On my twenty-eighth birthday, I got a package from my father, a small padded Jiffy envelope containing two neat little bundles wrapped in white tissue paper, folded and pleated and sealed up in their pouch with the slightly neurotic precision that is characteristic of my father and that he inherited, I believe, from his mother, Irene, who wrapped everything, even the unpeeled oranges on her kitchen counter and the silverware in her drawer. He’d neglected to include a note or a card. I unwrapped the first neat little bundle and found, in their clear plastic sleeves, four baseball cards printed by the Bowman Gum company in 1952, the year my father was fourteen. There was a Bobby Adams, and a Billy Goodman, and two pitchers named Howie, Judson and Pollet. I consider myself a baseball fan and a moderately accomplished student of baseball history, but I confess that I had never heard of any of these players. Thinking that I had inadvertently opened the “auxiliary” portion of my birthday present—perhaps some duplicate cards of my father’s (he’s a collector) that he had thrown in as a kind of bonus—I tore open the other bundle and found three more cards, also Bowmans, also in their archival plastic PVC-free sleeves: a Mickey Harris, and a Vern Bickford, and then a Randy Gumpert.

Despite the note of faintly derisive disappointment inherent in any sentence that ends in the word Gumpert, I was not at all disappointed in my father’s gift. The 1952 Bowman cards are among the most serenely beautiful exemplars of a popular art form not notable, it must be admitted, for works of great beauty, serene or otherwise. The baseball card has generally and throughout its hundred-odd-year history been an object supremely suited for insertion into the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Though to the true fan, any awkward old photograph of some square-jawed, wall-eyed fellow named Carlton Molesworth in a peaked beanie, staring off into the outfield on some long-gone sepia afternoon, may have a kind of poignant charm, and though some of the cards of the thirties and forties, such as National Chicle’s Diamond Star and those issued by the Leaf Gum Company, have a kind of flat, primary-colored crudeness that makes them resemble so many tiny Warhols, most baseball cards are, as specimens of the photographic and design arts, at best uninteresting to look at and, far more frequently, outright ugly.

The 1952 Bowmans are different: Accidentally, perhaps, they attain a cool and evocative beauty. For one thing, there is no printed text on the obverse of the card, no goofy bird or Injun or sock; there is only a small simulated autograph—say, “Randall P. Gumpert”—modest, dignified, perfectly legible, stitched across the portrait of the Boston right-hander. And the portraits themselves! The ballplayers have been depicted not in the usual glum mug shots, nor in the clumsy hand-drawn caricatures found on cards of earlier years, but in an odd combination of painting and photograph, photographs not merely tinted and retouched but painted over, transformed. Bloodred Boston B’s on caps, radium-white uniforms, dreamy powder-blue textbook skies—all the colors run rich and surreal; the lace cornices of Yankee Stadium over the shoulder of Randall P. Gumpert are a luminous cake-icing green, his resolute mouth a jet-black cartoon line; and one feels that these are unquestionably idealized paintings of ballplayers. But all the men have been caught in mid-windup, or after letting fly, or stooping to short-hop a grounder, as only a photograph can catch a man with his mouth open, or his teeth clenched, or his forehead furrowed in candid anxiety over the location of this next pitch, or with his thoughts patently elsewhere, his eyes looking strangely lost and vacant the way eyes can in photographs.

And then, inexorably, you turn the card over. Because the great secret theme of baseball is Loss (with its teammate, Failure), reading the backs of baseball cards is always an exercise in pity, and this is particularly true of the reverse of an older card like a 1952 Bowman, where the details of a ballplayer’s career are usually given not in the clean, bloodless statistical charts of today but in terse prose paragraphs, where they take on some of the mighty sadness of narrative, and each card can become the tiniest of novels whose plot is the familiar tale of futility and squandered promise and a ballclub’s giving up. Howie Pollet “began the 1951 season with the Cards. In 6 games for them, with no wins and 3 losses. With the Pirates Howie took the mound 21 times, with 6 wins and 10 losses. Season’s record: 6 and 13. Led League in 1946 with 21 wins. Had 20 wins in 1949. Broke into majors with Cardinals.” At the bottom of every card is the send-away offer of a baseball cap of your favorite major league team (“a $1.00 value”) for five waxed wrappers and fifty cents.

The thing was, I didn’t really collect baseball cards, and I thought my father knew that. During the winter of the Lockout of 1990, just before my first marriage ended, in the miserable grip of a Seattle January that consisted, without exaggeration, of thirty full days of rain, I had dabbled in the hobby out of a kind of desperate yearning for a season that, it then appeared, might not have its Opening Day. But I’ve never had the collecting temperament—not the way my father has it—and when the package arrived, over a year had passed since I had bought my last card. But that wasn’t important. I owned a little-used copy of Dr. Beckett’s Price Guide, in which I could look up the values of the seven cards and see that my father’s gift was a generous one, but that wasn’t important, either. That was what I was thinking, at any rate, as I took down the copy of Macmillan’s Baseball Encyclopedia that had been my father’s birthday gift to me in 1970, and I discovered that Billy Goodman was actually a pretty good ballplayer who in 1950 led the American League in hitting with a .354 average, and that Vern Bickford, in the same year, pitched the season’s only no-hitter. It wasn’t important that I didn’t collect 1952 Bowmans nor care what they were worth (not really), or that when I was finished turning each card over and over and wondering at that lost expression in Howie Pollet’s eyes, I would put them all away in my sock drawer and “lose” them for many years (they recently turned up again, ageless in their Mylar jackets). The important thing was the nature of the gift, was my father’s saying to me after twenty-eight years during which we had lost Roberto Clemente and our beloved Washington Senators and my father’s mother and father, and had split two divorces between us, and had known all the usual guilt and bitterness and recrimination, and had moved, in modern and terrible fashion, to opposite ends of the continent, “Here, son, have seven baseball cards.” What’s important was that baseball, after all these years of artificial turf and expansion and the designated hitter and drugs and free agency and thousand-dollar bubblegum cards, is still a gift given by fathers to sons.