The Truth or Something Like It

by Tommy Vollman

          I met Joe Nuxhall a few weeks after my fifteenth birthday. His hands were gnarled, and he spoke as though his mouth was half full of marbles, but he was sharp and funny as hell. I was only a few months younger than he was when he made his Major League debut.

          At just fifteen, Joe Nuxhall climbed on the hill at Crosley Field in the top of the ninth against the would-be World Champion St. Louis Cardinals. Manager Bill McKechnie called on Nuxhall with his Cincinnati Reds on the short end of a 13-0 deficit. Nuxhall’s debut was essentially mop-up duty at Niagara Falls.

          Still, the Ol’ Lefthander managed to retire two of the first three batters he faced before all hell broke loose. Nuxhall never finished that half-inning; he never found a third out. In fact following his debut, it would take him eight years to get back to the Major Leagues.

          When I met Nuxhall, he was half of the radio broadcast team for the Cincinnati Reds. I shook his hand and asked him to sign a baseball card my uncle gave me years before. The card was a 1963 Topps. On the front, Nuxhall was framed in mid wind-up, his arms stretched high over his head, his throwing hand hidden inside a chocolate-brown mitt. The back of the card was jammed with stats. When I first received the card, I wondered if the 67.50 ERA listed for 1944 —his rookie campaign—was a misprint.

          I was enamored with that statistic. The pitchers I knew of in the bigs had ERAs in the 3s; the really good ones were in the 2s or below. For a long time, I was sure my Nuxhall card was a simply a misprint. No pitcher, anywhere, at any time could possibly, I thought, have had a 67.50 earned run average.

          But Joe Nuxhall did.

          67.50 was no misprint.

          Nuxhall was a legend. He was a good pitcher—great, even—a Cincinnati Reds Hall-of-Famer who won 135 games in his sixteen-season Big League career. His lifetime ERA—3.90—was a far cry from the ultra-inflated number of 1944.

          While he was signing my card, I asked him what it was like to face the St. Louis Cardinals at fifteen.

          He stopped his Sharpie mid-signature and stared at me. The room we were in—a large, partitioned conference room at the downtown Westin on Fountain Square—seemed to go silent. A wide smile cracked across his face, and all the air came back into the room. He adjusted the thick, wire-framed, aviator-style glasses that perched on the bridge of his nose and leaned back in his chair.

          “You know,” he said, “I was so goddamned nervous when I got the call, I tripped and fell on the way out of the dugout.”

          He leaned forward, his elbows on the white, cotton tablecloth. His eyes grew clearer, even more focused. He seemed to stare not at me but through me.

          “I was used to throwing to good hitters, even some really good ones,” he added. “But,” he continued, “there’s a difference between a good hitter and a Major League hitter. I got two of three, then gave up a walk.”

          He shook his head and smiled.

          “I was there, up on the hill, and I look over and see Stan Musial in the on-deck circle. Next thing I know, he’s up at the plate.”

          He leaned back again in his chair and stretched his hands over his head in nearly the same way he had in the photo on my baseball card.

          “Then,” he chuckled, “they scored some runs. Lotsa runs.”

          His smile was so real, so sincere, I’d have believed anything and everything he said.

          “It wasn’t that bad,” I replied. “Only five.”

          Even to this day, I’m not sure why I said what I did. I’m not sure what I was thinking. At the time, when I heard those words tumble out of my mouth, I could hardly believe I’d said them. I thought Joe Nuxhall might punch me in the face.

          But he didn’t.

          Joe Nuxhall was too much of a class act for that sort of thing. In fact, what he did left me as awestruck as anything has since that time.

          Joe Nuxhall leaned toward me, his hands flat, fingers spread, and said, “Son, they could’ve scored as many runs on me that day as they wanted.”

          He handed my card back to me, his signature split in two segments, and nodded to the person behind me.

          As I stepped away, Nuxhall spoke again.

          “Hey kid,” he said. “Thanks for that.”

          I smiled and nodded, puzzled as to why in the world Joe Nuxhall would thank me for reminding him of his horrendous Major League debut.

          As I got older, I think I grew to understand why Joe Nuxhall might have thanked me. Now, I’m almost sure of it. He thanked me because I gave him a chance to be honest when it would have been so easy to be dishonest.

