Wax Packs Looks at Post-Career MLB Players

The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife (2020)

 Brad Balukjian 

★★★

 The Wax Pack is a high-concept book for baseball fans. In 2015, Brad Balukjian, a natural history professor at Merritt College in Oakland, bought a random unopened package of 1986 Topps baseball cards on eBay and spent his summer trying to track down the 14* players lying underneath the bubblegum. In 49 days, Balukjian put 11,341 miles on his 2002 Honda and fueled himself with 123 cups of coffee.

Balukjian chose 1986 because it evoked fond childhood memories of enjoying baseball with his father. Twenty-nine years later, the 34-year-old Balukjian was single, renting a room in Oakland, and in therapy for OCD and emotional issues. His coast-to-coast-to coast baseball journey took on a second life of sorting out his own life. His Topps pack included–in the order Balukjian discusses them–Rance Mulliniks, Steve Yeager, Gary Templeton, Gary Pettis, Randy Ready, Don Carman, Jamie Cocanower, Carlton Fisk, Vince Coleman, Lee Mazzilli, Doc Gooden, Richie Hebner, Rick Sutcliffe, and Al Cowens.

Balukjian bookends his sojourn with stories gathered in Duryea, Pennsylvania, where Topps cranked out 170 packs of cards per minute before closing the plant in 1996. Mary Lou Gula missed the steady employment and camaraderie at Topps, though it was hot, hard work. It’s not easy starting over when you’ve doing something for a long time. Balukjian wanted to learn if that was also true for the faces on the cards.

Getting to the major league usually entails devoting one’s youth to endless hours of playing, practicing, and attending coaching clinics. Those who become prospects spend around four years in the minor leagues, and just one in 33 will make it to the majors. Even then, the average career is less than 6 years; most players retire in their 30s. What one does for the next 30-plus years? What kind of person does one become once the cheering ends?

One revelation is that there is generally a reverse correlation between being a great player and a good human being. Jaime Cocanower, for example, grew up in Panama and lasted just three years in the majors. He now lives in Arizona with his wife, a teacher who works with Asperger kids. Cocanower experienced few problems with walking away.

Professional baseball is notoriously hard on marriages–especially for players from dysfunctional birth families. “Boomer” Yeager was tight-lipped about his unhappy childhood, but you don’t need a degree in psychology to imagine how it contributed to two collapsed marriages and struggles with alcohol abuse. Rance Mulliniks also divorced before he finally found peace in not being the center of attention. Most of the players in Balukjian’s wax pack divorced at least once.

Cocanower is an outlier in severing ties to baseball. Rick Sutcliffe had an afterlife in broadcasting, Yeager as a coach for the Dodgers, Gary Pettis with the Astros, Richie Hebner with the Blue Jays, and Lee Mazzilli with both the Mets and Yankees. Balukjian’s boyhood idol, Phillies pitcher Don Carman, became a sports psychologist who works for superagent Scott Boras.

Wax packers Carlton Fisk and Doc Gooden milked their fame while showing little respect for the fans who idolized them. Balukjian observes that Fisk, “never won any nice guy awards.” He comes across as a prima donna and world-class jerk. His agent claims Fisk is a private man, which begs questions of why someone wishing anonymity needs an agent, or why he agrees to act chummy with anyone who pays for an autograph.

The most direct way of describing Gooden is that he is simply bad news. Through his son, he extorted hundreds of dollars from Balukjian for an interview he never intended to give. Gooden is a junkie who has been arrested for everything from DUI and domestic abuse to child endangerment and cocaine possession.

The wild card in the wax pack is Balukjian’s attempt to connect with other black players. Gary Templeton was extremely open about being the “black kid” who refused to “kiss white butt." He accused his former manager "Whitey" Herzog of living down to his nickname, and cited racism to explain why the percentage of black major leaguers has fallen from 18 percent in 1976 to just 7.2 percent. Balukjian positions Templeton as a complex and misunderstood man whose pride was never broken.

On the other hand, neither Pettis nor Vice Coleman would speak to Balukjian, moments that provide space for Balukjian to discuss his own demons or speculate about non-present subjects. Often, these breaks are book-within-a-book digressions that weaken the book’s coherence. Plus, should someone in therapy try to psychoanalyze others? Vince Coleman’s run-ins with the law are fair game, but few fans would agree with Balukjian’s assessment that Coleman was “a pretty mediocre player” whose sole attraction was base-stealing. Coleman played for 12 years and was a career .264 hitter. That’s solid, even if not earth-shattering.

The book is much stronger when Balukjian immerses himself in the hometowns of the players. Al Cowens died in 2002, and Balukjian visited Compton and elicited remembrances from community and family members. Especially moving was Balukjian’s trip to Carman’s boyhood home of Camargo, Oklahoma, a dead oil-patch outpost now defined by crystal meth and low aspirations. Carman left it behind, a reminder that professional sports are often a one-way escape from nowhere. Metaphorically speaking, that’s a much longer journey than 49 days of crisscrossing America.

Rob Weir

* Normally there are 15 player cards, but one card was a checklist.