The Wax Pack

by Brad Balukjian

  Completely forgetting the game in front of me, I begin scribbling ideas and questions in my scorebook. What happened to the underdogs of my childhood after the spotlight faded? How do they feel the game has changed? And what can I learn from them about what lies ahead for me? Pencil in hand, I realize that at thirty-four I am now the same age that most of them were when they retired, their bodies betraying them. In what other profession are you washed up for good in your midthirties? Most would be content to let this daydream evaporate into the summer sky. But not me. Not having saved any wax packs from childhood (the idea of not opening one as a kid was heretical), I take out my phone, log on to eBay, and order a pack of 1986 Topps, the first year I remember collecting.

  When the Pack (now a proper noun) arrives a few days later, I cradle its still-shiny wax paper, admiring the sunbursts of gaudy color and nonsensical slogan (“the Real one!”), noticing the way the horizontal bar of the lowercase t in “topps” extends farther than it should.1 I remove the calcified stick of gum with the caution of a bomb expert, place it in my mouth, and clench down on its powdered surface, splintering it into a thousand crumbs, which instantly dissolve on my tongue. It’s delightfully gross.

  I draw out the unveiling process as long as possible, slowly revealing each player while cherishing the mustiness of neglect. It is a tantalizing mix of greatness and mediocrity, fourteen Wax Packers in all (card 15 is a checklist, a card that is literally a list of other cards). Of course, for me, it’s not enough to just open the Pack. Now I need to find the players inside it. And write a book about it.

  I do some research online and find the Wax Packers are spread out across the country, from California to Massachusetts. The fourteen players played a combined 201 seasons for twenty-three different teams; only the Minnesota Twins, Atlanta Braves, and San Francisco Giants are not represented. I also luck out on their longevity: while the average big-league career lasts only 5.6 years, all but one player in the Pack (Jaime Cocanower) played at least 10. In addition, all but one is still alive: Google informs me that Al Cowens, best known for his days with the Kansas City Royals in the 1970s, succumbed to a heart attack in 2002.

  Baseball being a game played largely on the road, I decide the best way to tackle this project would be to take one mother of all summer road trips, a zigzag route that, when drawn on a map of the United States, looks like someone passed out with a Sharpie in hand. My unemployed status (in between semesters teaching biology at Laney College) gives me the luxury of time (but certainly not money; unlike literary quests like Eat, Pray, Love, the only advance I have is the warning that Vince Coleman might be a dick). This journey would, of course, require condensing a year’s worth of driving into seven weeks, which raises two serious concerns: (1) my tendency to get immediately drowsy behind the wheel (I’ve been known to nod off driving the Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco) and (2) the steed for my odyssey would be a 2002 Honda Accord, already with 154,029 miles on the odometer, the automotive equivalent of asking a forty-year-old pitcher to throw a complete game.

  I circle June of next year on the calendar as my departure date, giving me nine months to try and locate thirteen ex-ballplayers (and the ghost of a fourteenth) and convince them to talk to me. But here’s the thing: I have no special connections, no rich uncle who was golf buddies with George Steinbrenner. I don’t even have a sports-writing pedigree to give me legitimacy, having focused almost exclusively on science in my freelance writing career. So I resort to good old-fashioned stalking. My methods vary according to the player—some are only a Google search away (Rance Mulliniks’s Century 21 Realtor web page instantly pops up, including his cell phone number), while the more famous players, like Carlton Fisk and Doc Gooden, are much harder to contact.

  I have a narrow window in which to pull off this road trip—forty-nine days, leaving June 19 and returning home August 6, with only one buffer day in case I have car trouble or get arrested trying to ambush Carlton Fisk. Time is tight because on August 8 I have a plane ticket to fly back across the country for the wedding of one of my college buddies, an event I can’t miss.

  When I encounter each new Wax Packer, I will hand him a thick manila folder, a collection of all the articles written about him in the sports media.

  I will say, “This is my file on you. I’ve read it all, and I still feel like I know nothing about you.”

  He will smile and chuckle, impressed that I am willing to call him out on the well-known fact that players are trained to say nothing of substance to journalists.