          I wouldn’t have been honest as Nuxhall.

          I couldn’t have been; I care too much about what other people think of me. More accurately, I care far too much about what I think other people think of me.

          Which often puts me in quite a bind relative to the truth.

          It shouldn’t, but it does.

          Now that I have kids, I’m more conscious (or at least I try to be) of my issues with truth. But old habits die hard, and it’s still far too easy for a lie to slide off my tongue.

          Joe Nuxhall didn’t give up a homer that day; his earned runs came solely from walks and base hits. My lies aren’t mammoth—they’re not home runs. I tell myself they’re tiny—base hits or walks—irrelevant, seemingly. They’re lies to cover up forgotten phone calls, neglected garbage carts, and overdue library books. They’re lies about missed emails, late arrivals, and vitamins. But they all hide (or attempt to hide) the same thing: a sense of not quite being good enough, of not measuring up, as if telling the truth could expose a version of me that no one could possibly love or respect. I’m not perfect, and I can’t ever expect to be, but I’m scared to death of being seen for what I am: someone who forgets, who loses track, who sometimes can’t keep up or just doesn’t want to. I’m terrified that my shortcomings might be exploited or worse, define me. I’m desperate to try to maintain something fundamentally unsustainable. I’m desperate to stay in control, to not be seen as less-than, as a fraud. I understand, of course, the awful irony. I lie to others to maintain the perpetual lie I tell myself.

          The truth, of course, is that none of my lies are harmless; all of them are aimed at deception. All of them evoke pain and erode trust. All of them—every single one of them—are destructive, cancerous, corrosive.

          Which is exactly the opposite of what I tell myself.

          I wonder what Joe Nuxhall told himself. I wonder how it could have been so different from what I tell myself. I wonder if Joe Nuxhall ever considered anything but that truthful, face-up story about his Big League debut. I wonder if Joe Nuxhall ever offered any excuses, ever messed around with the size or shape or structure of things.

          I’m sure he did.

          Or at least I’m sure that he considered it.

          But I think he figured everyone knew the truth already. And even if they didn’t, he did, so what difference did it really make? What happened, happened, and Nuxhall’s honesty may just have freed some space for other things, things not destructive, corrosive, and cancerous. Nuxhall’s honesty helped him get back to even. And eventually, he got ahead.

          I want to free some space. I want to get back to even. I dream about getting ahead.

          Lies are heavy, clumsy, and awkward. Lies are unruly; they’re contradictions. Lies are a misguided effort to reconfigure the space-time continuum. They’re an attempt to overwrite history, to highjack experience, to gaslight and usurp. Lies are an essential impossibility, yet I try to execute them day after day after day. Some days, I even manage to convince myself I’ve successfully executed them. Of course, that’s a lie, too.

          I’m not really sure when or why I started lying. I know it had something to do with power. Control, too. My lies offered me a mechanism for getting what I wanted, what I thought I needed: respect, recognition, control. I only wanted to be seen, to be enough. I never wanted to be the best; I only wanted to be good enough. My lies gave me agency, and as inauthentic as that agency was, it sure as hell felt good, so the lies grew.

          I think I finally understand why it was so easy for Joe Nuxhall to be honest. Being honest is really the only possible—the only sustainable—outcome.

          It took Joe Nuxhall eight years to get back to the Big Leagues after those five earned runs in two-thirds of an inning. Eight years. And the weight of those five runs is nothing compared to the weight of the lies I’ve told.

          The weight of those five runs cost Joe Nuxhall eight years; it took him that long to get back to even. I wonder how long it’ll take me. I wonder if it’s even possible.

Tommy Vollman is a writer, musician, and painter. He has written a number of things, published a bit, recorded a few records, and toured a lot. Tommy’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the “Best of the Net” anthology. His stories and nonfiction have appeared (or will appear) in issues of The Southwest Review, Two Cities Review, The Southeast Review, Palaver, and Per Contra. He has some black-ink tattoos on both of his arms. Tommy really likes A. Moonlight Graham, Kurt Vonnegut, Two Cow Garage, Tillie Olsen, Willy Vlautin, and Albert Camus. He's working on a novel entitled Tyne Darling and has a new record, “Youth or Something Beautiful”, which was released in April 2019. He currently teaches English at Milwaukee Area Technical College and prefers to write with pens poached from hotel room cleaning carts.

