The project, explained

So why exactly does a grown man collect old baseball cards?

I can’t remember much about 1975, but almost all of it has something to do with baseball.

One day in the spring, my father handed me a quarter and told me to buy a pack of baseball cards with it. I had never purchased anything before then, and it was a feeling that I hadn’t yet experienced in life.

Later on that summer, my dad took me along with him to my first baseball game, a doubleheader between the Cardinals and Mets at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. The crowd, the sights and smells, the excitement in the air when a big play was made, all of it hit me in a way that I haven’t forgotten in all the years since then.

My first baseball cap was purchased at the ballpark that day but, fortunately, the Cardinals era of my life didn’t last for very long.

In the fall of that year, shortly after I had started the second grade, I was laid up at home with a broken leg. I broke it while playing hide-and-go-seek with some kids in the neighborhood, because kids did those types of things in 1975.

Since I was on crutches and couldn’t go outside, I turned on my parents’ old TV in the family living room and discovered a baseball game on WGN in Chicago. Had I not been exposed to the game a few weeks earlier in St. Louis, I doubt the game being played at Wrigley Field that afternoon would have resonanted with me. But it did, and I was hooked. And even though I wouldn’t get to actually set foot inside Wrigley Field for more than a decade, I knew it was a special place.

Having acquired a familiarity of the game, both live and on television, the World Series of 1975 then seared baseball into my consciousness. It was an epic battle between two teams, and I was left wanting more when it was all over.

So how was a young kid supposed to learn more about the game, in the days before cable TV and the internet? Baseball cards offered a cheap and easy way to learn about who the players were, and the teams they played for. They cost about a penny a piece in those days, and even provided a little stick of bubble gum to go along with them. Chewing gum while inspecting my latest acquisitions became a way of life for me in the years that followed.

By the time I left home to go to college, a decade later, baseball cards had lost their appeal. Although baseball itself remained on my radar screen, baseball cards had been relegated to the silly eccentricities of a kid that I no longer was.

Now jump ahead into the 21st century. I had acquired a handful of baseball cards, mostly Cubs players, through a variety of ballpark promotions, eBay purchases, estate and yard sales, and secondhand shops. I also received a significant number of cards from friends and family who wanted to part with their cards, but weren’t sure how to do it. “Send them my way,” I advised them. I was confident I could find something to do with them.

From the time I was seven years old, I’ve never considered these things to have any inherent value, at least in a monetary sense. Yes, there are people who spend large amounts of money on these things, and “The Hobby” is definitely a real thing. But I’ve never understood it, and I’m not interested in participating in it, either.

So then what to do with a bunch of old scraps of cardboard? The answer came to me on the day that I spotted a card from 1976 showing Lyman Bostock of the Minnesota Twins. I’ll say more about Bostock later, but he was killed during the 1978 season, on the evening after playing a game in Comiskey Park.

That event was devastating fot the ten-year old kid that I was at the time. I can remember thinking “Why would somebody want to kill a baseball player?” when I heard the news. It likely gave me some interest in the mortality of baseball players, which was heightened when Thurman Munson was killed in a plane crash the following summer.

I decided to start sorting through my baseball cards from the 1970s, because that’s when baseball mattered more than it ever would again. Aided by the internet—which certainly wasn’t available to the kid that I once was—I was able to quickly tell which players were still with us, and which had passed on to whatever comes next for us all.

With the cards sorted into the living and the dead, I then created a spreadsheet to keep track of them in a way that I would never have dreamed of as a kid. But since time marches on and nobody lives forever, I now find myself in middle age, with something a bit more macabre than I could have imagined as a kid in the 70s.

I recently came into posession of two identical boxes, which are ideally sized for storing baseball cards. They are labelled, as shown in the picture here, as ‘The Dead Box” and “The Living Box” (and Doritos dips should be avoided at all costs, in case you’re curious.)

I’m happy to report that there are many players from the 70s who are still alive at this point. There are currently 655 individual players in the two boxes, and with duplication of players from one year to the next, possibly 800 cards in all. Slightly less than 75% of those players are still alive, and a bit more than one-quarter of them have passed away. Each box is divided into three separate groups, which I’ll explain as this project moves along.

The living players’ box looks like this:

and the dead player’s box looks like this:

Who some of these players are, both the living and the dead, will be revealed and discussed in the posts to come. I plan, at the moment, to do this for a year, focusing on either a birth or death date, as determined by me as the keeper of the two boxes.

As the inevitable arrives for some of these players—all of them, really—I’ll break into the narrative flow that I have already planned out to point out who has jumped from one box to the other. And unless you follow baseball and grew up in the 1970s, most of the names won’t mean a thing to anyone reading this. To which I reply, borrowing a phrase from Slaughterhouse-Five, “So it goes.”

I’ve already come to terms with the idea that for the rest of my time on this earth, I’ll be watching people grow older and then die. And I’ll be doing the same thing, myself. My hope is that watching this process play out will allow me to appreciate every day as the gift that it is. And it will give me something to write about, too.

Until next time….