Cardboard Gods (4 page)

Though my brother and I were at the center of the adults' vision of a new life in the country—they wanted us to grow up wild and free, bounding barefoot through meadows, uncorrupted—we paid as little attention to it as possible. Instead, as it turned out, we paid attention to baseball. I'd never cared about baseball before, but in our first spring in Vermont, in 1975, my brother started playing little league and collecting baseball cards and following the regional team, the Red Sox. And what he did, I did.

This imitative way of being was something that would in many ways define my life, my imitations often going beyond mimicry to become a kind of inward orthodoxy that seized on one or another of the various pursuits of my brother as if they were the exploits of a visionary, each detail worthy of the impassioned scrutiny of a solitary monk. I understand my connection to baseball in this way. My brother liked baseball a lot. He was a better player than I would ever be, bigger and stronger, even able eventually to throw a good curveball. But I don't think he grabbed hold of its details as fiercely as I did, something I noticed early on when he tried to argue that Rogers Hornsby, and not Ty Cobb, held the record for highest lifetime batting average. It was the first time in my life that I knew more than my brother about anything, and possibly also my first experience with irony, given that I'd so passionately studied the baseball encyclopedia my uncle Conrad had recently given my
brother for Christmas because I believed such study would bring me closer to my brother.

That first year in Vermont, we house-sat in a town called Randolph Center for a family spending a year as Christian missionaries in Korea. Randolph Center had many big white houses with immaculate lawns, a college with brand-new tennis courts, and a big pond called Lake Champagne with a sun-drenched wooden dock in the middle of it and a building nearby with pinball machines and air hockey tables. Very near our house, there was a small ski hill with a rope lift. In the summer, hang gliders launched themselves from the top of the hill like bright-colored ponderous birds that seemed somehow simultaneously prehistoric and futuristic.

Kids were friendly in Randolph Center, a few of them coming by to basically welcome my brother and me aboard. One of these kids was a farm boy named Buster who would go on to become the primary baseball news oracle for the nationwide sports information monopoly and who even as a preadolescent had contagious enthusiasm for baseball, baseball history, and at that time most especially baseball cards. By the time we met him, or, to put it more accurately, were swept up in his tornado of baseball mania, his baseball card collection was already the stuff of legend—the rumor was that he kept the collection in a trunk that he'd buried somewhere on the grounds of the Wiffle Ball stadium he'd built on his family's lawn to resemble a miniature Fenway Park. When asked about this he would bark laughter, then give answers as elusive as his unhittable Wiffle Ball pitches.

My brother and I had bought stray packs of cards before, but under our friend's influence we began buying packs whenever possible at the general store in town called Floyd's, which was owned by Mr. Floyd, a chipper Vermonter with a Santa Claus build and a gray-flecked flattop buzz cut. We began bringing those packs home and opening them and marking the new names received on a checklist and sorting those cards into teams and casting names already received into a reservoir for flipping and trading, the doubles pile. There were rules and unknowns, satisfactions and needs, waves of getting and undertows of wanting. The riddling pull of love. We began to collect.

We plunged into it so fiercely in that first full year away from our father that I got closer to getting every player for a single team than I ever would again. From Bibby, Jim, to Tovar, Cesar, I slowly but
steadily accrued every last member of the 1975 Texas Rangers except one: Topps card number 412. Hands, Bill/P.

My brother owned Bill Hands. I can't remember clearly, but he may have even had doubles. However, it was not at all customary to simply hand over surplus cards. I understood this and was in a strange way even glad about it. The game had rules, and rules helped create a world with meaning. He proposed to trade me Bill Hands for my one and only 1975 Carl Yastrzemski. I was tempted, but even at age seven I knew that if I made such a deal I'd feel as if I'd been punched in the stomach for months afterward. By then I had fallen in love with the Boston Red Sox, and I knew that the center of the team was the ancient living legend known as Yaz. So I held tight to my Yaz card and decided to take my chances with the random gatherings within each new pack of cards.

I began to pray. I'd never prayed before. Every time I opened a pack of cards, I prefaced the opening with a silent plea for Bill Hands. His persisting failure to arrive threaded a new feeling through the revelation of each freshly opened pack, through the bright colors and sunshine, and the nobility of the names, and the exactitude of the numbers, and the sweetness of the gum, and all the other pleasures of
getting
. Below all that, faintly: an ache, an absence, an unfillable box.

A new practice arose alongside my pack-opening prayers: When things fail to arrive, depart. Start with a card and let the baseball encyclopedia do the rest. Start with Harmon Killebrew and go all the way back with the Lifetime Leaders in Home Runs to Babe Ruth swatting his first fourbagger in 1915. Start with Bob Gibson and go all the way back with the Lifetime Leaders in Strikeouts to Walter Johnson fanning his first batter in 1907 and Cy Young doing the same in 1890. Start with Carl Yastrzemski and go all the way back with Awards from Triple Crown to Triple

Crown to the very first author of the feat, Tip O'Neill, in 1887. Start anywhere. Start in the middle of nowhere. Start with Cy Acosta and go all the way back.

 

In 1872, major league baseball's first Cy, Clytus George “Cy” Bentley, debuted at the age of twenty-one with the Middletown Mansfields of the National Association, a forerunner of the National League. He started 17 of their 24 games and finished the season with 2 wins, 15 losses, and a 6.14 ERA. At bat, he hit .235 with 2 triples. He died the following year, on February 26, 1873, at the age of twenty-two.

