Baseball as Religion Part III: Ephemera

I've notated it more than once on this blog, the effect of baseball on my youthful life.  Especially in 1982.

I became a completionist that year as well.

It started in the fall of that year.  A trip to a convenience store with my sisters Linda and Pee Wee had me spending the 50 cents I had in my pocket (Linda covered the sales tax) on a pair of Topps baseball wax packs.

Yes, they were that cheap, and you got 15 of those rosary beads in one shot, along with that pink, brittle, and powdered stick of what apparently was gum.  It was awesome.

Still have two of the yield from that day, worse for wear,  and you can see them below:

1982's Topps series was probably among the least attractive of their baseball sets, but I wasn't aware of the aesthetics in the moment.  Sadly, it was late in the year, the shelf-space wouldn't be occupied by baseball cards much longer, as Halloween and Christmas items would begin to replace them, but the appetite was whetted for my new hobby.  That same fall, a trip to Ben Franklin (the noted five and dime store my Mom liked to frequent) brought to my attention the Topps baseball sticker album.  The whole book was only 25 cents. Where they got you was the packs of stickers required to fill it.  They charged .25 a pack, and you got about 7 per pack, if memory serves.  Mind you, this was 1982.  A quarter was not breaking the bank, even that far back.  So trying to fill these things was a blast and something fun my dad and I did together.  I wasn't able to put very many in the album, for as was the case with the cards, the time for the stickers to be on the shelf was short.   So I would bide my time for next season.

This was just on the fringes of the era where adults would come in and ruin a kids' activity (as they did with comic books and record collecting) with appraisal, marketing, price guides, inserts, and chase cards.  All that miserable shit was just around the corner.  The piece de resistance of card collecting at that time was simply finding or trading for a player's "rookie" card.  Nowadays that term doesn't really matter all that much.  People just want that 1 in 300 pack insert opportunity that has turned the hobby from hero worship into slot machine-lottery ticket buying.  I'm getting off topic here, as a bitter old man is wont to do.

Back to Dad and I.   He really was a backer of my interest.  So much so, that he'd often stop on the way home from work and pick up several packs of cards or stickers.  He'd then hide them in various spots around the house for me to find.  It was a ton of fun looking for the packs between couch cushions, between books on shelves, tucked amongst the breakfast cereal.  As good as he was with hiding small items, Dad was practical with the overflow too.  Like with the Reggie Jackson-emblazoned 1983 sticker album. When doubles started to build up, we picked up a second album and put them in that book.  Eventually, we did fill the first one, but ended up having to buy so many packs to get the last couple to fill it, we filled 3/4 of a second one. Along the way, Dad was just as interested and having as much fun with it as I was.  Realistically, this would be difficult to do today, as 25 cents just doesn't go as far as it once did.

One year for Christmas, my parents shocked me with complete sets of 1982 and 1983 Topps baseball cards.  When Donald Trump collapsed the USFL with his raging litigiousness, Pop rushed across town and bought me the only sets the Waco, Texas sports card shop carried.  He contributed the 1963 Pete Rose to my collection, as well as the coveted 1984 Donruss Don Mattingly, among many others. In hindsight, that may seem frivolous to many, but over the years those cards eventually became financial backing for a young man yet to be blessed with health insurance, and saved his ass from either of the unwanted fates of not getting needed health care, or going into massive debt getting it.

I seem to remember him making the prediction that this was a possibility over 35 years ago, and 8 years before it became true. Thanks, Dad.  Imagine doing something that was so much fun at the time, and down the road it ended up with a result somewhat like playing the stock market with cleverness.  

I do miss those cards now that most of them are gone, but damn if it wasn't a hoot of an investment.

Baseball as Religion Part II: The Home Run Book

Let's start by talking about the home run.

Chicks dig the long ball.

That's an old phrase that pretty much means "go big".

Baseball was a big part of the coping mechanism of my youth.  It distracted, it soothed, it shaved edges.  It made blood flow.

And as any good cleric in any religion, I studied.  I studied it hard.  I absorbed the biblical sports page, joined the choir in the highlight videos, watched ESPN Sportscenter (in its infancy, of course), and memorized library books and the backs of baseball cards.  I became an ardent attendee of summertime sermons on Superstation TBS and WGN, becoming an ancillary fan of the Atlanta Braves and Chicago Cubs in the process.