Furry Felonies

Furry Felonies

by Atticus Benight

          During my first year in AA baseball, the team’s marketing director, Rob, beckoned me into his office just after the start of a game. His shelves were lined with limited edition memorabilia—bobble heads, signed balls, and souvenir bats—all products of his tenure with the organization. On the opposite wall, life-sized posters hung depicting some of the team’s most promising prospects from the past several years—Kenny Baugh and Max St. Pierre.

          I occupied a corner stool, the only seat capable of accommodating my tail. As he closed the door, he lowered himself into the vinyl office chair across his desk. He scooted close to the desk and leaned in. As he did so, I noticed an odd resemblance to a young Mickey Rooney—round face topped with red hair, and a lip full of tobacco.

          “I need a straight answer,” he began with a minty tone of mock sinistry. “What are you willing to do for this club? Any limitations, tell me know.”

          “Depends on what you had in mind,” I answered with a hint of hesitation.

          “Well,” Rob continued. “Would you be willing to ‘apprehend’ a few of our competitors—put them out of commission ahead of this next road trip? You know—get the bad juju going for their team?”

          “You’re suggesting?”

          “Kidnapping,” Rob said. “More precisely—kidnapping Steamer and Diesel Dawg.”

          Comprehension dawning at last, I nodded. After considerable thought, I did what any self-respecting employee might do when their boss asked them to commit a felony—I asked for an advance.

          “I’ll need rope, perhaps some duct tape, a couple of burlap bags—I mean, you gotta have head bags,” I said ticking off my grocery list of abduction supplies, as if I had done this before. “Oh, and gas. I’ll need gas.”

          “Gas?” Rob raised an eyebrow.

          “For the drive,” I said, “and maybe fire. Mostly for the drive though.”

---

A few days later, I found myself outside of the Blair County Ballpark in Altoona, PA, lugging an oversized blue and purple bag through the crowd gathering at the front gates and into the stadium. Along the way, plastered all over the ticket windows, front gates, and support columns were wanted posters from the Altoona Police Department. According to the brief narrative, a six-foot tall wolf had accosted two of the most “beloved” mascots in minor league baseball over the prior weekend, and that Steamer and Diesel Dawg had not been seen around the ballpark since. One local television studio claimed to have the “treacherous crime” on video, and a few television screens near the concessions were looping the grainy footage of two over-sized, awkward—perhaps drunken—Muppet-like creatures, bumbling around the empty parking lot. Then, from out of nowhere, a white van screams into view and a fuzzy, gray, four-fingered paw hoists them inside and speeds away. The prime suspect of it all—the diabolical, sinister, no-good mascot— C. Wolf.

Little did I know that at a news conference earlier that day a young boy named Conner was recruited to get to the bottom of this “crime.” He was declared a special deputy of the Altoona Police Department and presented his badge, but the Chief of Police was at a loss. No resources that they possessed would be a match for an anthropomorphic six-foot-tall, baseball-playing wolf. But then, as though called into action by hopeless circumstance, the blue and yellow Power Rangers arrived to provide backup. Conner donned the red ranger’s jumpsuit and mask, and was charged by the Chief of Police to lead a special investigation to pursue and capture the diabolical fugitive known only as C. Wolf.

I was later briefed on these facts by a mole that we had positioned within the front office of the Altoona Curve—named Zee. She was a slender, sexy woman, with long twisted blonde hair and smelled perpetually of peppermint—the top mint aroma in my opinion.

“In something like this,” Zee began with a Cheshire grin that exposed every one of her white teeth, “there are no rules. Your goal is to evade—until the 7^th inning. Then, you’re needed here.”

She opened a map and indicated a small area behind the outfield wall.

“That’s where we’ll stash Steamer and Diesel Dawg. There’s a trap door there that you can come through—we usually send a dancer out onto the field when there’s a homerun. Anyway, you’ll go through there, and the Power Rangers will be on your heels.”

I accepted my instructions and thanked Zee. In return, she pulled me in tight for what I found to be an invigorating embrace.

“You’re really great for doing this,” Zee said.

“Ah, it’s nothing,” I told her.

“No, no,” Zee insisted, unwilling to relinquish her hug—not that I was complaining. “You’re a real hero.”

“Well, thanks,” I answered as she released her grip on me.

