Are you ready to grow up?
—All my ex-girlfriends, ever
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).
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.