Cardboard Gods Read Online Free
Author: Josh Wilker
you lost 20 games, you were kind of a rag arm, a luckless mushballer (though probably not utterly incompetent; after all, your team must have seen reason to keep running you out there to take all those beatings).
These seemingly mutually exclusive starting pitcher landmarks would be well-known to me by the time I started inspecting the baffling statistics on the back of Wilbur Woodâs card. In a five-year span, the aging knuckleballer with the nineteenth-century name won 20 games four times, but he also lost 20 games twice, 19 games once, and 17 games once. The most confusing year of all was one of the years when all three of my parents lived in the same house, 1973, when Wilbur Wood won 24 games and lost 20.
I could never figure out if Wilbur Wood was bad or good, but eventually I came to see him as being, in both name and deed, some kind of throwback to the rugged, spike-gashing dawn of major league baseball, when hurlers started both ends of a doubleheader and then came on in relief the next day at dusk despite massive corn liquor hangovers to strand the go-ahead and winning runs in scoring position. Wilbur Wood was beyond Old School. He was Old Testament. He was the last vestige of a time when men named Mordecai and Smokey Joe and Grover strode as giants upon the land, their won-lost records both gleaming and gory, good and bad entangled.
When Wilbur Wood hung it up, it left no one to stop the meek five-inning starters and one-out lefty bullpen specialists from inheriting the earth.
Topps 1975 #511: Texas Rangers Checklist
Though my brother and I were at the center of the adultsâ vision of a new life in the countryâthey wanted us to grow up wild and free, bounding barefoot through meadows, uncorruptedâwe paid as little attention to it as possible. Instead, as it turned out, we paid attention to baseball. Iâd never cared about baseball before, but in our first spring in Vermont, in 1975, my brother started playing little league and collecting baseball cards and following the regional team, the Red Sox. And what he did, I did.
This imitative way of being was something that would in many ways define my life, my imitations often going beyond mimicry to become a kind of inward orthodoxy that seized on one or another of the various pursuits of my brother as if they were the exploits of a visionary, each detail worthy of the impassioned scrutiny of a solitary monk. I understand my connection to baseball in this way. My brother liked baseball a lot. He was a better player than I would ever be, bigger and stronger, even able eventually to throw a good curveball. But I donât think he grabbed hold of its details as fiercely as I did, something I noticed early on when he tried to argue that Rogers Hornsby, and not Ty Cobb, held the record for highest lifetime batting average. It was the first time in my life that I knew more than my brother about anything, and possibly also my first experience with irony, given that Iâd so passionately studied the baseball encyclopedia my uncle Conrad had recently given my
brother for Christmas because I believed such study would bring me closer to my brother.
That first year in Vermont, we house-sat in a town called Randolph Center for a family spending a year as Christian missionaries in Korea. Randolph Center had many big white houses with immaculate lawns, a college with brand-new tennis courts, and a big pond called Lake Champagne with a sun-drenched wooden dock in the middle of it and a building nearby with pinball machines and air hockey tables. Very near our house, there was a small ski hill with a rope lift. In the summer, hang gliders launched themselves from the top of the hill like bright-colored ponderous birds that seemed somehow simultaneously prehistoric and futuristic.
Kids were friendly in Randolph Center, a few of them coming by to basically welcome my brother and me aboard. One of these kids was a farm boy named Buster who would go on to
These seemingly mutually exclusive starting pitcher landmarks would be well-known to me by the time I started inspecting the baffling statistics on the back of Wilbur Woodâs card. In a five-year span, the aging knuckleballer with the nineteenth-century name won 20 games four times, but he also lost 20 games twice, 19 games once, and 17 games once. The most confusing year of all was one of the years when all three of my parents lived in the same house, 1973, when Wilbur Wood won 24 games and lost 20.
I could never figure out if Wilbur Wood was bad or good, but eventually I came to see him as being, in both name and deed, some kind of throwback to the rugged, spike-gashing dawn of major league baseball, when hurlers started both ends of a doubleheader and then came on in relief the next day at dusk despite massive corn liquor hangovers to strand the go-ahead and winning runs in scoring position. Wilbur Wood was beyond Old School. He was Old Testament. He was the last vestige of a time when men named Mordecai and Smokey Joe and Grover strode as giants upon the land, their won-lost records both gleaming and gory, good and bad entangled.
When Wilbur Wood hung it up, it left no one to stop the meek five-inning starters and one-out lefty bullpen specialists from inheriting the earth.
Topps 1975 #511: Texas Rangers Checklist
Though my brother and I were at the center of the adultsâ vision of a new life in the countryâthey wanted us to grow up wild and free, bounding barefoot through meadows, uncorruptedâwe paid as little attention to it as possible. Instead, as it turned out, we paid attention to baseball. Iâd never cared about baseball before, but in our first spring in Vermont, in 1975, my brother started playing little league and collecting baseball cards and following the regional team, the Red Sox. And what he did, I did.
This imitative way of being was something that would in many ways define my life, my imitations often going beyond mimicry to become a kind of inward orthodoxy that seized on one or another of the various pursuits of my brother as if they were the exploits of a visionary, each detail worthy of the impassioned scrutiny of a solitary monk. I understand my connection to baseball in this way. My brother liked baseball a lot. He was a better player than I would ever be, bigger and stronger, even able eventually to throw a good curveball. But I donât think he grabbed hold of its details as fiercely as I did, something I noticed early on when he tried to argue that Rogers Hornsby, and not Ty Cobb, held the record for highest lifetime batting average. It was the first time in my life that I knew more than my brother about anything, and possibly also my first experience with irony, given that Iâd so passionately studied the baseball encyclopedia my uncle Conrad had recently given my
brother for Christmas because I believed such study would bring me closer to my brother.
That first year in Vermont, we house-sat in a town called Randolph Center for a family spending a year as Christian missionaries in Korea. Randolph Center had many big white houses with immaculate lawns, a college with brand-new tennis courts, and a big pond called Lake Champagne with a sun-drenched wooden dock in the middle of it and a building nearby with pinball machines and air hockey tables. Very near our house, there was a small ski hill with a rope lift. In the summer, hang gliders launched themselves from the top of the hill like bright-colored ponderous birds that seemed somehow simultaneously prehistoric and futuristic.
Kids were friendly in Randolph Center, a few of them coming by to basically welcome my brother and me aboard. One of these kids was a farm boy named Buster who would go on to
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