It can mean a lot to hold something in your hands. Consider the feeling of being a kid and holding a brand new card in your hands. Say it’s 1976 and the card shows a previously unseen (or even imagined) Technicolor eruption of colors virtually bursting from the two-dimensional limits of the card. That feeling is one I’ve been trying to describe on this site for a few years now, and it’s the feeling that is at the center of my book, due out in about a month.
Congratulations to Josh Wilker ("Voice of the mathematically eliminated") and his excellent editor as well - Kate McKean. Some thought that Wilker was going to shut his blog down, but in fact it's the opposite. Wilker compares writing to the fate of the journeymen pitcher:
Wayne Granger seems to feel it, too, leaning slightly to the left as if a little unsure of his moorings, a look on his face like his catcher is flashing him sign language interpretations of the essays of Umberto Eco. He has been a star in the league, back when things made more sense, back when he was on a team, the Reds, with strict rules about how to dress and how to wear your hair. Those years are behind him now. He has been traded for a player to be named later and has twice been afloat in the strange new ether of free agency. He can grow his hair long and put on vestments that could just have easily been the chosen garments of a 1970s cult dedicated to communal living, past-life regression hypnosis, and chanting at rainbows. Granger (who because I was too young to know him as a star was always confused in my head with that early symbol of the excesses of free agency, Wayne Garland) carried a record of 34 and 35 into the 1976 season. He had not even had a baseball card in 1975, so there may have been some sense that this photo shoot might be his last.
"Cardboard Gods," the book, coming soon!.
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