Lad Tobin
Sorting Things Out
I’m trying to think of a way to make this all sound normal but I know
it won’t be easy: the image of a middle-aged man sitting alone for hours
on his bedroom floor sorting his childhood baseball card collection
into dozens and dozens of neatly stacked piles is just bound to raise
certain questions. The fact that it has been several years since I last
pulled out my cards from the box I keep under my side of the bed might
suggest that this is really not quite as weird as it looks. But the very
fact that I keep these cards in a box under my side of the bed might
mean it’s even weirder.
I can’t remember buying my first packs of baseball cards – it was
sometime in the late ‘50s -- but I can remember the overwhelming,
sickeningly sweet smell of the enclosed stick of chewing gum that would hit you
as soon as soon as you peeled back the waxy wrapping (because that
fluorescently pink rectangle of gum was as thin and brittle as a credit
card, I was never tempted to pop it in my mouth; I would have soon chewed
the cards). I do remember that I was immediately drawn to the look of
the cards (which, given the bright colors, compelling graphic designs,
and blocky, upper-case fonts makes perfect sense to me now). And I
remember that, right from the beginning, I loved the feel of the cards in my
hands, the way you could shuffle them, sort them into piles, or just
hold them, like prayer beads, while you went about your business.
Of course, since I was only five or six when I started collecting, my
business, especially in the summer, wasn’t all that pressing. I just had
to find activities to fill up my day and re-sorting my baseball cards
was always near the top of my list. By the time I was seven, I was also
passionately committed to watching baseball on TV, listening to the
un-televised games on the radio, playing little league or pick-up games in
the neighborhood, or staging marathon fantasy major league baseball
games which involved throwing a tennis ball against our garage door or
basement wall and keeping a meticulous mental log of every strike, ball,
hit, run, inning, and result. But as much as I loved the competition and
physical activity of actually playing baseball, I always preferred –
and I’m still a little sheepish about admitting this, even to myself --
the time I spent thinking about the games I invented, fantasizing about
games that could be played, replaying games I saw years before.
I’m sheepish about this inner baseball life because I’ve always
worried it was just one of the indications that at some point I had crossed
the line from a normal, well-adjusted person with a passionate interest
in sports to a misanthropic guy with a weird fantasy life: in other
words, I knew it wasn’t unusual to watch baseball games, read the sports
pages and box scores, and discuss the games with other fans. I knew that
more diehard but still relatively normal fans might memorize a few
statistics, collect some autographs, maybe even fly down to Florida to
follow their team in spring training. But spending an afternoon trying to
figure out what would happen if an all-star team from 1959 played an
all-star team from 1969 was probably further down the list of normal fan
activities. And spending your entire morning sorting your entire card
collection according to the players’ birthdays was probably off the list
altogether.
Of course, given the proliferation of fantasy sports games and leagues
which now occupy the time and passions of an increasingly and
disturbingly large number of men in the 18-45 demographic, this privileging of
games about the game rather than the game itself no longer seems quite
so strange. In fact, today it’s not at all unusual to find fans that are
involved in an office or dorm or Internet league in which they all
pretend to be general managers of pro teams whose progress they then chart
and bet on and compare to other fantasy teams. But my virtual baseball
life preceded this phenomena by a few decades and, even by today’s
fantasy standards, it still seems that any kid who would turn down an
invitation to join a pick-up game at the park in order to sort thousands of
cards which he would then mix back together several hours later must
be, well, a little weird.
Or even downright pathological. The fact that I still keep the cards
under my bed, the fact that I am waxing nostalgic about the smell and
feel of the cards in my hands, the fact that I valued time spent alone
staring at 3” by 2” pictures of professional baseball players as much as
time spent actually playing the game with actual humans -- all this
seems to indicate a full-blown fetish of some sort. Certainly part of the
pleasure, as I’ve just confessed, was the tactile, sensual delight of
handling the cards and staring at the pictures. And so it wouldn’t take a
clinical psychologist to figure out that the cards must have held for
me, especially as a pre-teen, some sort of pornographic, possibly
homoerotic, element, an idea supported by the fact that I looked at those
pictures so long and hard that I could identify every single player in my
collection, whether the name was visible or not (in fact, I realized at
one point that I could recognize every player even if most of the
card was covered, exposing only a mouth or eye or eyebrow, a skill my
mother told me once would come in handy only if I happened to walk past
one of those players while he was wearing an elaborate disguise). I
suppose the pornography theory is supported, too, by the fact that when,
as a teenager, I discovered and collected some magazines which had naked
pictures of women, I stashed that collection under my bed, too.