I gathered my gear and breezed past her, through a sea of cubicles, and into a meeting room where I slipped more easily into character. When I emerged from the room, Zee brushed up against me and offered two half pats, half gropes on either side of my tail, punctuated by a subtle squeeze.

“You know,” Zee said, “I don’t often get the chance to meet another wolf.”

“Another?”

“Oh,” she said. “I thought Rob told you. I’m a wolf too—deep—deep down.”

After several moments, Zee revealed that she was a furry. She was self-described wolf and considered that her primary criteria for selecting a potential mate. If you were not a wolf, she would not be interested. Half curious, half frightened, I stepped from the office, slid on the giant wolf head, and readied myself for what I imagined would be the most hostile crowd I would ever face.

          When I first emerged onto the concourse, the jeers that I had expected did not materialize. In fact, children were lining up waiting their turn for a high five or a hug. One little girl, three-years old with blonde curls and wearing a t-shirt with Steamer on it, even beckoned me to bend down, and she kissed the eye patch over C. Wolf’s left eye—the one that legend says was knocked out by a rogue foul ball hit by Jose Guillen back in 1995—before the decision was made to install a higher and wider net as a backstop behind home plate.

          “Boo boo all better?” she asked in a voice that could melt any heart. I nodded.

          Before the game, I ran about the stadium—occupying random seats, offering a handspring or two in the infield, and harassing anyone who crossed my path in an Altoona Curve baseball cap or jersey.  After all, with Steamer and Diesel Dawg incapacitated, this was my house, regardless of what any of the wanted posters might imply. Even my team was wearing their home whites, while the Curve sported dingy gray uniforms. Oddly enough, the sentiment that this was my house seemed to be echoed by the fans themselves. The more I taunted, jeered, and harassed them, the more they cheered.

          Finally, when the game was about to begin, I sought refuge in the bouncy houses along the first base line as Conner and the two Mighty Morphin Power Rangers took to the third base dugout. As someone who grew up with the first generation Power Rangers, something immediately seemed off. There was a long ponytail flowing from beneath the blue ranger’s helmet, and the spandex costume was stretched to the max, barely accommodating the form of what was clearly a rather hippy, full-breasted, plus-sized woman. The uniform of the yellow ranger was similarly taxed to its limits, but with a very different, husky beer-bellied form. The stitches, straps, and buttons of bib-overalls were clearly visible through the thin yellow fabric—even at this distance. Perhaps Billy and Trini (the original blue and yellow rangers) had each undergone hormone therapy, or maybe they had mixed up their power coins before teleporting to the Blair County Ballpark. In either case, I could not help but think that post Power Ranger fame must have been really unkind.

          After the crowd was informed of the kidnapping of Steamer and Diesel Dawg, Conner and the other rangers began their pursuit. I remembered Zee’s instructions—to evade until the 7^th inning, so I did just that. I bounced with a few kids in the bouncy house with a giant likeness of Steamer on top of it. That is until I saw the blue and yellow rangers enter the kid zone. Immediately I hopped out, waggled my fingers at the tip of my long, wolfy snout, and sprinted toward the fence just as a final out was made and the outfielders began trotting into their dugout. I leapt the fence, and ran to my team’s dugout where the “power punks” could not follow. It was as if I was Goldar, and the dugout was Rita Repulsa’s moon base. Once there, the rangers would not—or perhaps could not—pursue.

          I hunkered down there for a bit, until I noticed one of the players exit the stadium through a door in the dugout. At Jerry Uht Park, my home stadium, there were no doors. The clubhouse was located in the Erie Civic Center, and getting there involved a long walk across the outfield. But here, a door in the back of the dugout led to a network of concrete hallways. It was getting hot, and I needed a break, so I followed this player through the door, removed my head, and ambled through the underbelly of the stadium.

          Eventually I stumbled upon the laundry and sat in there for a few moments chatting up one of the grounds crew while guzzling a Gatorade. Just then, a yellow body flashed in front of an open door and I saw my nemesis sneaking down the hallway, glancing side-to-side. Luckily, he hadn’t looked up and didn’t see me, headless, straight ahead. I tossed the giant head back onto my shoulders and ran in toward the open door and slipped behind it, pinning myself in the corner against the wall.

