by Josh Wilker
The photo on this card, number 300 in the 1976 series, is most likely from the 1975 season, in which Johnny Bench’s team, the Cincinnati Reds, won 108 regular-season games and then bested the Red Sox in a legendary World Series. Though I have since steeped myself down to the last detail of the 1975 World Series (that last detail being Yaz coming to bat with two outs in the bottom of the ninth of Game Seven with the Red Sox down a run and 30,000 voices screaming, Come on, Yaz! until the man they were screaming for popped out to César Gerónimo in center field), I missed the whole thing as it happened, all the action broadcast on NBC, which we couldn’t get in East Randolph. In later years, I’d listen to games on the radio that I couldn’t see on TV, but in 1975 I may not have even known that radio was an option, and if I did I may have not yet been able to follow a game that way. So I had to rely on my imagination and my cards to piece together what had happened to the Red Sox when they faced Johnny Bench and the Reds.
This particular card told me just about all I needed to know. With dust rising all around him, Johnny Bench is the gunslinger who has just downed one challenger and who is now eyeing the next as if to say, “You really think that’s a good idea? Really?”
At times I imagined that he’d just gunned down a runner, and at other times I imagined that he’d just gunned down the whole league, including the Red Sox. At the end of the year, after the Reds again won more than 100 games during the regular season, Bench single-handedly demolished the Yankees in the Reds’ four-game sweep of the 1976 World Series. That was also on NBC, so I didn’t learn about it until my brother’s Sports Illustrated showed up in the mail with Johnny Bench on the cover, launching a home run. The caption asked a question—“How good are the Reds?”—that even at age eight I understood was not really a question but a throwing up of the hands: Johnny Bench’s Reds are so good, you can’t even explain how good they are.
Bench’s 1976 card stood out even more than the other superstar cards from that year. His gunslinger pose revealed him as a hero from an earlier, simpler time, the last of a dying breed. By then the classic Western, along with the clearly defined model of tough, decisive American maleness that fueled the genre, seemed to be limping its final gut-shot paces. John Wayne was old, and in his wake had come a new version of what it meant to be an American man. A boy growing up in the 1950s could follow the path to maleness pretty easily: Be tough, play to win, salute the flag, shoot a few savages if necessary, and let the womenfolk cook and clean and weep and such. But a boy growing up in the 1970s had to cling to the last few shreds of that simple path wherever he found them while besieged on all sides by uncertainty.
The two most popular television shows of the era, All in the Family and M*A*S*H, prominently featured characters (Archie Bunker and Frank Burns, respectively) whose histrionic embracing of the John Wayne Way was continuously lampooned as rigid, anachronistic, and just plain wrong. Meanwhile, in schoolyards all over the country, especially schoolyards that served hippie-influenced classrooms such as mine, children were encouraged to play something called “New Games,” which were all, if the photos in the New Games book were any guide, invented by ambiguously gendered giggling longhairs prancing across meadows under the influence of potent hallucinogens. All the New Games valued toothless hand-holding cooperation over competition and had no real rules, only suggestive guidelines and the foundational dictate that there were never to be winners or losers. My free-school class owned the book and also a rainbow-colored parachute that served as the centerpiece for the New Games’ most elaborate invention, which proved to have all the drama and enjoyment of folding and unfolding a gigantic multicolored bed sheet. I never took to New Games, but I can’t say I didn’t love another more powerful contributor to the decade’s gamboling corrosion of What Was What and Who Was Who: Free to Be You and Me.
The massively popular child-targeting musical television special and accompanying massively popular album got children all over America singing along to catchy, ebullient ditties about girls doing boy things and boys doing girl things. How silly to walk in a well-worn rut! How silly to pretend to be tough or care about being first! How wonderful to be whatever you want to be! Traditional sports made a couple notable appearances, but only as a kind of foil. In one song, a gigantic real-life NFL player who had once been a member of the Los Angeles Rams’ legendarily menacing “Fearsome Foursome” defensive line now comforted a boy named Dudley Pippin who had worried that he was “a sissy” because he broke into sobs. “It’s all right to cry,” crooned the former athlete who had once crushed guys to the turf with bone-shattering tackles. (Adding to the confusion, the hulking singer had the first name of a girl: Rosey.) In another song, “William’s Doll,” a boy admits to his grandmother that he considers baseball his favorite sport but says, in a line that still makes me shudder, “I’d give my bat and ball and glove / to have a doll that I could love.”
Though I liked the album as much as anyone, “William’s Doll” cut a little close to home, touching the same nerve that sparked my anger whenever a stranger saw my long, curly hair and thought I was a girl. This happened a few times, especially in the years before I was old enough to play little league baseball and therefore able to wear my team cap everywhere, like an ID badge proving that I was, just like my brother and all my gods, not a little girl but a boy.
Topps 1977 #634: Big League Brothers
From the back of this card: “Paul and Rick both picked up baseballs as soon as they were old enough.”
