Brad Balukjian

Wax Pack (eBook, ePUB)

On the Open Road in Search of Baseball's Afterlife

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A Los Angeles Times Bestseller 2020 NPR's Book Concierge Staff Pick Is there life after baseball? Starting from this simple question, The Wax Pack ends up with something much bigger and unexpected-a meditation on the loss of innocence and the gift of impermanence, for both Brad Balukjian and the former ballplayers he tracked down. To get a truly random sample of players, Balukjian followed this wildly absurd but fun-as-hell premise: he took a single pack of baseball cards from 1986 (the first year he collected cards), opened it, chewed the nearly thirty-year-old gum inside, gagged, and then embarked on a quest to find all the players in the pack. Absurd, maybe, but true. He took this trip solo in the summer of 2015, spanning 11,341 miles through thirty states in forty-eight days. Balukjian actively engaged with his subjects-taking a hitting lesson from Rance Mulliniks, watching kung fu movies with Garry Templeton, and going to the zoo with Don Carman. In the process of finding all the players but one, he discovered an astonishing range of experiences and untold stories in their post-baseball lives, and he realized that we all have more in common with ballplayers than we think. While crisscrossing the country, Balukjian retraced his own past, reconnecting with lost loves and coming to terms with his lifelong battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Alternately elegiac and uplifting, The Wax Pack is part baseball nostalgia, part road trip travelogue, and all heart, a reminder that greatness is not found in the stats on the backs of baseball cards but in the personal stories of the men on the front of them.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Nebraska
• Seitenzahl: 264
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. April 2020
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781496221506
• Artikelnr.: 60872738

Autorenporträt

Brad Balukjian is an entomologist and is faculty in the Natural History and Sustainability Program at Merritt College. He is also a freelance writer who has published in Rolling Stone, Slate, National Geographic, and other publications. He lives in Oakland, California, with his VCR.

Inhaltsangabe

Author’s Note
Prologue
1. Warming Up
2. Happy Meals
3. Yeager Bombs
4. Camp Templeton
5. Houston, We Have a Problem
6. Ready Is Ready
7. Carman’s Cradle
8. The Battery
9. Chasing Carlton
10. Leader of the Pack
11. Vincent van Gone
12. Is It September Yet?
13. Nobody Home
14. Gone Fishing
15. Catching Carlton
16. Captain Comeback
17. Straight Outta Compton
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes