Shoeboxes In The Closet

There are a series of old shoe boxes on the top shelf of my closet that date back to the late 1970s and early 80’s. I’ve carried them around with me for over 40 years. The shoes are long gone. The boxes are filled with the old memories and dreams of a kid. The sort of dreams that every boy growing up in a certain time period held onto. They are manifest in the form of 2.5” X 3.5” pieces of cardboard with the images of baseball players on one side and a series of statistics, maybe a cartoon or interesting fact about the ballplayer on the other.

               The ballplayers have names like Nolan Ryan, Dave Parker, Mike Schmidt, Reggie Jackson, Steve Garvey, Willie Stargell, Dave Winfield, Robin Yount, Pete Rose, Rod Carew, Johnny Bench, Ozzie Smith, George Brett, and Goose Gossage, to name a few. Outside these cards, many of them existed to me only on television in a weekly masterpiece of a program called “This Week in Baseball” or the Saturday afternoon “Game of the Week”. That is, unless they played in the National League.

               I grew up a fan of the Atlanta Braves in a glorious time when, though the team was horrible, you could watch them every night of the summer on television thanks to the genius of a man named Ted Turner. The stadium lights were dim and the field looked a tad dingy compared to the glitzy, manicured ballparks of today. The Braves played as though they were the inspiration for the Bad News Bears in those days. But we didn’t care. If you can love a team like that, and watch them night after night, you learn to really love the game.

               But when we stopped at the “Jiffy” store in our little town and I talked my parents into buying me a pack of cards wrapped in wax paper, I rarely found any Braves players inside. I was convinced this was just another expression of the un-coolness of our town. Somehow through trades and buying a pack or two of cards when we were on vacation or out of town, I hit on a few Braves players. Pepe Frias, Larry McMurtry, Phil Niekro, Rowland Office, Gary Matthews, Glenn Hubbard, Jerry Royster, Gene Garber. But there was one card in particular that eluded me—that of my favorite player, Dale Murphy. A Murphy card became my lost grail. Finally, in the 4^th grade one of my friends declared that he had a Dale Murphy card he would sell me.

               It took a while, but I scrounged together the $5—a king’s fortune for a kid in those days, but there was nothing I could imagine wanting more. When we made the trade, I was handed the card—a 1981 Topps with a green border and a little ball cap in the bottom left corner labeling the player’s team, “Braves”, and the player’s position, “Outfield”. Murph was wearing the powder blue road uniform and was in full swing, his head tilted upward as if he had hit a pop fly, his back to the camera, the back of his jersey announcing “Murphy” with the big “3” embroidered below it.  There was a big scratch on the card just in front of Murph, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t have valued it more had it been made of pure gold.

               Not long after, in my random card pack purchases, I began to organically acquire the cards of more Braves players and three or four years later, I had over half a dozen Dale murphy cards in my collection. With the exception of the 1982 season, the Braves weren’t much better but my baseball card collection was.

               I labeled each shoe box, “American League” or “National League” and sorted the cards inside each by order of my own affinity for the teams. At the head of box one there were a few cards that were not team affiliated—Checklist cards, League MVP cards, All Star cards, even a San Diego Chicken Card. The Braves got top team priority of course, followed by the Phillies because my Little League team shared the same name, and the Astros because they had cool uniforms. The San Francisco Giants got last priority in the National League, largely because I didn’t like their orange and black uniforms. The Yankees led off my American League box, followed by the Kansas City Royals, Detroit Tigers, and Baltimore Orioles. After that they all faded together and the Toronto Blue Jays brought up the rear.

               Baseball cards inspired a love of the game’s nostalgia. I began to learn about its history, hungry for stories about players like Lou Gehrig, Ty Cobb, Ted Wiliams, DiMaggio, Mays, Mantle, and Maris. I checked their biographies out of the library and read each one, some of them, like Mantle, Mays, and Gehrig, multiple times. I got my hands on books about baseball memorabilia and old Braves programs and team yearbooks that my Aunt Kate had kept from games she attended when the great Hank Aaron played alongside Eddie Matthews, Ralph Garr, and Darrell Evans in Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

Sometime in the early 80s my grandmother let it slip that my father’s baseball cards where in a shoe box in her attic. I begged for months before she let me go up into the attic crawl space via the pull down ladder in the hallway to find them. I emerged with a greater treasure than I could have imagined. Over 660 cards from the early to mid 1960’s cluttered the box. Among them were a dog-eared Sandy Koufax, Harmon Killebrew, Stan Musial, Orlando Cepeda, Warren Spahn, Roger Maris, and Eddie Matthews. However, they all paled in comparison to one card from 1963-Topps #200, with a green block of trim on the bottom of the card. To the right of the name was a circle bearing a black and white close up of the player posed in his batting stance. It was the same player whose face stared out in full color from the card with the iconic frieze of Yankee stadium in the background. Ladies and gentlemen, Mickey Mantle. I was old enough and steeped enough in baseball lore to understand what I was looking at. It was as if a light from heaven shone down on that card from the darkness of the attic. I had to sit down and nearly knocked over an old lamp. “Everything ok up there? Come on down before you get hurt”, Nanny yelled.

I added these to my collection, keeping the cards in a separate box from my own cards, careful to handle them gently. Every time I acquired more cards, I tallied up the number in each box and wrote it on the front in pencil, so that I could erase it for the new, ever increasing number. The number grew to well over 6000 baseball cards, which still reside with me. Sometime, as I entered high school I stopped collecting cards. But I held on to them. It seems silly to have kept these cards for so long, a child’s trinkets carried about all these years and stuck in the top of a closet.

               Most people who collect things always have the idea that their collection is going to be valuable someday. The value of baseball cards took a big nosedive sometime in the 1990s because of the over-production of new cards. Instead of buying a pack of cards down at the corner store, kids started receiving entire annual sets of cards for Christmas. Older collectors died out and in a digital age, kids aren’t that into cardboard. Everything comes back around if you wait long enough, but the real value of baseball cards is the memory of that feeling you got as a kid, picking up that wax-covered package of 16 pieces of cardboard with the image of baseball players printed on them and hoping that one of them would bear the likeness of your guy and in trying to chew that pink stick of gum perfuming the package, which could have passed for a piece of cardboard itself.

Somehow, there’s still a magic about these pieces of cardboard that make it difficult for me to part with them. They have become some sort of talisman. It doesn’t happen very often, but occasionally I’ll take down a box or two and look through them. I am instantly taken back to a time when I saw the world differently. When I do so, I can feel the same things I felt then. I am back inside my childhood, I can sense the people there who are no longer here, but when I reach out for them, for it, that childhood all dissolves back into dim nothingness, like reaching for smoke. There was a luster and innocence to it, even though the world seemed a little more gritty. There was less glitz, less opportunity for immediate satisfaction, and that was a good thing. The made and unmade things seemed to be more solid, more reliable. The world seemed bigger, more inviting, and more mysterious. There was time to dream and pretend. The older I get, the more time that passes between my childhood and whenever now may be, the more I look for such charms, and the more rare they seem to have become.