Ian had started playing little league the year we moved to Vermont, away from our father. He wasn’t very good at the beginning. After his little league games in his first year I always asked him the same question:
“Did you get a hit yet?”
The answer, no, was eventually rendered in the form of an I-Am-Going-to-Punch-You glare. By the end of the season I’d stopped asking. That summer we played catch in the yard of the house in Randolph Center, then, when we moved to East Randolph, we played catch and hit each other grounders and fly balls in the big yard alongside the house. I can’t remember him ever giving me any specific instruction, but just by playing with me hour after hour, day after day, week after week, year after year, the ball sailing back and forth between us, a shared pulse, my brother taught me baseball.
“They were teammates in little league, Pony League, High School and American Legion ball.”
By the time I joined Ian on his little league team, the Mets, in 1977, he was one of the bigger and better kids in the league. Because I’d had him to practice with for two years, I was much more prepared to play than he’d been and got a hit in my first game—a single off the end of the bat, up the first base line. The following year, his last in little league, Ian was a superstar, one of the three or four best players in the league along with the hulking Stu Townsend, the mustachioed Tony Russo, and the seeming can’t-miss future major leaguer Bob Chase. I’d always idolized my brother, but that year he was one of the select few in the league to hit the ball over the fence. I actually got to pour out of the dugout with all my teammates and meet him at home plate cheering.
“In one Pony League game, Paul hit a Homer to win it for himself.”
Once I got a uniform that proved I was on my brother’s team, I never wanted to be without a key piece of that uniform, the grass-green cap with the white felt M that turned darker and darker throughout the year as I wore it everywhere, all the time. Though I also owned Red Sox caps throughout my childhood, I remember wearing my little league cap more than once on the yearly trip to Fenway. I think I was wearing that cap and screaming myself hoarse when a man in front of us turned to my mother and said I must be a kid who “ate, slept, and breathed baseball.” I felt proud, and also happy to be defined. The man got it right: I was a kid who ate, slept, and breathed baseball. I was a kid who always wore the cap of the team he was on with his brother.
Without the cap, without baseball, without my brother, who was I? This question, though I never formulated it so spec
ifically, has a lot to do with why I was drawn to this Big League Brothers card, and to all my cards in general. This card, as with other “special” cards, heightened the idea that the cards in total comprised a storybook world by using text on the back instead of centering primarily on numbers.
This text on the back of Paul and Rick Reuschel’s Big League Brothers card was not the first thing that I noticed about this card, but I’m sure it gratified me when I finally got around to reading it, which would have been some time after my stomach stopped hurting from laughing by myself and then with my brother at the two stunned, doughy, beady-eyed lummoxes glowering apprehensively back at us. The story on the back of the card was of two brothers who loved baseball and who always stuck together. On other cards in the Big League Brothers series of 1977, the same basic story was told again and again—two brothers who loved baseball and stuck together, two brothers from a normal family that featured just two parents—a mother and father with the same last name as the two brothers, the father always around, tirelessly teaching both boys “the fundamentals.”
I knew my life didn’t match the storybook one, but as long as I had my cap on my head and baseball cards in my hand I was able to imagine myself into that world. I could see a future that always included baseball and always included my brother, the two of us side by side on the same team in the Big Leagues.
Topps 1980 #48: Rick Miller
While there has never been a salary cap in baseball, I sometimes suspect that in the mid-to late-1970s, as a reaction to the dominance of the early 1970s Oakland A’s, American League owners instituted a secret Mustache Cap that restricted the amount of total facial hair each team was allowed to carry on its roster. Consider:
1. After winning three World Series titles in a row, 1972 to 1974, the roster of the overwhelmingly hirsute A’s was almost completely dismantled within a couple years, as if some secret and severe penalties for overmustaching had been levied. The skyrocketing salaries spurred by the introduction of free agency have most often been noted as the cause of this dismantling, but I’m not so sure that tells the whole story. If it does, then how do you explain the lack of a similar instantaneous dismantling of the successful National League team that had an even more star-studded roster than the A’s, the Cincinnati Reds (who were all as clean-shaven as boot-camp marines)?
2. When Charlie Finley tried to hasten the dismemberment of his A’s dynasty by selling two of his stars to the Boston Red Sox, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn disallowed the transaction, citing the damage it would do to competitive balance; however, I believe this justification was a screen to cover the real reason: Joe Rudi and (especially) Rollie Fingers would have put the Red Sox, already fairly well mustached, far over their facial hair allowance. Supporting this point is that Rudi later came to the Red Sox anyway, sporting his modest gun-shop-cashier ’stache, while Fingers, the facial-hair-cap-wrecking A-Rod of the Mustache Years, had to spend some years with the smooth-cheeked Padres of Enzo Hernandez and Randy Jones until the apparent lifting of the Mustache Cap in the early 1980s allowed him to join the malodorous unshaven rabble known as the Milwaukee Brewers.
