The Bookshelf Conversation: Brad Balukjian

When I was a kid, I looked forward to another “opening day,” besides the one where the umpires yelled “Play ball!” for the game of the season.

For me, it was almost more important when the first boxes of Topps cards arrived at my local candy store. I was once so excited to buy an entire box that I didn’t realize I had left my school-loaned violin under the counter until after I arrived for class.

At the early stages of my collecting, in the mid-1960s, the cards came five in a pack — plus the customary thin slab of gum — for a nickel. You could also get a larger quantity of cards (not sure if it was 15 or twenty five) wrapped in cellophane for a bit more.

I think I speak for a lot of kids when I say we never thought of the players as “real people,” that is, guys who lived normal lives, full of the situations and problems we all face at some point. To borrow from Tennyson, is it really better to have loved and lost — to have enjoyed playing baseball for a living, however well or short-lived the career — than never to have played at all? For many, the heartbreak and absence of the cheering and adulation is difficult to bear, when you have to think about what to do with the rest of your life just like the average Joe, when you were once a hero of thousands. Brad Balukjian gives us an inkling of that in The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife.

Balukjian started his collecting much later than I, but his feelings were just as strong (not sure what instrument he might have played during his academic career). It’s a bittersweet story about…well, you’ll have to listen to the Conversation and read the book.