David Roth's Weak In Review: The Old Ball Game, And The New One

In the early 1990's, the baseball card business found itself with a problem that it was in no way capable of solving, and which did not even look, at the time, like a problem. The problem was that otherwise reasonable people had come to believe that baseball cards were not just excellent bookmarks and fun keepsakes, but an actual investment vehicle. The thinking behind this was that since a few extremely rare turn-of-the-century tobacco cards were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars despite being little cardboard rectangles with a picture of a baseball player on the front, other baseball cards could/would also be worth that much.

It was the scarcity of those antique cards that drove the value, as is generally the case, and not the dippy portrait of a particular Taft Administration shortstop, but a lot of people put a lot of faith and a decent amount of money into B.J. Surhoff Rated Rookie Futures before this became obvious. There are sagging boxes in my parents' attic, marked Do Not Open Until 2010 in my optimistic little kid handwriting, that are still unopened. I know what's in them, and until science devises a way to use Kevin Maas Upper Deck cards as a clean energy source, I know exactly what they're worth. To be fair, though, I was 11 years old when I began laying in my Strategic Phil Plantier Rookie Reserve as the beginning of a retirement plan, and so have an excuse for being a starry-eyed dope as both an investor and an evaluator of talent. The card companies mostly don't.

The card companies saw this booming market and reacted in the same way that goldfish react to fish food—first with unreasoned hunger, and then by producing more shit than seems possible. The companies glutted the market with cards; every gaunt, doomed reliever and beef-o hatchback of a pinch-hitter got one, and each card was printed hundreds of thousands of times. They were mostly artless—the mind reels at how many photos there are of squinting men named Greg still out there in the world, stuck in paperbacks or moldering in attics or awaiting a long-overdue pulping—and they were impossibly legion. If there are not more Pat Borders baseball cards in the world than people named Pat or Patrick or Patricia, it is surely 1) the result of those being popular names and 2) probably pretty close.

Buried among those buried, worth no more and no less, are a bunch of cards for Rich "Goose" Gossage, who was then riding out the shoulder of a long and brilliant career that would eventually get him elected to the Hall of Fame. During the baseball card boom market, though, Goose was in his early middle age and primarily an itinerant mustache with a big right arm attached; less metaphorically, he was a middling relief option on what were mostly lousy teams. By the time he retired at the age of 42, in 1994, Gossage was the oldest player on a sub-mediocre Seattle Mariners team whose youngest player was an 18-year-old Alex Rodriguez. There are interesting things to be written about that, and Eric Nusbaum did so here. But it's probably sufficient to say that time and attrition and a bunch of other non-negotiable things had finally conspired to make Gossage exactly as common as his baseball card—one glowering grouch among many, standing maybe a bit closer to the exit than the rest.

Earlier this week, as a spring training guest of the New York Yankees, Gossage loosed a densely fragrant mudslide of superheated bitchery into the nearest open microphone—about young players, Latin players, kids today, managers today, geeks, dweebs, weirdos, and how They Make The Orange Juice Too Strong These Days. None of it will seem terribly new to anyone who has had the experience of hearing some sozzled ex-ballplayer spend a half-inning coming really close to using ethnic slurs during a guest slot on some mid-summer broadcast; it is also very much in character for Gossage, a self-styled Old-School Guy who has looked like the disagreeable 51-year-old owner of a bar called Sticky's since he was 25 years old.

The tirade was notable, if it was notable, because of how fuck-heavy and comprehensive it was, and because of when it arrived—at a time when there wasn't much else in baseball to talk about, and after all the changes in the game that Gossage groans and grouses had already become something like settled law. Baseball, like everything else, has its own set of tribal rules and mores, most of which is grounded in a supremely selective and contingent parsing of familiar Jurassic Macho code. We know about this mostly because, every year about this time, for forever and ever, someone from the previous generation points out that the current one has forgotten it. The sentiment doesn't change—it is pure Old Man Yelling At Cloud, or more precisely Old Man Yelling At Cloud As If He Has Just Now Noticed Clouds Exist—although the language in which this so-idle grievance is expressed shifts with the trends.

Right now, that language is loud and pop-eyed and delivered with an unconcealed urge to back it all up with a sucker punch. Gossage had one of the great right arms of his generation, but his mind is right there in the seething middle, and what he is saying—that the young people act too young, and that he would like to punch them into acting more the way he'd like them to act—is more than familiar. It reads like nothing so much as a Mad Lib rendering of a bilious Facebook comment, with [Latin Power Hitter's Name] swapped in for [Type Of Immigrant]; this fuming language is how a great many members of Gossage's generation talk about the world. There is no reason to overthink this: if Gossage is going to pose as a big ol' asshole, we might as well take him at his word. But there is more to this than the latest airing of these tired old complaints, from the latest in the long line of tired old complainers to air them.

The world moves faster than we can move through it, and things change, and there is very little that any of us can do about any of that. The greater part of the challenge of getting older is learning how to deal with this; time and toil and the market make common cards of all of us, whether we had Hall of Fame peaks or not. When a reactionary she-golem like Phyllis Schlafly hymns the old days of all-white, Americans-only baseball, she's not really talking about baseball at all—she's talking about a world in which people like Phyllis Schlafly had a bigger share of everything, and what looked at the time like the exclusive rights to the future.

This isn't to say that Schlafly's not backwards and small and positively weeping with terrible ideas, because she is. It's just that the expression of those ideas is more symptom than disease. In the same way, we can assume that Goose Gossage—who was teammates with Rickey Henderson and Dennis Eckersley and Reggie Jackson—is less concerned with showboating and youthful narcissism and deviations from baseball's grim and coppish norms than he is with the horror of realizing that those celebrations are no longer his. There is nothing special or inherently admirable about the past, really, except that we were younger when it was happening, but people will go a long way to avoid looking this fact in the face.

The (much smaller) baseball card business that exists today manufactures scarcity, having finally realized that what people want is not everything, but simply something special. The companies build scarcity it into each set with parallels and short-printed cards and autographs and by embedding little dorky swatches of uniform pant in the cards themselves. When I worked at Topps, in the middle of the last decade, even the printing plates used to manufacture the cards were cut up and seeded into the packs. This moved every collector closer to the dream of hauling a sharp-edged metal version of a Troy Percival card out of an otherwise unassuming pack, I guess, but something about it always seemed strange and even a little cannibalistic to me. But those printing plate cards served a purpose—they were each a one-of-one, the only such card of their kind in existence. This is all anyone has ever wanted, from a pack of baseball cards or a baseball season—something that startles and sticks out, something that is unusual and memorable and unlike everything else around it. It would be nice to think that it's possible to get old without forgetting that, or forgetting what those uncommon moments are worth.