As we enter the dog days of summer, with our two mutts lying flatter on our kitchen floor than a discarded inner tube in a Mississippi creek bed, I find myself paying even closer attention than usual to baseball.
I scour the box scores each morning, and I'm irresistibly drawn to Baseball Tonight each evening on ESPN, where former Las Vegas Star John Kruk always provides a laugh or two and Hall of Fame scribe Peter Gammons reveals why he's the smartest baseball guy on the planet.
This year, as always without our own big-league franchise to pull for, I'm particularly interested in the San Diego Padres and the Milwaukee Brewers. That's because my golfing buddies, Greg and Mike Maddux, are playing important roles in trying to help their teams win division pennants. This month Greg chalked up his 340th win in a legendary career, and older brother Mike is doing masterful work as the Brewers' pitching coach .
It's my humble opinion that if Yankees owner George Steinbrenner had any sense at all he'd throw some of his considerable bankroll Mike's way, so he could teach the Bronx pitchers how to get somebody out. (To see the Brewers winning their division with a total annual payroll roughly one-third that of the bumbling Yankees makes my heart soar like the proverbial eagle.)
My love affair with baseball began at age 7. It started with bubble gum.
A kid who lived down the block in Spokane one day fronted me a brittle pink slab covered with white powder, and I noticed after I'd nearly dislocated my jaw breaking it down that the lump in my cheek made me look older. I even fantasized that it made me look like a big-league ball player. I could chew the stuff forever and it would still be the consistency of a handball, but that didn't matter.
With a lump of Topps Baseball Cards chewing gum in my cheek I had a healthy dose of self-esteem, and henceforward I couldn't imagine playing Little League over at Manito Park without at least four slabs wedged in the left side of my face.
Of course the only way to buy Topps gum back in 1956 was to spend a nickel for the six baseball cards that were packaged with it, and so my 10-cent weekly allowance went one place, and one place only, for two more packs.
I remember how impressed my father was when I brought home my first two packages and we found inside the great Ted Williams and Ernie Banks. Dad said I should save the cards and keep them in good condition, that they could be worth something one day. And so began my first passionate hobby.
Within weeks I had several other major stars of the day in my collection, including the impressive Cleveland Indians pitcher Herb Score, a fire balling 22-year-old who shortly thereafter would be hit in the eye with a line drive off the bat of Yankee Gil McDougall, effectively ending his career.
I also had Warren Spahn and Lew Burdette, the aces of the Milwaukee Braves, and lesser lights like Pete Runnels of the Washington Senators and Wally Moon of the Cardinals. But try as I might, I wasn't lucky enough to get a Mickey Mantle. Then I heard about the Hogan brothers, who lived around the block from us. Word had it that they were avid collectors, but that they were missing a few cards from the 1954 through '56 seasons and had duplicates of the Mick from every year. I was told that if you could fill in some holes in their collection, Mantle would go on the trading block.
I had played Little League against Glen Hogan, the elder brother , who wore spectacles thicker than block glass. Glen played for the Lower Manito Bears and we had beaten them in the division finals the year before, partly because of Glen's inadequacy at first base, where his woeful vision caused many an infield throw to get by the butterfly net he disguised as a glove. I suppose the only reason his coach let him play first was because Glen was tall and left-handed, which fit the stereotype, just as it seemed that the fat kid with the freckles always played catcher.
Anyway, I called up the Hogans and told them I was interested in swapping cards, and they invited me over to examine my inventory. Now I don't understand the science of how bubble gum companies distribute baseball cards, but I do recall that I had about 14 Gus Zernials and a dozen Camilo Pascuals in my surplus, and I probably had 95 percent of the other cards in the 1956 Topps series. I had them all filed alphabetically in a sturdy gray box my mother had used in her capacity as secretary for the Washington state dental auxiliary.
I remember sitting on the floor in the Hogans' den, with our cards spread all over the room, but with a clear line of demarcation separating theirs from mine. It was obvious they knew what they wanted, because they skipped right over my duplicates and went straight for my Ted Williams and Red Schoendie n st. They demanded both of those, plus several team cards (the ones featuring all 35 guys on a major league roster) in exchange for the one card that every kid with good sense wanted: a clean, square-cornered shot of Mickey Mantle as a rookie in 1951.
When I left the Hogan home that day with the Mantle card safely preserved in a plastic sleeve, I felt like the Brinks robbers making their getaway. And if my Dad had been impressed with my Teddy Baseball and 'Let's play two!' Ernie Banks cards, you should have seen his reaction to the Mantle. He was as pleased as if I'd returned a report card with straight A's.
By the end of that year, I had in my gray box the complete 1956 Topps series, and during the next few years I corrupted my molars by chewing acres of bubble gum in compiling the complete '57, '58, '59, and '60 series.
I continued to collect and file baseball cards until 1963, when high school and puberty and a growing passion for golf intruded on my hobby. But I was certain that my investment would some day have real value. After all, I had five complete sets of cards meticulously indexed in fireproof metal boxes in our attic.
I thought even then that it would be nice to save those cards for my own son - were I to be so lucky - and to encourage him in a fun and healthy hobby. I didn't have any idea that what I'd placed so neatly in those boxes would one day have a value of tens of thousands of dollars. The Mantle rookie card alone at one time was worth about fifteen thousand bucks. But here's where this quaint little story comes to a horrible ending. During the Thanksgiving weekend of 1970, on a return home from college in Oregon, I asked my mother where she had stored my card collection. I had an urge to go through them again.
"Oh, I gave those cards to an orphanage a year ago," Mom said, without a trace of alarm in her voice. "I just got tired of all that clutter in the attic and figured you didn't want them anymore."
There may be a moral here somewhere, but I'll be damned if I know what it is. I can only hope the supervisor of that kids' home appreciated what was contained in those plain gray boxes, sold them at auction, and built a five-star resort for those abandoned children.
I can't even bear to watch "Antique s Roadshow" on PBS. It upsets my stomach with the possibilities.
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