Chuck Hartenstein
Cardboard Gods
by Josh Wilker
7M ago
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
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Darrel Chaney
Cardboard Gods
by Josh Wilker
7M ago
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
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Skip Lockwood
Cardboard Gods
by Josh Wilker
7M ago
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
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Billy Almon
Cardboard Gods
by Josh Wilker
8M ago
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
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Manny Sarmiento
Cardboard Gods
by Josh Wilker
1y ago
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
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Cardboard gods in sunlight
Cardboard Gods
by Josh Wilker
1y ago
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
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Dan Schatzeder
Cardboard Gods
by Josh Wilker
1y ago
I’m leaving baseball cards here and there lately. I hope people find them and get something out of them. The cards are random, and the places where I leave them are random. I pick one out of a plastic bag full of doubles from my recent influx of cards, and I carry it around in my wallet until it occurs to me, when I’m out in the world, that I have a card in my wallet that I can leave behind. I left this one behind, as it turns out, near a turning point in my life. Back in 2003, my girlfriend and I packed a Ryder van full of our belongings in New York City and drove it to Wisconsin. We didn’t ..read more
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New gods: intro
Cardboard Gods
by Josh Wilker
1y ago
For a few weeks now, as the world convulses, I’ve been sorting cards. My method is to first sort cards into teams, with the teams themselves grouped on the table in front of me by the divisional alignment they were in when I was a kid, left to right, American League East, American League West, National League East, National League West. After that, I sort the cards in each team into years. These new cards, which were collected by my friend Drew’s older brother, who didn’t want them anymore, were most heavily concentrated in the years 1977 through 1981, so while sorting each team I have stacks ..read more
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Mark Fidrych and the search for meaning
Cardboard Gods
by Josh Wilker
1y ago
As I was waiting for yesterday’s Strat-O-Matic online results to post, I called one of my oldest friends. He isn’t on Twitter or Facebook or anywhere else where I’ve been narrating for several weeks now about the exploits of an imaginary team, but he has caught wind of my doings. After we talked for a while about various things, a Paul McCartney concert he recently attended, the 1977 New York City blackout, national parks we might visit, there was a slight lull in the conversation. “All right, man,” he said. “So what’s going on? What’s wrong?” *** It all ended last night, the whole dream of g ..read more
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How to watch Mark Fidrych go for 20 wins
Cardboard Gods
by Josh Wilker
1y ago
As reported last night, the Worcester Birds have been mathematically eliminated from playoff contention. But one meaningful game remains. Mark Fidrych has won his last 3 starts to push his record to 19 wins and 7 losses, and he will start game 161. In real life, he fell just shy of 20 games in his dream season of 1976, and injuries scuttled any hopes of his ever getting anywhere close to that again. I’m rooting for the virtual avatar based on his 1977 season to achieve this landmark as hard as I’ve rooted for anything for a while. I want to imagine him mowing them down one last time at the ce ..read more
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