The Wax Pack
Page 1
“Poignant and powerful. . . . Balukjian covers more than ten thousand miles to track down the stories of fourteen men from a single pack of 1986 Topps baseball cards, learning a lot about their lives—and his own. Hop in the backseat and join him for the journey.”
—Tyler Kepner, national baseball writer for the New York Times and best-selling author of K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches
“As pleasing as the pink slab of bubble gum that, long ago, came with baseball cards inside five cent packets, this slender volume gives fresh flavor to the familiar phrase ‘inside baseball.’”
—George F. Will
“What if a pack of baseball cards could come to life? It sounds like a Spielberg movie plot, except it happened. It happened because Brad Balukjian made it happen, in real life, with the most eclectic cast of baseball characters ever assembled. And the result is one of the most fun, honest, funny, human, and uniquely creative baseball books of the year. I’ll admit it. I loved The Wax Pack!”
—Jayson Stark, senior baseball writer for The Athletic
“What a weird, quirky, fun read. There have been 50,000 books written on Major League Baseball, but Brad Balukjian’s The Wax Pack is a uniquely romantic love letter to a game, a time period, and its random soldiers. Well done.”
—Jeff Pearlman, author of Football for a Buck
“Balukjian’s cross-country, cardboard-based bildungsroman reminds us that baseball’s best stories are sometimes told by and about players who’ve long since left the league.”
—Ben Lindbergh, best-selling author of The MVP Machine and The Only Rule Is It Has to Work
“Brad Balukjian’s book is for all those little kids with cardboard heroes who turned into big kids and started wondering, ‘Hey, what if there’s more to life than just the cardboard?’ Turns out, there is.”
—Rob Neyer, author of Power Ball: Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game
The Wax Pack
On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife
Brad Balukjian
University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln
© 2020 by Brad Balukjian
Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image is based on an image in the interior.
Author photo courtesy of the author.
Topps® trading cards are used courtesy of the Topps Company, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Balukjian, Brad, author.
Title: The wax pack: on the open road in search of baseball’s afterlife / Brad Balukjian.
Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019032953
ISBN 9781496218742 (hardback)
ISBN 9781496221506 (epub)
ISBN 9781496221513 (mobi)
ISBN 9781496221520 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Baseball players—United States—Biography. | Baseball—United States—History—20th century. | Baseball cards—United States. | Balukjian, Brad—Travel—United States.
Classification: LCC GV865.A1 B3235 2020 | DDC 796.357092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032953
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Baseball is very much a game about fathers and sons, as the following pages attest. My gratitude to my dad will hopefully speak for itself, but I want to use this space to thank my mom. For every game my dad took me to, my mom took me to a baseball card shop in some converted garage or basement in rural Rhode Island to indulge my passion. Thank you, Mom, for always giving me the confidence to be me. I love you.
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is a daring adventure, or nothing.
—Helen Keller
Contents
Illustrations
Author’s Note
Prologue
1. Warming Up
2. Happy Meals
3. Yeager Bombs
4. Camp Templeton
5. Houston, We Have a Problem
6. Randy Is Ready
7. Carman’s Cradle
8. The Battery
9. Chasing Carlton
10. Leader of the Pack
11. Vincent van Gone
12. Is It September Yet?
13. Nobody Home
14. Gone Fishing
15. Catching Carlton
16. Captain Comeback
17. Straight Outta Compton
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Illustrations
1. Wax pack wrapper
2. Rance Mulliniks
3. Steve Yeager
4. Garry Templeton
5. Gary Pettis
6. Randy Ready
7. Jaime Cocanower
8. Don Carman
9. Vince Coleman
10. Lee Mazzilli
11. Dwight Gooden
12. Rich Hebner
13. Carlton Fisk
14. Rick Sutcliffe
15. Al Cowens
16. 1986 baseball checklist
Author’s Note
This is a work of literary nonfiction, and as such, I have played with the chronology of events in some instances for the benefit of the narrative and ultimately the reader. The only composite events take place in chapter 2, when two visits to Visalia (an initial scouting visit for the road trip and the visit on the trip itself) are combined into one. All quotes are accurate, as I tape-recorded my conversations with players and took contemporaneous notes. There are also no composite characters in the book; on occasion I have changed the names of certain people to protect their identities.
Prologue
November 1985
Mary Lou Gula knows it’s going to be a long day.
Since starting her job on the floor of the Topps factory fourteen years ago, she’s worked on every part of the baseball card manufacturing process: card cutting, general help, the DF line, day coding. She even played Santa at the company Christmas party.
The two-story factory sprawls among the hills of Duryea, outside Scranton in eastern Pennsylvania’s coal country. Duryea has long been a town of miners and factory workers, first from the silk and cigar industries and now baseball cards. These 2.5-inch-by-3.5-inch slices of cardboard, initially included as giveaways in packs of cigarettes in the 1880s, have produced a collecting craze across the country. By 1992 sales will reach $1.5 billion, and soon after that, a confluence of forces—oversaturation of product, waning interest in baseball, the advent of the internet—will burst the bubble, sending baseball cards back to the dugout. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Right now, in late 1985, Topps is the flagship, and Duryea the flagship’s home.