I became such a savant that for Christmas, dear old Dad had note pads printed that were emblazoned with a cartoon figure of some cat swinging a bat.  The headline of these pads?

Who will tell me about baseball?   ROB WILL.

All that being said, The Milwaukee Brewers were, and still are, the principal drivers of a baseball passion that does still exist in a much less feverish form now.

But it was different back then.  Watch The Sandlot, listen to Daniel Stern's monologue in City Slickers, and you'll get my meaning.  I was up with the sun, catching and hitting balls (with friends or without) until it went down again.  Evenings were spent with my besties, monks from the temple of the national pastime, playing Milton Bradley's Championship Baseball or watching games on the tube.  Rainouts were seldom cause for sadness as the local channels ran highlight films of World Series past until the game returned, expanding my already impressive knowledge of the game.

Rob Will, acolyte of the Diamond.  How's that for baseball religion allegory work?

Anyways, back to the long ball.  Any sports fans loves the quick score.  The 80 yard bomb in Football.  The Clutch 3 in basketball.  But neither are quite as majestic as the home run ball.  Someone, preferably from my team, tacking a hard rawhide encircled ball of twine and literally driving it further than a football field with a stick.

After the sphere has been thrown at them, often at over 90 miles per hour, no less.

The glorious home run ball is comprised of a long arcing tracer missile ascending into the night air, accompanied by the rising vocal excitement of the paid faithful, a piece of excitement only matched by its descent into the crowd, signaling the satisfying confirmation of runs scored.

It's even better when it's late in the game, more importantly in the post-season.  Bobby Thompson, Kirk Gibson, and Bucky Dent....I'm talking to you.


So, there it was one spring day.  6th grade.  Right there in the iconic publication called the Weekly Reader.  The Home Run Book.  The Topps' Home Run Book, no less.  Who better to put together an encyclopedia of the best baseball had to offer in the round-tripper department than the premier manufacturer of the rosary beads of the sport, the baseball card.  Each cardboard saint came in a wax pack accompanied by wonderful facts and stats, introduced by the whiff of the powder pink residue scent of the stick bubble gum.  A gift from the baseball deity,  this book was my catechism, a pocket prayer book for the baseball seminary.

In it's tiny form, it listed out all the vital stats on the men who hit the most home runs.  A pocket history of the dinger's legends.  Categorized by career 400, 500,  and 600 home run hitters, and of course finishing with the two who filled the 700 homer category, Ruth and Aaron. The book obviously predated Bonds by many years, but it doesn't matter.  I don't care how many that steroid-infused twatwaffle hit, Aaron is still number one.

Don't argue with me.  I'll excommunicate you from my beautiful baseball religion.

After the book's home run hall of fame, was a segment consisting of simple home-run related tidbits, that while not as informative or colorful, were still fun. Topps' The Home Run Book was a compendium of knowledge on the most exciting moments in the grand old game, and those that elicited the most of them.

Every day of the summer of 1983, this young monk, still growing in the baseball priesthood, read one chapter.  He took in the stories of the great popes of his religion.

And remembered them.

The Spectrum Files: The Wanderers

In the late 70's and early 80's it seemed that movies involving street gangs were kinda in.  Walter Hill's The Warriors raked in box office cash (while inciting riots), The Outsiders had everybody talking, and Boulevard Nights was quite popular as well.  Something about that us vs. them mentality of these films must have tapped into America's zeitgeist at the time. I myself was too young to tie anything together in that regard.

And then there was The Wanderers. 

What can I say about Philip Kaufman's take on Richard Price's novel?   A lot.  As a kid I liked it for reasons that it really doesn't hold up for now.  The "tough talking" kids battling over territory, the wise-crack humor, the street battles?  As a 10 year old, I guess these things may seem attractive, but I feel almost embarrassed at the fact that these plot points (particularly in this film) were what drew me to it.  Those elements now seem juvenile.  They aren't so cool anymore. Not even close.

In reality, what's good about the film now differs greatly.