          Conner entered the laundry, two drenched, foul-smelling power rangers slinking along behind him. The member of grounds crew that I had been speaking with started to grin. Just as they cleared the doorway, I slipped out and backed into the hallway. I made an exaggerated tiptoeing motion, as if I were a cartoon rabbit evading the hunter by walking in his own footprints. At that point, the grounds crewman lost all composure and I rounded the corner to a booming laugh.

          The ballgame progressed quickly and before I knew it, I was called behind the outfield wall. By the time I arrived, members of the front office staff were already wrapping clothesline around Steamer and Diesel Dawg and positioning them next to a large box that contained the transformer that powered the score board. With a boost from Zee, I scurried up on top and struck a menacing pose.

          When Conner came into view, he made a bee line straight for my prisoners and began unwrapping the rope from around their chests. Just then the other Rangers noticed me.

          “Look out,” one of them shouted

          Conner assumed a karate-like pose just as cheers erupted inside the stadium from the final out. I looked down at Zee, who was poised at a small hatch in the outfield wall. That was my cue to take the battle onto the field so that the fans could witness the conclusion. I jumped down on the far side of the transformer and waited for Conner to catch up to me. He grabbed me by the arm and flung me through the hatch and I tumbled onto the outfield just as a convoy of police cars roared onto the warning track through a gate in right field—lights flashing, sirens wailing.

          From out of nowhere, Conner emerged with a giant dog catcher’s net and he flung it over my head, knocking me to the ground. As I fell, I felt my foot connect with something and when I looked down, to my horror, it was Conner. I had just kicked the Make-A-Wish kid. For a long moment my heart plummeted and I wondered if we had taken this thing too far, but when he finally rolled back to his feet, he struck another pose for the audience, two police officers lifted me up and tossed me into the back of an SUV. The door slammed behind me.

          I removed my head and stared out of the tinted glass as this convoy began moving once more. Conner was in one of the patrol units, waiving at the crowd, and Steamer and Diesel Dawg bobbled on the back of a golf cart, finally free after a weekend of “torment.” The convoy rolled out of the stadium and onto a narrow service road that connected with the parking lot. One of the police officers opened the rear hatch and I replaced my head for the last time that day.

          When I rolled out, Conner was waiting and I knelt beside him. He stared at me with serious look on his face.

          “I love you C. Wolf,” he said. “But you’re a bad doggy.”

          The police officer grabbed one of my arms and locked a pair of handcuffs around my wrist. With my free arm, I covered C. Wolf’s eye and cowered in the most pitiful position I could. Conner motioned toward Steamer and Diesel Dawg, still poised, smiling unblinkingly on their golf cart.

          “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said with a pirate-like growl.

          Conner looked up at the policeman and said “It’s ok, he’s sorry. You can let him go.”

          “Are you sure,” the officer said. “We can run him downtown.”

          “No, he learned his lesson.”

          And with that, the police officer removed my cuff and I knelt down to offer Conner a long hug of appreciation.

          This was Conner’s wish. He suffered from a seizure disorder—though I can’t recall specifically what it was—and the Make-A-Wish Foundation offered him the chance to live out his dream of fighting crime with the Power Rangers. As I left the ballpark that day, Conner, Steamer, Diesel Dawg, and a few of the police officers were riding up the white hill of the wooden roller coaster that over looked Blair County Ballpark. I watched them teeter over the crest and rattle their way along the rickety track. And that was the last I ever saw of him. Though I think of him often, I never learned what happened to him. I’d like to picture him as a teenager now, sitting atop the Appalachian foothills in central Pennsylvania, wondering occasionally who I was—the man who played a wolf one afternoon so he could have a childhood dream come true. Perhaps he’ll read this account of that day and think to himself—“Hey, I think that’s me,” and maybe, just maybe, he’ll kick his five-year old self for wasting his wish on me.

Atticus Benight is an emerging “undercover writer of words.” His creative works have appeared most recently in The MacGuffin and Sediments Literary-Arts Journal. A native of western Pennsylvania, Atticus currently lives and writes near St. Paul, MN. You may connect with him @AtticusBenight via Twitter or Facebook. 

