A new book comes out tomorrow. It's called "The Wax Pack" and the premise is simple. Author Brad Balukijian opened a pack of 1986 baseball cards and then tried to track down each of the players and interview them about where life has taken them since baseball. It's a brilliant idea and one that will lend itself to many sequels if the author so desires. As someone who collected baseball cards as a kid and still pulls the ones he has out once in awhile there is something visceral about the little pieces of cardboard. Just seeing the design of a certain year takes me back. A memory that is as vivid as the day I bought my first pack at Northside Drug Store in 1963. The excitement you felt when you got a Hank Aaron or Willie Mays among the dozens of Jerry Lumpe or Don Mossi cards. But the idea is we all know what has happened to Hank Aaron and Willie Mays....but Jerry Lumpe or Don Mossi?...lost in time.
Here is the desciption of the book from Amazon.
"Is there life after baseball? Starting from this simple question, The Wax Pack ends up with something much bigger and unexpected—a meditation on the loss of innocence and the gift of impermanence, for both Brad Balukjian and the former ballplayers he tracked down. To get a truly random sample of players, Balukjian followed this wildly absurd but fun-as-hell premise: he took a single pack of baseball cards from 1986 (the first year he collected cards), opened it, chewed the nearly thirty-year-old gum inside, gagged, and then embarked on a quest to find all the players in the pack. Absurd, maybe, but true. He took this trip solo in the summer of 2015, spanning 11,341 miles through thirty states in forty-eight days.
Balukjian actively engaged with his subjects—taking a hitting lesson from Rance Mulliniks, watching kung fu movies with Garry Templeton, and going to the zoo with Don Carman. In the process of finding all the players but one, he discovered an astonishing range of experiences and untold stories in their post-baseball lives, and he realized that we all have more in common with ballplayers than we think. While crisscrossing the country, Balukjian retraced his own past, reconnecting with lost loves and coming to terms with his lifelong battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Alternately elegiac and uplifting, The Wax Pack is part baseball nostalgia, part road trip travelogue, and all heart, a reminder that greatness is not found in the stats on the backs of baseball cards but in the personal stories of the men on the front of them."
Even the cover of the book should elicit a memory for those who collected.
Speaking of baseball...there will be no American Legion Baseball in the United States this summer for the first time since the 1920's. Some states were going to try and run a state program after the national tournaments were cancelled. Wisconsin and Minnesota made their cancellations official over the weekend. And the National Headquarters then told all states that the program would be cancelled for this year. I believe the decision was made too early without seeing how things will play out over the next two months. I think it would have been very possible to conduct a shortened season in July. But I didn't have a vote. As a former player I feel for the guys who not only lost their spring seasons but now the summer season as well. For the seniors it's another lesson that life isn't always fair and you can't always get what you want. And, unless you become King Of The World, there will always be decisions made above your head that you don't agree with.
Some new music released last week. There is an LP of new material from Bob Dylan coming in June. It's called "Rough and Rowdy Ways" and includes this one....
Todays lost jazz classic comes from 1957. Some nice bop from trombonist Curtis Fuller and sax player Sonny Redd . I especially like Tommy Flanagan's piano.
We lost Hillard 'Sweet Pea" Atkinson last week. He was an in demand backup singer and also a vocalist for Was (NotWas). He's the guy with the white hat on the slice of of pop-funk from 1988.
We also lost Betty Wright over the weekend. She hit the charts in 1971 with this one...
Covers Of The Day (we say goodbye to one of the founders of rock & roll...Little Richard!)
New Title IX rules don't require coaches to report sexual misconduct. Thanks Betsy Devos...read it here
Before you fall down the Plan-Demic rabbit hole you should probably check the veracity of the claims and the doctor making them....read it here
Another example of Republican corruption...this time in Colorado...read it here
Meet the women accusing Donald Trump of sexual harrassment or assault. Read it here
Quotes Of The Day
"I’ve been around thousands of politicians since I first started working in campaigns. I’ve worked with politicians all over the world. I have never known any politician as simply stupid as @realDonaldTrump. His inability to process information is killing Americans."-Stuart Stevens
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/125885397116436...
"I’d like to hear Republicans try to defend $160 billion in tax cuts they gave to millionaires & billionaires in a Covid-19 relief package. If they can’t, they can sign on to my bill to repeal these ridiculous provisions and use the money to help those actually in need."-Sheldon Whitehouse
"Interesting how wearing a mask is considered as being afraid, yet carrying a gun is just protection."-Brynn
"It is unsurprising @realDonaldTrump enjoys wallowing in his fetid self-indulgence, but I find it surreal that so many other government officials encourage his ignorance, incompetence, & destructive behavior. BTW, history will be written by the righteous, not by his lickspittle."-John O. Brennan
"It didn’t have to be this bad. The hard truth is that Donald Trump was simply not up to the job."-Joe Biden
https://twitter.com/NPR/status/1258739166029975552
"The results of dismantling Obama’s legacy: Iran closer to a nuke, climate warming faster, a deficit over a trillion, and pandemic preparedness that has the economy in free fall."-Ben Rhodes
https://twitter.com/alivaez/status/125885106095911...
“Katie, she tested very good for a long period of time, and then all of the sudden she tested positive ... this is why the whole concept of tests aren't necessarily great ... today, I guess, for some reason, she tested positive."-Donald Trump
"Is anybody explaining this to him?"-Karen Tumulty
"The AG dropping the case on Flynn turns the entire purpose of the Special Counsel regs on its head. The SC is appointed *precisely* to insulate an investigation from influence by a political appointee, namely, the AG."Asha Rangappa
"We’re not supposed to have one system of justice for the President’s friends and another system for the rest of us. That’s the sort of corruption you’d expect in a banana republic, not the United States of America."-Renatto Mariotti
"Corrupt regimes don’t fight crime, they legalize it. They don’t chase the crooks, they hire them. They don’t stop lying, they tell you the truth is whatever they say."Garry Kasparov
https://twitter.com/mrbromwich/status/125848418986...
"Totally unjustified and purely partisan. Just goes to show that a president with a sufficiently corrupt and compliant Attorney General needn’t even bother to abuse his pardon power to bail out his loyal henchmen."-Lawrence Tribe
"The deal the Republican Party has made with Donald Trump is they will let him disastrously mismanage a national crisis and corruptly protect his friends from legal consequences so long as he never dares to raise taxes. It's grotesque."-Ezra Klein
This from Dr. John Talmedge
When you need to take your rocket launcher to Subway.....