  “What do you want to know?” he will ask.

  You’re about to find out.

  2

  Happy Meals

  Control what you can control.

  —Rance Mulliniks

  Days 1–2

  June 19–20, 2015

  Miles driven: 303

  Cups of coffee: 3

  Oakland CA to Visalia CA

  Twenty-five miles outside the city limits, I get my first whiff of Visalia.

  Nose crinkling, I hit scan on the Accord’s radio, ping-ponging between Christian rock and mariachi, then finally resort to the AM dial. More Christians, talking this time.

  What do you do if you need to perform a baptism and there’s no water available? asks the host.

  “What the fuck?” snaps Jesse from the back seat, his dark brown eyes flashing.

  2. Rance Mulliniks

  For the first leg of the trip, driving east from Oakland and then south along the spine of California’s Central Valley, I’ve brought along my two best friends, Adam and Jesse Brouillard, figuring the company would be nice before I strike out on my own. I met the Brouillard brothers right after college, in 2002, when I moved to Santa Barbara. Our parents, who were acquaintances back in our home state of Rhode Island, had arranged a play date for us at a local bar, something that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, doesn’t result in a sequel. Fresh from a shift at their family restaurant, the Brouillards, who pride themselves on being blue collar, took one look at the literal blue collar of my starched polo shirt and flat-front khakis and checked the clock. But it turned out we had a lot in common: Jesse and I both loved baseball, were terrified of power tools, and used Caps Lock instead of the Shift key for capitalization; Adam (whom we call the Kid, even though he’s technically a few months older than me) hated baseball, but we bonded over our love of obscure Star Wars characters. And the brothers couldn’t have been more different from each other, Jesse a loud-talking, cymbal-crashing force of charming neurosis and mercurial pride, Adam a sensitive free spirit and ex-bartender ready to nest with his fiancée, Ali.

  The radio voice in my car continues: The book of baptism rules states that if no water is available, certain “doubtful matter,” such as saliva, tears, or light beer, can be substituted for the baptism.

  “How much longer, dude? I could use some doubtful matter right now!” Jesse says. “I’m thinking Heineken,” he adds, leaning so far forward he’s almost in the front seat.

  “And some chicken tenders,” the Kid says, shutting off the radio sermon. Riding shotgun, he shifts his feet and yanks on his black hoodie from the Kona Club, a bar back in Oakland where he used to sling fruity cocktails.

  If San Francisco and Los Angeles are California’s showrooms, then this, the Central Valley, is the boiler room. The carefully gridded quilt of ranches and farms bears little resemblance to the land once roamed for centuries by the Yokut tribe of Native Americans. Gold-seekers flocked here in the early 1850s, and when they didn’t find the bounty they expected, they transformed the grassland into an agricultural hub. Pistachio, walnut, and orange orchards stretch to the horizon, interspersed with cattle stalls.

  “So who is this guy again? Lance Mullinks?” the Kid asks, fishing out the 1986 baseball cards that inspired the trip. Jesse rolls his eyes.

  “Jesus Christ, Kid, it’s Rance Mull-i-niks!” he replies, dragging out each syllable. I smirk at Jesse’s frustration—we’ve only been on the road three
hours, and I’ve already refereed half a dozen spats, headlined by an epic debate over the food at IHOP versus Marie Callender’s (the edge going to the latter, based on their free blueberry banana loaf).

  Rance is the perfect leadoff hitter for this journey, wonderfully pedestrian as a player but phonetically unforgettable. He epitomizes the underdogs I idolized as a kid, a scrappy overachiever with the physique of a librarian who managed to play sixteen seasons in the big leagues. In newspaper accounts from his career, the same adjectives come up over and over: “smart,” “mild-mannered,” “hard-nosed.” He was a perpetual part-timer who got by on guile and hustle, a line-drive hitter whose career ended in Hollywood fashion, winning a World Series with the Toronto Blue Jays in 1992. He had not been hard to find: his cell phone number was listed online, and when I called him and explained the gist of the project, he seemed genuinely interested, almost bashful. In our very first conversation, he said, “I’d be happy to show you around. The small town I’m from, Woodville [located right outside Visalia], I’m not sure how interesting you’ll find it.”

