin’ there. It’s where Charlie Hustle equaled a legend. Whether you like it or not, Sammy made history there, creating a legend that is now a taint in Cubs history.

That’s the underlying theme with Wrigley, we’ve been a witness to heartbreak more than anything. I think the Wrigley moment that sticks out in my mind more than anything is Game 6 of the 2003 NLCS, and we don’t need to rehash that moment. Wrigley has never celebrated a World Series winner. She’s never seen the Cubs seal the deal.

Ivy

Wrigley will always have a soft spot in my baseball heart. It’s canned as a dump by its detractors, and yeah, a lot of the park could use improvement. What’s lost in the troughs is what that place really means to Cubs fans. It’s the embodiment of history for most of us, and it shouldn’t be that way. Wrigley is bricks, ivy, mortar, and steel. Wrigley is not Ernie Banks, Ron Santo, Fergie Jenkins, nor Greg Maddux. It was the home of some legends, but at the end of the day, that only matters so much. What matters more are the memories of what they did. It’s cool to have an active museum like Wrigley, but I think it’s more important to remember that memories don’t die if the stadium does.

I was always closer to my mother’s side of the family. My grandfather (her father) and grandmother settled into a house on the lower west side of Chicago in 1968. My family essentially lived in that house until 2000. My grandfather put so much time into that place, he became that place in a sense. My youth has strong roots in that house, we were that house. The memories of my childhood center around there, as our family grew and scattered to all corners of the country, we would always gather there for Christmases, birthdays, and eventually a funeral. When my grandfather died the decision came to sell the house and have my grandmother move in with us. That was an extremely painful and sad day for the entire family as 3 generations of family gathered again to say goodbye.

My grandfather was that place, but his memory lives on. The house was important, but more important were the memories shared there. They didn’t go away, they didn’t become dull in the wake of the sale. They remain, as the memories always will. Our family is more than brick and mortar, and we Cub fans need to understand that the Cubs are more than Wrigley Field.

A large part of me will be sad to see it go, it will be torn down in my lifetime, of that I am certain. There is a great deal of charm to the ballpark, but at the end of the day what matters more to me is that the Cubs put themselves in the best possible position to succeed. If that means a Jumbotron, fine. If that means tearing down a relic and building a new park, fine. Yankee Stadium was Ruth’s house, Yankee fans don’t mind the new Yankee Stadium much. There’s an understanding that the legends in pinstripes will always be the legends in pinstripes, regardless of where the current Yankees play.

A baseball sage once said that heroes get remembered, but legends never die. Wrigley Field is a legendary stadium, in my opinion. It’ll never really die, the ivy will always live on in Cub fan hearts and memories. It’s time to grow up in a sense, we’re in the baseball business now. Nobody is more romantic about baseball and history than I am, but part of history is progress, and I’m perfectly fine with the Cubs progressing.

Cherish the memories, they are important. Think about the long-term success of the team, that is more important.

Friday Roundup

• Carlos Marmol continues his unfortunate Rob Dibble Impersonation. Any trade value he may have had evaporated when he lost his slider. For compassion, here is Rob Dibble’s stat sheet. Note his age when he finally lost it. Carlos Marmol is 29 this year.
• Johnny Danks forgot how to pitch for some reason. His season ERA sits at a paltry 6.51 and he should thank the rest of the staff for taking the focus off of him for the time being. Danks isn’t fooling anyone anymore as evidenced by a career low 6 K/9 and a career high 3.9 BB/9.
• The Knicks last playoff victory happened during a time in which Lifehouse and Train were relevant bands.
• For the first time since 1996 the Yankees will have a name other than Mariano Rivera top their season saves leader board.

Even when he does cool shit Bryce Harper still looks like a douchebag.