Wax Pack

Does life exist after the ballpark? Brad Balukjian set out to answer that question and found that his project grew into something far more personal, a look at lost innocence and at how much everything changes. He wanted an unbiased group of players, so he bought one pack of 1986 baseball cards, the year he first began collecting, and opened it. He chewed the gum that had sat inside for nearly thirty years, which made him gag, and then he went looking for every player in the pack.

In the summer of 2015 he made the trip alone, covering 11,341 miles across thirty states in forty-eight days. Along the way he joined his subjects in ordinary and unexpected activities: a hitting lesson with Rance Mulliniks, kung fu films with Garry Templeton, and a visit to the zoo with Don Carman. He tracked down all but one of the players, and their lives after baseball turned out to be varied and full of stories no one had told. Balukjian came to see how much these men had in common with everyone else.

The journey also sent him back over his own history. He reconnected with people he had lost touch with and faced his long struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The book moves between wistful reflection and hopefulness, mixing baseball nostalgia, a road-trip account, and personal confession. Its central idea is that a player's real worth lies less in the numbers printed on the back of a card than in the lives of the people pictured on the front.