3. The California Angels and Boston Red Sox constantly shuttled similarly mustached guys back and forth, as if the deals depended on the equal exchange of facial hair. The unremarkable mustaches of guys such as Jerry Remy and Joe Rudi came east, and the unremarkable mustaches of guys such as Dick Drago and Rick Burleson went west. Even when clean-cut fellows such as Denny Doyle passed between the two teams, the transaction seemed to come with hidden “facial hair to be named later” clauses that impacted (and explained the seeming imbalance of) later trades whose principals, such as clean-cut Butch Hobson and walrus-faced Carney Lansford, did not balance out on the facial hair ledger.
I’m not quite sure how Rick Miller fits into all this, but when I was a kid he seemed to drift back and forth between the Angels and Red Sox like a Mustache Years version of a Cheshire cat. Because he was obscure to me in each place for different reasons (on the Angels because they were so far away and on the Red Sox because he was always buried on the outfield depth chart), I was never completely sure which of the two teams he was on at any given moment, and so there always seemed at least a shred of him in both places, a brown medium-sized mustache hanging in the clubhouse air, waiting for the rest of him to appear and collect a pinch hit or make a diving grab in the outfield just when you thought for sure he was on the other side of the continent.
Topps 1978 #314: Paul Lindblad
The Mustache Years weren’t my father’s happiest. He spent most of them living in a studio apartment in Manhattan while his family lived with another guy several hours away by bus. In that apartment, he had one window, a desk, a small table, a foam mattress that he slept on at night and rolled up and stowed in the lone closet in the morning, and some board and cinder-block bookshelves. In the hollow of one of the cinder blocks he kept a stack of curling photographs, mostly of my brother and me, the two of us changing as the years went on, our blond hair darkening, our bodies getting taller and thinner, the look in our eyes growing dimmer, warier, as if the photographer was becoming a stranger.
My card collection calmed me throughout my childhood, in part because it had elements that seemed as if they would stay the same forever. For a long time, Paul Lindblad provided one of my favorite of these comforting repetitions. As the years went on, it came to seem that Lindblad always had been and always would be• mustache-free,
• a current or recent champion,
• a member of the Oakland A’s, and
• puzzled.
But nothing and no one is immune to change. In this 1978 card, my last Paul Lindblad, the only remaining constant is his puzzled expression, which seems in the context of this card to be and perhaps to have always been a reaction to the inescapable impermanence of life.
In my first card of him, from 1975, he is shown looking clean-cut and puzzled after helping the A’s win their third straight World Championship by posting the best ERA of his career, 2.06. Just below the stat line with that information is a (somehow fittingly) terse textual note further attesting to Paul Lindblad’s capabilities: “Paul had 0.00 E.R.A. in 1973 series.”
I’m inclined to believe the effective middle reliever plied his trade with very little ego. A man who seems to be perpetually aware that a tornado could appear at any minute on the horizon and wipe out everything in its path certainly seems unlikely to display the air of complacent self-congratulation that supposedly has a tendency to infect members of a championship squad.
I wonder now if part of the puzzlement in his face was the result of an ongoing inner debate over whether to grow a mustache. By the time he started showing up in my collection, clean-shaven and puzzled, the hoopla that the act of growing a mustache might have once created was long gone. It had been three years since the A’s broke the baseball facial hair line in 1972 after Reggie Jackson showed up at spring training with a beard. A’s owner Charlie O. Finley, attempting to get Reggie to shave by making him feel less special, offered money to anyone on the squad who grew facial hair; they did, Finley found that he liked it, and the A’s set a trend that soon began to spread face to face around the league. Not coincidentally, Paul Lindblad, after spending several years with the A’s prior to 1972, had been toiling for the Rangers that pivotal year, and by the time he returned to the A’s the hippie-lip revolution had already occurred. In fact, by 1975, players on most teams were busting out beards and mustaches, muttonchops and fu manchus. To have a mustache was no longer in any way a declaration of independence. It was merely a personal choice.
And this is exactly when the world got confusing. This is exactly when the 1970s truly became the Me Decade. Everyone was on their own to make their own choices about everything. Grow a mustache, don’t grow a mustache. Do your own thing, don’t do your own thing. Who cares? No one. You’re on your own.
For most of that decade my father was a project leader on a sociological research team charged
with a massive evaluation of the effects of city services on all levels of the population. He worked hard, quietly, selflessly. A Paul Lindblad type. He showed up everyday, benefitting not only the project he was working on but also helping to feed much-needed money to the imperiled utopian dream of his distanced immediate family.
He wore a mustache for some of that decade. But this facial hair was never part of some rousing movement, large or small, like the swashbuckling 1972 A’s or the “let that freak flag fly” hippies. I have sometimes thought of the mustache he wore during the 1970s as hair shrapnel, a fragment of the general hairiness of the culture of the time that seemed to have landed randomly on my dad’s face. But he made a decision to grow a mustache, and he made it alone, and he wore the mustache for some years. And then, in another solitary decision, he chose to remove the mustache. I can see him shaving it off one evening in the bathroom of his apartment, then leaving the bathroom to unroll his foam sleeping mat on the floor below the one window, going to sleep, getting up the next day, and going to his job.