TOPPS 1959

by Garrett Rowlan

On a September night in Los Angeles, 1959, Pittsburgh Pirate pitcher Roy Face lost, and my father fell into the pool. Bill Jones pushed him from behind. We were guests at Bill’s house. The two men were drunk, fifties-style, alcoholic expansion in a country tipsy with postwar hubris. Vin Scully announced Dodger baseball on a plastic radio, his voice sailing over the city lights below.  

I’ll always remember my father’s expression as he climbed out of the water, his anger restrained under tight lips. I equate that expression with the Topps’ baseball card of 1959 depicting Pittsburgh reliever Roy Face. He’s shown poising with his arms lifted and his eyes cut toward some imaginary runner leading off first base. I have that card. A glance at it brings me back to the night of September eleventh, a date later to live in infamy. Roy Face had won eighteen straight games that 1959 season. The Pirates had come to Los Angeles. A heat wave, according to the microfilm of that September edition of the Times, had hit the city. I don’t remember the heat in particular, but they had a pool, the Jones’s, and I had gone with my parents to their house. Bill was a round-faced man with the sort of ruddy glow you get with sun and alcohol, and who bore a resemblance to the bandleader Phil Harris. His wife Rose was a husky-voiced brunette cut in the same mold as the actress Ruth Roman. They lived on a hillside on the northeast part of Los Angeles. The splash, the lights below, and Vin Scully’s voice, the card brings it all back.

I was ten years old in 1959. I was on the cusp of things. We all were. It was about to be a new decade, with a new President, and our family was about to move, choosing a better house uptown. These facts alone make the Roy Face’s 1959 card and other Topps’ for that year memorable. They set a marker. They look backward and forward. The oval-shaped pictures in the front of the card suggest a window into the past. Turn the card over and you’ll see the players’ stats. For me those numbers had the allure of the ancient and obscure, and since they include minor league totals, a hint of the American hinterland, of the smell of hay and the taste of corn and small motels like those we’d see or sleep in every summer driving north from Los Angeles to my father’s family in Kalispell, Montana.  The players, depicted on the front side, steel-eyed and strong-jawed in the sun, strike poses that are almost mythic: pitchers winding up and following through, batters poising to swing, the bat raised and cocked. Often I’ll see behind them some looming stadium from the era when Eisenhower was President, colonnades and stanchions that suggest an imperial reign in its decline, and blues skies beyond without a hint of ozone depletion.

The sort of blue that is behind Bud Daley who pitched for the Kansas City Athletics. His 1959 picture shows him captured in his follow-through pose. The photo was taken on the grounds of what I assume to be the old Monarch Stadium in Kansas City, a bit of which is visible in the background while, beside his left hip, juts the spire of some distant building or silo. The suggestion is of a Kansas stretched beyond the grass of the stadium, full of farms and prairie, home of Dorothy come back from Oz and not the slain Clutter family, who would years later be the subject of a groundbreaking book by Truman Capote. The sky is a bright blue.

I recall the splash of chlorinated blue as my father fell into the water. He had been trying to teach my mother how to dive, instructions he gave without demonstrating them himself. (He was hydrophobic. Holiday weekends we would drive up the California coast. On some beach around Santa Barbara he would, if coaxed into the water, stand in the low surf with his hands clasped across his chest and shiver.) Bill Jones, coming up from behind, must have seen the hypocrisy in the moment, and the opportunity. Looking back on that moment, I can’t help but see in it a whiff of class warfare, or at least distinction. It set a boundary. We were still lower middle-class. We had a modest house at the end of a cul-de-sac and lived next to the railroad tracks. In retrospect the Jones’s hillside house stands with a monochrome elegance, outside of the aqua-colored swimming pool, the sort of static luxury captured in Julius Schulman’s architectural photographs, the suggestion of an austere, otherworldly glory.

Otherworldly, like the hull of an abandoned spaceship, is how the batting cage behind Bobby Thomson looks in his 1959 baseball card. The athlete’s face is back-dropped by the oddly-shaped structure. On the card’s reverse side is a cartoon on the upper right hand corner that shows a smiling figure. It is Thomson being carried on the shoulders of his teammates while the caption reads, “Bobby’s homer won the 1951 pennant for the Giants.” I had dreamed of some kind of similar glory, some defining career moment culminating in fame, a hillside house, and a swimming pool. I had already projected myself into the future as a baseball star and wrote out complete statistics for a major league career beginning in 1970 or so, by which time, in reality, I was working for minimum wage. I had written that I would hit fifty-one homers in 1973 and recall thinking, even at age ten or so, that that number was a bit excessive. Remember, this number was projected a couple of years before Roger Maris broke the Babe’s record, and well before Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire began their chemically-enhanced pursuits of Maris’s record and its eventual eclipse. I’d like to state now for the record that my fifty-one home runs in 1973 were hit without the use of steroids. They were powered strictly by fantasy.