The DF line, where Mary Lou is scheduled today, is especially grueling. No one even knows what the D and F stand for—they just know that the process of cracking twenty-five-pound loaves of cold pink bubblegum into individual sticks, loading them into the chutes of the DF machine, and stacking the finished packs of cards in boxes, all at a breakneck pace, mean sore feet and an achy back by the time happy hour rolls around.
Lowering herself into her car to drive the two blocks to the factory, Mary Lou’s mind jumps ahead eight hours, when she and her coworkers will clock out, walk through the factory doors, and make a critical decision for happy hour: turn right and walk half a mile to Town Tavern, or turn left and go half a mile to Litzi’s Lounge. Litzi’s will cash their checks at the bar, and, being a Thursday, it’s also payday. While Ma
ry Lou has the masochistic habit of working doubles (can’t argue with the pay!), today she has first shift, the prime shift, and will be off by 3:30 p.m.
Arriving a few minutes early, Mary Lou pushes open the double doors of the factory. The scent of sugar immediately assaults her nostrils, sending a pang through her jaw. In another part of the building known as Hell’s Kitchen, latex, wax, rosin, calcium, and sugar are all mixed together in giant cauldrons to make one-ton batches of the famous bubblegum.
She waves to the security guard and walks down the long hallway of administrative offices, a tunnel of calm before emerging into the chaos of the open factory floor. A small but sturdy woman, she steels herself for the grind of the next eight hours. Yet a smile creeps across her face. This is, literally, her family: twelve of her relatives work here. It’s tough work, yeah, but it’s a collective struggle. When she was pregnant with each of her now-teenage kids, she worked right up until the day they were born.
Just like the players on the cards she manufactures, Mary Lou wears a uniform, except hers is stained with sugar instead of grass. Snapping the buttons on her knee-length white smock, the red italicized lettering of the Topps logo emblazoned in front, she thinks about hitting her target of 170 packs per minute, near the maximum capacity of a DF machine. She pulls on her red Topps baseball hat and walks from the locker room onto the cavernous factory floor, where she finds her post and greets Mona, her partner for the day.
Six weeks from now, these cards will sit under millions of Christmas trees, fifteen players per pack wrapped in red-white-and-blue wax paper, a slice of Americana and source of instant delight to the kids who will tear them open, hoping for a hometown player or superstar.
Mona stands at one end of the DF machine, one of twenty on the factory floor, and switches it on. It hums to life.
“Is it three thirty yet?” she asks as Mary Lou positions herself at the other end, ready to load.
“We’re hitting 170 packs today,” Mary Lou replies, glancing at the meter that measures their productivity.
She grabs a small pile of cards, feeding them into the machine’s A chute, and in a blur of muscle memory and coordination loads a stick of gum in the B chute almost simultaneously.
The machine combines all the elements of the pack—cards, sticks of gum, and special inserts—into a little stack and then pushes it onto an elevator, where a machine folds a sheet of wax paper around it. A heater melts the wax to seal the pack, which then slides along the conveyor to Mona, who places it in a box to be packed for shipment to the world.
As the wax paper wraps around that first set of cards, Mary Lou has no way of knowing that that pack holds any more significance than the thousands of others she has fed into DF machines over the years. She has no idea that rather than being unwrapped under a Christmas tree six weeks from now, it will remain sealed in storage, a forgotten time capsule waiting to be excavated. She has no idea that almost thirty years later, a sports archaeologist with a penchant for underdogs will come along and discover that time capsule, open it up, and then set off on a daring adventure to track down every player inside.
And she has no idea that one day she will meet that sports archaeologist in a smoky casino near Duryea and that that archaeologist will be me.
1. Wax pack wrapper
1
Warming Up
Are you ready to grow up?
—All my ex-girlfriends, ever
Summer 2014
I have always gravitated toward the obscure, the unknown, the unsung.
In 1984 I was one of only two kids to vote for Bert over Ernie in the Greenville Nursery School’s version of the presidential election (Sesame Street providing a more compelling choice than Ronald Reagan or Walter Mondale). I liked that Bert collected bottle caps and kept Ernie, who always seemed to be causing mischief, in line. As I grew, so too did my love of underdogs: my favorite insects were stinkbugs; my favorite New Kid on the Block was the reclusive Jon Knight; I even had a favorite railroad track at the Providence Train Station (track 5, remote and little used).
While I liked bugs and boy bands and train stations just fine, far and away my biggest passion was baseball. And true to form, my childhood heroes were the journeymen and benchwarmers, the underdog fringe players who needed to work like mad just to stay in place.
