Wax Pack trip brings out truths
Life-after-baseball saga illuminating
The idea. That’s what initially struck me about a popular new book called “The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife.”
What an idea!
(Yells at self) Why didn’t I have this idea?
Brad Balukjian, a 30something college biology teacher from California, grew up like me and surely some of you in two respects: He obsessed over baseball cards and never met a powdered stick of stale bubble gum he didn’t consume like a last meal.
As a kid in Rhode Island, Balukjian would exchange his allowance for a wax pack and hope for underdogs. His favorite player was a mediocre Philadelphia Phillies pitcher named Don Carman.
Fast forward a quarter century to 2014. Balukjian is sitting in the Uecker seats at beautifully decrepit Oakland Coliseum when a thought storm hits. It arrives in the form of a series of questions, the kind a man might ask when he suddenly realizes his parents are people, too.
What were his childhood heroes really like? What were their hopes and dreams? What had become of them?
And what would it be like to tear into a fresh pack one more time?
Balukjian whipped out his phone, went to eBay and ordered a Topps pack from 1986, the year he started collecting. When it arrived — 14 players plus the dreaded “checklist” card — he reverted to his boyhood ritual. He began by “chewing” the 30-year-old slab of gum (the only acceptable first move), then unveiled each card slowly yet eagerly, the way kids do. The way I did. As if the next might reveal itself as the baseball equivalent of Willy Wonka’s golden ticket. That spawned theidea. See, it wasn’t enough for Balukjian to admire the cards and wonder.
“Now I need to find the players inside it,” he said.
Thus was born a rollicking, cross-country crusade starring an obsessive-compulsive biology teacher in search of 14 “Wax Packers,” ranging in prominence from Carlton Fisk (wants no part of it) and Dwight Gooden (middle of a relapse) to Jaime Cocanower and Rance Mulliniks.
Balukjian unbelievably finds himself in Cocanower’s backyard for a
July 4 barbecue, in Garry Templeton’s living room watching kung fu movies, and in Carman’s backyard playing catch after a heart-to-heart in which Carman — now a sports psychologist — reveals that his father beat him.
There is a surprise at every turn on a journey that takes Balukjian and his 2002 Honda Accord across 30 states (11,341 miles) in 48 days. He is fueled by 123 cups of coffee and an insatiable desire to cut through the thin veil — or is it a concrete wall? — between superficiality and realness.
What is it that makes a man hold back from saying what needs to be said, what he desperately wants to say, until it’s too late? And what makes him cut through?
It was too late for Purvis Cowens, son of ex-Kansas City Royals outfielder Al Cowens, the only Wax Packer no longer with us. Two weeks before dropping dead of a heart attack, Al Cowens bizarrely challenged his grown son to a fight in the street in front of their house. Something in the forever strong-and-silent Cowens apparently had snapped. The fight grew violent before police were called.
Two weeks later, Purvis got a call from his grandmother, telling him to come to the house. He knew his dad was gone.
He found him lying in bed.
“I just stayed in the room, hugging him and crying, trying to wake him up until the coroners came,” Purvis told Balukjian. “After that, I would write letters to him every day, and then I would go to Huntington Beach Pier and rip them up and throw them in the ocean. I was writing him [stuff] that I didn’t tell him.”
So it went with Wax Packer Richie Hebner and the former Pirates estranged brother, Steve Yeager and his alcoholic dad, several Wax Packers with their significant others and Balukjian with his father. Some held back. Some cut through.
Carman admits that when his abusive father collapsed with a fatal heart attack in front of the family, “I was hoping he would die.”
This book is part “On the Road,” part “Ball Four” and ironically part “The Road Less Traveled,” which of course begins with the famous line, “Life is difficult.”
Life is difficult. For all of us, including ex-ballplayers — no matter how much money they made or how much adulation they accrued. It gets real when glitter fades. Balukjian and his hero, Don Carman, a man he’d never met, a man who overcame great adversity, speak of such matters on a trip to the zoo.
This is not your usual baseball book.