All collectors of essentially useless objects open ourselves up to
teasing and armchair diagnoses. Maybe the impulse to search for, acquire,
collate, and horde anything -- whether it’s baseball cards, vinyl
records, fancy shoes, war memorabilia, action figures, spoons from around the
world, Barbies, or X-rated videos – is always definitive evidence of
arrested development, sexual sublimation, anal retentiveness, obsessive
compulsion, castration anxiety or penis envy; call it what you will, I’d
still argue that the time I’ve spent playing with baseball cards was
more therapeutic than pathological, more worthwhile than worthless.
In fact, it was through studying my collection that I came to gain
almost all of the skills I needed to get me through school, if not through
life. My mother claims in the summer before I started kindergarten that
I taught myself to read by matching up the letters on the cards to the
pictures of the players I knew by sight. I’m certain that I owe my
basic number sense and math skills to endless hours adding up and dividing
the statistics listed on the back of the cards; to this day, I still
think in percentages, averages, and probabilities. And there were all
sorts of smaller, more particular lessons I got from studying those cards.
For one thing, by sorting the cards into home states, I learned
geography. I not only knew the names of thousands of cities and towns in all
50 US states, I had very early on a working familiarity with place names
in the islands in the Caribbean and the countries of Central America. I
knew how to match up the spelling with pronunciation of Spanish
names (that, say, the Ls in Mike Cuellar and the J in Jesus Alou were
silent or that the Is in Louis Tiant were pronounced as long Es). I
even learned how to read and write cursive since in certain years the
cards contained the player’s autograph across the picture.
As valuable as this information was, it pales next to the spatial or
architectural education I gained from the time managing my collection.
I’m not certain I was ever consciously aware that all that sorting was
seeping into the way I viewed every new word or number or text or idea I
encountered but as I reached high school and then college, I began to
realize that my whole learning style had been shaped by the time I spent
mixing and matching my cards. Whether I was organizing a composition in
an English class or memorizing a long list of information in a history
or science class, I found that the process felt uncannily familiar. It
was as if I had already established networks of connected grooves,
categories, taxonomies, and family trees; I just had to plug in the new
information.
I’m convinced that I was able to have a career as a writer and writing
teacher because I developed the ability early on to read a rough draft
-- my own or someone else’s -- and quickly see a variety of ways that the
ideas could be linked, juxtaposed, re-ordered; that is, I could quickly
see -- and take enormous pleasure from -- the great variety of ways
that the same ideas, facts, or statistics could be sorted into coherent
and colorful piles. Again, I certainly wasn’t spending all of those hours
and years sorting and re-sorting my ever-growing box of hundreds and
then thousands of cards into piles by teams, then year of birth, then
height and weight, then home state, in order to gain practical, useable
skills, but what I know about organization, spatial relations, and
diligence was first established in my work and play with those cards.
All of this may begin to explain why I first put a box of cards under
my bed when was I was seven but I’m not sure it really gets at why I
keep it there now that I’ve passed 50. I suppose part of it is that, like
Joan Didion has said about the journals she kept, my cards keep me
connected to myself or to the self I was at particular times in my life.
What comes back to me most strongly each time I glance at my cards is an
odd mix of melancholy and gratitude -- melancholy because I think I
usually immersed myself in sorting when I was feeling lonely, lost, or
anxious and gratitude because the act of organizing and ordering the cards
somehow distracted and even soothed me in a way that made me feel less
lonely, lost, and anxious. And, while as an adult I’ve found other ways
to deal with anxiety and depression, there is some part of me that
still views the cards as a security blanket.