I still make up statistics about myself, though sometimes I view my career in baseball in retrospection and modesty. My life experiences have imposed upon me a regimen of lowered reverse accomplishments. I still have those fantasies I mentioned earlier, but often now I’m not a star player anymore swatting fifty home runs a year, but a utility player or a pitcher who had parlayed a tricky pitch or modest hitting skills into a brief career. The numbers I give myself are mundane, certainly nothing on the scale of Billy Pierce’s 1.97 ERA in 1955, another gleaming statistic from the 1959 Topps’ set. Usually I apportion myself a career of some five or six years, ending around 1980, with a batting average in the high two hundreds and, if I’m a pitcher, victories ranging from thirty to sixty in that span of time. What I’m saying is that I stay in pro baseball long enough to get my pension, something I think about in real life. If I’m feeling expansive and consider the fact that I was in the same profession for almost twenty-five years, and have now retired, I extend my modest achievements, lengthening my career to a dozen years and my wins to around one-hundred. I’ll even take the record of Pedro Ramos, the Cuban-born pitcher who pitched for fifteen years, from 1955 to 1970, won one-hundred and seventeen games and lost one hundred and sixty.

My father, you might say, had a lifetime record also on the losing side. He’d suffered various disappointments, and often he vented resentment at the stupid and powerful having so much influence. Richard Nixon was always a prominent object of his scorn. As was, I believe, Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who brought his team out West in 1958, displacing the residents of Chavez Ravine in order to construct Dodger Stadium.

It was a sort of protest, then, his taking us to see the Los Angeles Angels for their second-ever home game in 1961, the Haloes against the Minnesota Twins on Friday night, April 28, 1961. The newly-formed Angels played in front of a crowd of 9,745. The pitcher that night for the Twins, an expansion team, was Pedro Ramos. The Angels’ lineout consisted of other teams’ cast-offs. Among those was Albie Pearson, the diminutive center fielder, a pick-up from the Washington Senators. I doubt if my father wanted to see the five-foot-five Albie Pearson play as much as I did. Still, it would have suited him to support the underdog. He liked the idea of the deprived, the oddball, and those who did the most with what they had. (He would have liked David Eckstein, the Angels’ former shortstop.) He was opposed to the waste and prejudices and inefficiencies that he thought characterized American life. While my parents lived in San Francisco before I was born, he was an advocate of Technocracy, a kind of quasi-socialistic form of organization based on managerial expertise. Later on, after we had moved to Los Angeles when I was small, I recall him as being an enthusiast of the writings of Thorstein Veblen, the dour coiner of the term “conspicuous consumption.” Even our cars ran toward the offbeat. First it was the Italian Fiat and then the Borgward, a Swedish car, which was ruined after we had an accident, the result of his aggressive driving.

The game went into extra innings before the Angels won, 6-5, in the twelfth, Albie Pearson coming home from third on a hit batter. I don’t remember that. We probably left early. The results I got on microfilm. I don’t remember much about that night except my mental snapshot of Pedro Ramos releasing a pitch under the bright electric lights, and my feeling of the immensity of the surrounding stadium whose seats seemed magnified in number, so that the domino-like acres of (mostly unfilled) chairs suggest infinity.

Those 1959 cards have an-almost infinite fascination for me. They are consonant with the microfiche copies of old newspapers and photographs and other artifacts that I use to dislodge relics of recollection from the place where my father, other family members, and a few friends have gone. When I turn over a baseball card, it’s another time. It’s Bud Daley or Ralph Terry, another hurler for the Kansas City Athletics, throwing a pitch against a pristine blue sky, and it’s also like Roy Face, looking over his shoulder as if to see what’s coming next.

Garrett Rowlan is a retired substitute teacher with the Los Angeles Unified School District. He has published about 40 stories, essays, and poems, most recently in Map Literary and the Cafe Irreal.