Always outside the mainstream, I identified as an underdog myself. A natural introvert, I was a late bloomer in everything from school to puberty to sex. I faced a good deal of middle-class adversity growing up, going through six years of speech therapy to treat a debilitating stutter, enduring another six years of orthodontics to tackle a dental situation that baffled my own father (who himself was a dentist), and struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’ve never forgotten what it feels like to stand alone in the corner of the room.
Now thirty-four, I am still putting bugs in jars, still listening to eighties music on cassette tapes, and still loving baseball. And so it’s probably no coincidence that I am also still single, living on a shoestring adjunct professor’s salary while renting a room from a lawyer in Oakland, California. In my early twenties I thought I’d met “the One” and was ready for what you’re supposed to do next—marriage, kids, etc. But I was wrong.
Expectations can be a dangerous thing.
Oakland is an underdog in its own right, its skyline no match for the glitz and gloss of its counterpart, San Francisco, across the bay. I prefer the grit of Oakland, a difference symbolized best by the differences in the cities’ baseball stadiums. The crowd at the Giants’ AT&T Park resembles a corporate happy hour, with tech hipsters swiping on their phones, their bodies turned away from the field in animated conversation, the game a mere backdrop for socializing. The Oakland Coliseum, on the other hand, is a postapocalyptic crater ringed with hot dog stands. Opened in 1966 on the flank of the I-880 freeway, the eyesore has been decaying for years, its plumbing regularly failing and leading to major sewage problems in the clubhouse.
But the Coliseum is my church and the upper deck my pew. One lazy summer day in 2014, I plop down fifteen dollars and have an entire section to myself, stretching out across three seats. I share my perch overlooking the first baseline with brazen seagulls squawking and jousting for food scraps, unfazed by my presence. The Jumbotron displays the teams’ lineups and players’ statistics, and just beyond, the tops of the Oakland hills glow in a sea of golden light. Even from these nosebleed seats, the freshly watered green of the outfield grass and reddish brown of the infield dirt radiate like a tropical rain forest with a buzz cut.
As the A’s leadoff hitter swaggers to home plate in that way only baseball players can—thick haunches pumping up and down with each stride like the coupling rod of a locomotive—I hover my pencil a couple of inches above my scorebook, ready to record the action.
I glance at the scoreboard and scan the names, suddenly aware of how few I actually recognize. While I still follow baseball, my knowledge of players peaked around age ten, when shoeboxes brimming with baseball cards covered my shelves. Those cards were like little monuments to my heroes, the backs of them crammed with statistics in squint-inducing fonts. And while I appreciated, even obsessed over, those numbers (I can still recite the career stats of my favorite player, Don Carman), gaudy statistics did not impress me. Rather, I was drawn to those players who for some reason resonated with my quirky personality—I liked Spike Owen because of his funny name, Marty Barrett because I thought he was handsome, and Felix Fermin because his initials were both F (which, for no apparent reason, was my favorite letter). I curated a baseball card album of all these players, whose only other common thread was that they were underdogs.
Every week, I marched my fifty-cent allowance to the Greenville Pharmacy to buy a wax pack of these cards, complete with a chalky stick of gum that snapped like a twig when you bit into it. Each pack was a kid’s version of a scratch-off ticket, a chance to find a favorite player waiting inside.
But even at that young age I was
not content to just let my cards sit in an album. I wanted, needed, to know everything I could about the players themselves, to connect with them in some way.
When my parents purchased our first computer in 1992, I immediately opened the word processor (remember Notepad?) and typed up a biography of Marty Barrett and his complete statistics, which I printed out and pressed to my nose, inhaling the scent of fresh ink. Somehow writing down those numbers and printing them out made them real and tangible in a way that mere thoughts never could. But again, it wasn’t enough to just print them—I then had to track down Barrett in person, finding him at a car dealership where he was signing autographs so I could present the report to him. I wanted to study him, to see what he looked like in normal street clothes, to simply know if he was a nice guy. (He was.)
As I got older, my pathological need to scrutinize and document only grew. I became a scientist (specifically, an entomologist), a profession demanding meticulous observation, research, and record-keeping. And the right side of my brain kept up with the left: my other passion was writing, particularly writing about people, and so, struggling to choose between science and journalism (my commitment issues extending to all facets of my life), I resolved to do both.
Back in my nosebleed seats at the Coliseum, I think more about the benchwarmers and journeymen of my childhood, the figurines of my Toy Story, whose cards are now locked away in a storage unit in my mother’s condo. (Thank you for not tossing them, Mom!) I picture the vessel that those cards came in, the wax pack, wondering if they even make them anymore, a smile spreading across my face as I recall the thrill of opening one. Each pack held fifteen individual surprises. And then I experience a wonderful moment of inspiration bubbling from the subconscious, that ever-elusive visit from the muse: What if I could open a pack just one more time? Not a new pack, but one that had been kept sealed by some hoarder in the vain hope that it would one day be worth something, one that—and this is the key—would almost certainly contain many of the very underdog types I once idolized (the contents of a pack being random and underdogs being more numerous; most teams only have a few star players).