It would be eighteen years before another Cy reached the majors, but that second Cy, born Denton True Young, would retire twenty-one years later with 509 more major league wins than his predecessor, a deluge of namesakes in his wake. In chronological order depending on their first year in the majors, they are Cy Bowen, Cy Seymour, Cy Swaim, Cy Vorhees, Cy Morgan (not to be confused with Cy Morgan, below), Cy Falkenberg, Cy Ferry, Irv “Cy the Second” Young (career record: 63 wins, 95 losses), Cy Barger, Cy Neighbors, Harley
“Cy the Third” Young (career record: 0 wins, 3 losses), Cy Alberts, Cy Slapnicka, Cy Williams, Rube “Cy” Marshall (and with Roy De Verne Marshall [career record: 8 wins, 10 losses] the land of Cy merges with the land of Rube, which is almost as populous as the land of Cy, 33 major league Rubes to 35 major league Cys [the latter number not including nineteenth-century journeyman Sy Sutcliffe], Rube Foster and Rube Waddell foremost among the Rubes, who have not walked among us since the retirement of Rube Walker in 1958), Cy Pieh, Al “Cy” Cypert, Cy Rheam, Charlie “Cy” Young (career record: 2 wins, 3 losses), Orie Milton “Cy” Kerlin, Cy Perkins, Cy Warmoth, Cy Wright, Cy Fried, Cy Twombly (whose one year in the majors predated the birth of the famous painter with the same name by seven years), Cy Morgan (not to be confused with Cy Morgan, above), Cy Moore, Ed “Cy” Cihocki, Cy Blanton, Cy Malis, Cy Block, Cy Buker, and, finally, Cy Acosta.

The gap between the untimely passing of Cy Bentley and the arrival of Cy Young was eighteen years, which is the third biggest Cyless gap in baseball history. The second biggest gap is the twenty-seven years between the last pitch of Cy Buker, who played for one year for the Brooklyn Dodgers during World War II, and the first pitch of Cy Acosta.

The last pitch of Cy Acosta came three years, 186 2/3 innings, and one obscure meritless feat later (in a 1973 game, a defensive substitution involving the designated hitter brought Cy Acosta to the plate to hit, the first time a pitcher batted in an American League game after the institution of the designated hitter rule; he fanned), and with the last pitch of Cy Acosta began the longest Cyless span of all. It's now more than three decades since Cy Acosta logged his final two innings in a sparsely attended 11-3 loss otherwise featuring pitchers named Bob, Steve, Tom, Ron, Joe, and Al.

Sigh.

Many years after my family's move to Vermont, I got a glimpse of the expectant happiness that defined that time for Mom and Tom. I was on an aimless break from college, and I came upon a postcard Mom had written Tom while we were still living in New Jersey. At the time the postcard was written, Tom was away at blacksmith school in Kansas.

“I'm
flipping out
with thoughts of THERE!” my mother wrote.

She meant Vermont, the Vermont that they'd dreamed up together, the lasting answer to everything.

But our first stop in Vermont, in Randolph Center, was temporary, lasting only as long as the family who owned the house was away in Korea. Throughout our year there, I imagine Mom or Tom continued to talk to one another of THERE as being something and someplace yet to come. Near the end of our time in that house, in the summer of 1975, Mom and Tom sent in a foreclosure auction bid on a house a few miles away.

They hadn't been allowed to inspect the premises before putting in a bid, but they'd looked at the house from the road. They'd seen that it was even farther out in the country than the house in Randolph Center. They'd seen the pastures all around, the mountains cradling the green valley on all sides. They'd believed when they looked at that house that they were looking at the true beginning of the life they'd been dreaming of. They believed that the house was THERE.

 

Tom and I were in the kitchen of the house in Randolph Center when Mom came in with the envelope from the state. Mom looked at Tom and not at me. Then she opened the envelope with exactly
the same delicious slowness that I employed to open a pack of baseball cards. When she pried the flap open all the way she looked again to Tom. The two of them stared at one another, small, nervous smiles on their faces.

I feel as if I remember this moment intimately, even down to the detail that something about their smiles, something about the way their interlocking gazes shut out everything in the world but each other, made my stomach start to hurt. But I can't be sure about this, or about anything, because for some reason I have spent most of my adult life imagining and reimagining the past, and now I never know beyond a shadow of a doubt what actually happened and what I've invented to fill in the gaps of what's been lost. Most of the un-countable moments of life evaporate with no trace, so it's really no wonder I hold on with such desperation to what's left, my baseball cards, those actual, physical, inarguable remnants of the past. I need them now as much as I've ever needed them. I started needing them in 1975, the year I watched Tom move to Mom's side so that they could discover the contents of the letter together.

“Oh my god,” Mom said.

“We won,” Tom said to Mom.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“We won! We won!” Mom shouted to Tom.

 

We discovered the nature of this victory together, as a family: me, my brother, my mother, and Tom. We drove a few miles from the house in Randolph Center, on a winding road that went down and down. When we finally reached the bottom of the hill we took a right turn and drove past the general store where most of my baseball cards would come to me, then past the few houses of our new town. The houses started to thin out quickly, and we pulled into the rutted dirt drive of a house that seemed to be at the edge of things.