I have a little easel on my desk. I don’t know where it came from. Something with my kids, I guess, some art set or something. I use it now to hold up a baseball card. Last week it was a Bill Melton card from when he was late in his career, on the Angels ..read more

I believe that in this 1987 baseball card Dewey Evans has been captured in a split second of hope. An instant earlier he had been in the low, coiled stance he’d begun using halfway through his career, and then he saw a pitch in the zone and swung and connected and is captured here just ..read more

Nine things about Bruce Kimm: Bruce Kimm hit one major league home run. I watched a baseball game last night, or part of one, partially because I’ve been looking at and holding this Bruce Kimm baseball card a fair amount lately. I don’t follow baseball any more, not really, not day in, day out. I used to live for it. The most exciting moment of the whole summer when I was a kid was the All-Star game. My brother and I got to choose one night a year when we could stay up as late as we wanted, and we always picked that night. That’s how I saw Bruce Sutter for the first time, making American Lea ..read more

Someone hands you a gift, and it feels good in your hands, like it’s alive. That’s how this Joe Niekro card came to me. I didn’t find it in a pack when I was a kid but got it a couple of years ago when a friend came through town with a box of baseball cards that his brother was giving away. I already owned versions of the majority of the cards, but as I sorted them into my existing collection, I kept getting the occasional jolt of seeing a card that I’d never seen before, like something from a dream, like it was possible to travel back to a time before I started shutting down certain parts of ..read more

This card is a miracle. Mundane, unsinkable life triumphs over blurred dissolution. A man, despite the befogged oblivion behind him, despite the intrusion of transient, haphazard artificiality in his airbrushed cap and uniform, hasn’t dissolved into the cartoony murk closing in all around him. He is here. He resists disappearance with the homely, inarguable details of his life, tinted aviator glasses, muttonchops, the hinting of a double chin, an expression somewhere between a grimace and a smile, the countenance of a man who’s worked, who’s suffered fools, who’ll live and let live, who’s not ..read more

Darrel Chaney keeps coming back to me, even now, in a fractured world. And I keep coming back to Darrel Chaney. I first encountered him when I was eight years old. That’s when the world started showing its cracks to me. I had no way of processing this consciously, but around that time, 1975, not long after my father stopped living with the rest of us and the rest of us moved to a new place, I started having night terrors, which we called nightmares, not knowing there was a term for what I was experiencing. That was how the cracks in the world showed themselves to me in the middle of the night ..read more

I fell out of love with baseball cards in 1981, when I turned 13. I mean that first, purest love. So I didn’t know that Skip Lockwood, shown here in his 1981 card, ever played for my favorite team until just last year, when this card came to me among a collection I scavenged from a friend of a friend who’d deemed that the cards from his childhood were not something he needed anymore. The majority of the cards had already come to me in my own childhood (and that I’m still holding onto), but some of them were new to me. This was thrilling, seeing cards like this, like an echo of falling in love ..read more

This is one of my favorite baseball cards. It’s an action shot, but what is the action? In some other famous cards with action shots, the action captures an element of the game that’s at the heart of why the game came to mean so much to us, the drama, the excitement, the heroism. I think of the 1974 Cleon Jones card that is in my mind the first baseball card I ever saw, the one that started to lay the whole foundation of my conscious mind, for what is my mind but something built on baseball cards, on early childhood attachment interwoven with a want and need to attach to my older brother and ..read more

Manny Sarmiento has just released a pitch. The dust at his feet is evidence of both the temporal proximity and the physical force of his effort. But this effort, it seems, has not produced its most optimal result, which would be the ball passing through the strike zone and safely reaching the mitt of Manny Sarmiento’s catcher. We don’t know the identity of Manny Sarmiento’s battery mate, but something about the flattened backdrop of this card suggests that it’s not Manny Sarmiento’s legendary teammate, Johnny Bench. The world we are seeing here is well off to the side of any powerful gods. Th ..read more

This is me and some baseball cards. It looks like I’m saying “enough already” but with the not unhappy awareness that it will never be enough, that whatever I’m trying without much conviction to hold back in the cards is just going to overpower me. And it’s true, the cards will outlast me. Even my son was remarking as much the other day. “Are you going to give me your baseball cards when you die?” he said. He was lying in his loft bed, and I was leaning on the railing of it, about to walk to the door of his bedroom and turn out his light. “Well, I guess you and your brother can split them,” I ..read more