  “Rance wanted to come back here?” the Kid says, billboards streaking by as we enter Visalia proper.

  If abortion was my right, why do I feel so wrong? reads one.

  Rance came home and now works as a residential Realtor, which raises this very important question: What the hell is a World Series champion doing hosting open houses in a place that smells like cow shit?

  * * *

  *

  Getting marital advice from Rance Mulliniks was definitely not on the itinerary.

  I stare at the shiny gold rock clamped on the fourth finger of his left hand, a symbol of his one true love. The Toronto Blue Jays logo sits front and center in the ring, a sparkling diamond in the bird’s eye, commemorating the Jays’ 1992 World Series victory.

  “Lord knows I’m not an expert on marriage, but I got married at twenty-two. And I tell my older children, until you’re thirty, don’t even think about it,” he says.

  Jesse and I glance over at the Kid. Rance arches an eyebrow.

  “What?” the Kid protests. “I’m thirty-four. I know what I’m doing.”

  Rance is wearing a black polo shirt and black plaid shorts, and his graying hair, a bit thinner now than it was during his playing days, is slicked straight back. His bushy mustache is still there, but with a lot more salt than pepper now. He casts a figure bigger than his six feet, with a late middle-age leanness belied only by settling around the midsection that says fatherhood. His face is florid and his features are a bit avian, with a weak chin and warm bluish eyes. He is a relaxed fifty-eight, still spry enough that if a ground ball came screeching his way, he could instinctively crouch down and snuff it.

  Rance has suggested a homecoming tour, visiting all the places where he crafted the hitting stroke that brought him to baseball’s promised land. We’ve gathered behind the fence at Monache High School’s baseball field, a padlock on the gate keeping us from standing in the spot where a teenage Rance once crushed it. A life-size cardboard cut-out of his likeness looms down the right-field line above the outfield fence, a tribute put up by the school when they retired his jersey (number 4) last year.

  After this tour of Rance’s alma mater, we’ll visit the tiny town of Woodville, too small to have a high school of its own, and then watch him give a hitting lesson at his baseball academy. But right now, Rance is in mentor mode, having been informed of the Kid’s recent engagement to Ali.

  “You’ve got to work at it. It doesn’t just naturally flow, because at some point the shine’s gonna wear off, and now it becomes a day-to-day thing,” he says.

  He’s talking marriage in his measured baritone, but he could just as easily be discussing baseball and its grueling 162-game schedule.

  Rance speaks from experience—he was forced to grow up way too quickly while playing a child’s game for a living. Although he had scholarship offers from USC, Arizona State, and other schools, he spurned them for a $32,500 signing bonus from the California Angels, a reward for signing in the third round of the 1974 amateur draft. Two years later, he met his first wife, Jeannie, while playing in the Minor Leagues in El Paso, Texas, and the year after that, at only twenty-one years old, Rance got the call that every Little Leaguer dreams of: you’re going to the Major Leagues to be the Angels’ starting shortstop. Even forty years later, he can recall his exact statistics the day he was called up: eleven home runs and fifty-one runs batted in.

  The next sixteen years were a blur away from home. And three years after his career ended in 1992, so too did the marriage.

  “What happened?” I ask, fully aware of how nosy I’m being.

  Rance stares out to center field, his hair matted with sweat at the edges, his face still.

  “I don’t really know what happened. It just got to a point where I wasn’t willing to do it the rest of my life. My ex, Jeannie, she would always say, ‘I know you must have a woman,’ but I just laughed. There was no other woman.”

  I don’t press beyond that, and he doesn’t offer a further explanation. Although he and Jeannie haven’t talked in years, they’re forever linked through their three adult children, Ryan, Merissa, and Whitney, who all live elsewhere.

  “I can honestly say that I wasn’t the giving father that I should have been,” he volunteers. “I don’t want to give the wrong impression. I wasn’t hanging out and partying all the time and doing those kinds of things, but when I was home during the off-season, I didn’t spend the time that I should have with my children.” I’m surprised by his candor. He’s already shown us more vulnerability than he did in sixteen seasons with reporters.