I suppose I also keep the cards because I’m not sure what I’d do with
them otherwise. While I assume that some of them are fairly valuable
(I’ve got dozens of cards of Hall of Fame players such as Mickey Mantle,
Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax, and Roberto Clemente), I’ve never been
tempted to sell them. In fact, I’ve even resisted finding out how much they
are worth for fear of finding out either that they are worth so much
money that I’d feel like a fool for not selling them or that they would
have been worth that much money if only I had kept them for all these
years under protective plastic rather than handling and sorting them
several thousand times. In any case, I’d think I’d feel uncomfortable or
guilty seeing something that possesses so much sentimental and
psychological weight for me reduced to dollars and cents.
Which brings me back to why I’m sitting on my bedroom floor surrounded
by piles of cards sorted this time by the players’ birth dates. It’s
taken me almost an hour to find a player with my birth date -- January 6 --
which, given the fact that I’ve probably sorted over 500 cards strikes
me as a probability-defying phenomena (and, in fact, a quick email
query to and response from a mathematician friend of my wife reveals that
the odds of finding a “birthday twin” rise above 50% after only 253 cards).
And I’m struck, too, by the fact that the first player I find with my
birthday, Joe Lovitto of the 1972 Texas Rangers, is such an obscure card
and player that I don’t even remember him. Reading through his meager
stats -- those years in the minors, those years when he barely got off
the bench and into the game -- I find myself feeling a little sorry for
old Joe and, I’m embarrassed to admit, for myself. After all this time,
all this searching, this is all there is? While it may have been
too much to hope that I’d discover that I share a birthday with stars
like Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays, it still sets me back for a minute
to finally find my doppleganger and to see that he -- and I? -- are just
bench warmers.
I know this is ridiculous but this strikes me as sobering news -- and
makes me stop short. In fact, I’m tempted to throw all the cards back
into the box, push the box back under the bed, and find something real to
do with my day. For some reason, though, the possibility -- no, the
mathematical probability (or is it near-certainty?) -- that I’ll find many
other January 6-ers in my collection keeps me going. But after scanning
the back of the very next card -- Larry Doby; Born: 12/13/24 – I
hesitate again. I remember Doby not only because he was star player during the
period when I first started following baseball in the late ‘50s but
also because he was the second African American player in the Major
Leagues (Jackie Robinson, of course, was the first black player, breaking the
color barrier in 1947, just eleven weeks before Doby did it). I
remember reading that Doby was always frustrated that, even though he had to
endure all of the same bigotry and prejudice that Robinson went
through, he got little attention since the media and fans had already
tired of the story. Amazingly enough, many years later, Doby become the
second African American manager in the major leagues and so again his
story was overshadowed.
Doby’s hometown is listed on his card as Paterson, NJ, which makes me
think of William Carlos Williams, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who, I
knew from my days as a grad student in English, was writing the first
books of his epic poem, "Paterson," at right around the same time that
Larry Doby was breaking baseball’s color line. I knew, too, that Williams
also felt overshadowed -- in his case, by T.S Eliot and the other
modernist poets. Were these two residents of Paterson, NJ even aware of each
other? Did they ever meet in 1947 to celebrate their groundbreaking
achievements or to commiserate about the fact that they had not yet
received their just desserts? For a second, I consider the possibility of
developing and marketing poet cards, with color photos or portraits on the
front, stats about publications and awards and maybe a famous quote or
two on the back. I find myself imagining the Robert Frost card, which
could include that famous photo of his reading at Kennedy’s Inaugural and, on the back, maybe “The woods are lovely dark and deep/But I
have promises to keep,/And miles to go before I sleep,/And miles to go
before I sleep.”
Shaking myself, I remember that I also have a long ways to go before I
can quit for the day: I still have many piles of cards spread out on
the floor and, so far, only poor Joe Lovitto in the January 6th slot.
Returning to reality (or at least what passes for reality in my fantasy
life), I carefully place Larry Doby in the sizeable December 13th stack,
reach back into the box, and continue putting my things in order.
©2006 by Lad Tobin