Other films, (American Graffiti and Grease, in particular) show a strange similarity with The Wanderers regarding the late 50's and early 60's.  The commonality is these hyperkinetic, fast-talking,  annoying teenagers with what seem to be boundless energy and limitless stupidity.  Due to these common denominators, I'm led to believe people that acted like that were somehow the era's norm.  That shit would have driven me insane.  I may have been forced to deal Ritalin on the street corner to quell the loudness of my schoolmates.  Of course these films' young Category 5 morons hung around brutish sleepy-eyed Lords of Flatbush look-a-likes that pretended to have a grip on things, but were really just as dumb (and scared) as the hang-abouts running circles around them.

The Wanderers is a bizarre film indeed.  It takes place in1963 New York, and in this particular neighborhood all of the kids appear to be members of different gangs as opposed to cliques, and none of them get along.  Besides the titular gang whose members are all of Italian descent, there's the bizarre Baldies, the all-Asian Wongs, and a final gang comprised of the neighborhood's African American representatives, the Del Bombers.  It is a bit of a cartoonish separation of sorts, but by films end, there seems to be a peace brought about by familiarity that actually works despite the insanity.

This stylistic exclamation of visual differences (shown in even-more neon exaggeration in The Warriors) was one of the things that drew me to it as a kid.  Did I want to be in a comic book gang or something?  God, I hope not.

There's one more gang that I will refer to in a separate paragraph.  When these guys, known as The DuckyBoys, are on screen the film takes a creepy, if not disturbing tone.  This gang is huge, and seems to be comprised of child molesters in training.  They take things to a level the rest of the "kids" in this film are hesitant to go to, and for good reason.  That level is awful, violent, and laced with sadism.  The DuckyBoys send out an aura of cult-like violence that seems to cast them in almost a boogeyman light for the rest of the gangs in the film.  They are indeed frightening.

Oddly, I don't really remember the DuckyBoys from the Spectrum days.  It was only in a recent re-watching that I was taken aback by these DuckyBoy sequences and found them to be the most striking of the film. 

Much of the dialogue, especially early on in the film is racist, vile, and stupid, much like most of the principals.  Sadly, it is probably representative of the era and the location, and I'm sure the filmmakers are aware of this.  It doesn't come across as a message, but a recording.  Make no mistake, The Wanderers are young, dumb, and lack the ability to function as human beings.  Their development of that much-needed quality, a degree of maturity, is what the movie is about.  In my recent viewing, I wondered what the hell I ever saw in most of these low-lifes as an adolescent.  I really did.

The performances in this movie are excellent by all involved.  The cast was comprised mostly of then-unknowns, but Kaufman picked the right crew to lead this film.  Ken Wahl is excellent in his film debut as the leader of The Wanderers.  He was a good-looking youngster with screen presence and toughness, but had no trouble conveying his character being in over his head.  Also outstanding is a young actor named Tony Ganios as Perry, a quiet but pivotal character.  His performance is subtle, often intimidating, and vulnerable.  Perry quietly often proves to be more of a leader than Wahl's Richie, but never tries to subvert The Wanderers.

There's really not a sour note in any of the acting in the film.  Early on, the energy level of a few characters make it difficult to concentrate, but it comes together nicely if you can get through the early maelstrom twisting across the screen.  When I was a ten year old, I found myself liking Ken Wahl's character a lot.  37 years later, it was Ganios' Perry that struck me as the most interesting and satisfying of the film.

The conflicts, battles, and spastic energy of the film and its characters is what kept me hooked multiple times as a youngster.  All that seems superfluous now, as the The Wanderers sudden growing realization that the world is shifting becomes something I didn't notice back then, but gives the movie its current existing power.  Their world is changing hard, violently, and without patience.  It will not wait for The Wanderers, and it's both beautiful, sad, and often powerful to see how all the different members of the gang face that knowledge.

It's amazing how times changed for me too.  Many years ago,  (after an older sister almost blocked my viewing due to a just-after-the-Orion Pictures-production-logo interlude between Wahl's Richie and his girl) I absorbed a truly strange, kinetic, sometimes confusing, and often violent film and really dug The Wanderers a lot.

I do now, too.  Just for completely different reasons.