  “And as a husband, I wasn’t a bad guy or anything, but I was so dedicated and into what I was doing that I could have done better,” he says, his ring flashing as he talks with his hands.

  “You can be home and a mile away,” he adds.

  I think about how opposite my relationship with my father was, the countless games of catch, the way he taught me how to read box scores and batting averages.

  “Where does Ryan live?” Jesse asks.

  “Seattle. He works for the U.S. Postal Service. Used to be in the navy, served on a nuclear submarine.”

  A job that will take you as far away from home as you want to go.

  “Was he not into baseball?” I ask, knowing how common it is for players’ sons to try and follow in their dads’ footsteps.

  Rance shakes his head, then blinks, holding the fence.

  “Well, he liked to play. He was a very good athlete, well-coordinated. I coached him a couple years, and I could put him anywhere on the field and he could play. But I don’t know, because I didn’t spend the time with him that I should have. If I had, maybe he would have really taken to it.”

  He pats the dirt with the toe of his sneaker, carving a small mound.

  I look over at the Kid, who has been listening intently this entire time. Baseball has never seemed so interesting to him.

  We pile into Rance’s white Toyota Avalon to drive to Woodville, the tiny town next door and site of the original Mulliniks homestead.

  “That 1985 team was underrated, wasn’t it?” Jesse asks from the backseat, unable to resist talking directly about baseball any longer. He was every bit as obsessive and fastidious a fan as I was growing up in the eighties.

  Rance smiles. For Blue Jays fans, 1985 is the moment you lost your virginity: bittersweet, wonderfully flawed, but unforgettable. That year, only eight years removed from their inception as a pitiful expansion team, the Jays won ninety-nine games and their first division title.

  “I think that ’85 team was the most talented team I ever played on,” Rance replies, easing the Avalon down flat county roads, shifting his body occasionally to relieve the sciatica that has plagued him since running out a bunt hit in 1978.

  Despite being favored, the Blue Jays lost that year in the playoffs to the Kansas City Royals, who went on to become champions.

  “
Winning a world championship [in 1992] was a great thing, but the overall experience in ’85 was greater,” he says.

  Woodville’s misfortune lurks behind the ubiquitous chain-link fences walling off homes from the sidewalk. It’s a squat, dusty town, the houses packed in close, devoid of restaurants or other commerce. We park at the elementary school, and after a cheery greeting from the principal (“When’s your mom going to bring more of those pies around?”), we walk past a group of kids playing pickup basketball behind the school, barbed wire lining the top of the fence. Striding quickly toward the baseball field, Rance says the town has changed considerably, although his childhood home and his grandparents’ house still stand.

  On this field many years ago, his dad, Harvey, had seen the future: Rance would succeed where Harvey had failed. Once a prospect himself, Harvey had had a live arm, a cannon, and was signed in the 1950s with high hopes as a pitcher by the Yankees. He was born in Oklahoma, his family moving to California with the hundreds of thousands of other southwesterners (nicknamed “Okies”) during the Great Depression in search of literal greener pastures. He met Rance’s mom, Ganell, on a school bus at age fifteen in nearby Porterville, devoted himself to baseball, and, when he blew out his arm, settled into a career as a finance and loan businessman and later a county assessor.

  With the help of Rance’s brother, Dana, Harvey threw batting practice to Rance on this field deep into the twilight every single day after school beginning in February, when the cold plains air stung every bit of exposed skin. Rance swung until his hands were raw, his muscles being programmed with each subsequent pitch. His talent was obvious as he blew past his peers, but most impressive was his quiet confidence and resolve. When he had stitches removed from a deep gash on the bottom of his foot right before his first Little League game, he wrapped it up and, against the protests of his mom, declared he would play, no matter the pain. When he broke into the Major Leagues with the Angels in 1977 and slumped horribly, he didn’t flinch, telling the Sporting News: “At no time did I think I was over-matched. They don’t throw any harder up here than they do in the Minors and their breaking pitches aren’t any better.”1