Sentimental Value

Mike Trout, on cardboard

Mike Trout (Wikimedia Commons)

Last weekend, I was watching baseball — mid-pandemic sports being the magnetized iron to my own moral compass — when one of the commentators butted in with a tidbit of news: A signed, mint-condition, one-of-a-kind Mike Trout rookie card had just sold at auction for nearly $4 million, a new record for a trading card by many hundreds of thousands of dollars.

By most metrics, Trout plays baseball better than anyone else active today: In eight full seasons, the first of which ended with him as the American League’s Rookie of the Year, he’s made eight All-Star games; won seven Silver Slugger awards, as the AL’s best offensive player; and claimed the AL MVP award three times. I don’t really care about the Angels, nor can I stay awake long enough to watch most west-coast baseball games, but at least in highlights, Trout looks the part of a Hollywood baseball hero. He launches clutch home runs and makes improbable, gymnastic leaps at the centerfield wall to rob opponents of their own clutch home runs, which can only be good for his net moments of glory (moments of glory achieved minus moments of glory allowed plus moments of glory stolen), which I’m sure baseball nerds have some heinous acronym for.

The math is not so great for Trout in other ways. Last fall, the New York Times pointed out that, while nearly all Americans know LeBron James and Tom Brady, fewer than half of them know Trout. That’s why I included that long explanatory paragraph above: Statistically, you, reading this newsletter, are unfamiliar with him. Baseball, before the pandemic, was experiencing its lowest ticket sales since the days it was emerging from the steroids era, and its regionalized broadcasting scheme means that it’s hard to catch even big stars in action; that same Times article broke down data to show that you’re nearly 100 times more likely to be able to regularly watch James or Brady than Trout.

History rhymes here, by the way. The player whose card held the record before Trout’s was Honus Wagner, who played shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates at the turn of the 20th century and who was the great star of another less-loved period of baseball, the unglamorous, home run-starved “deadball era.” Wagner was a prodigious hitter with great speed that earned him the enviable nickname The Flying Dutchman, which kicks ass even if Wagner’s parents were actually German. He played until he was 43, so old that he resembled a wax Rocky Balboa figurine left in the sun. He was inducted in the first Baseball Hall of Fame class, along with stars like Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth, who played in a slightly later period and, consequently, became much more famous. Wagner is probably better known among casual fans for his very expensive likeness than for his athletic prowess.

It strikes me as both funny and fitting that a Trout card would break the auction record. Baseball cards, to me, carry this sort of golden-hour aura, a nostalgic glow — kids riding bikes through mid-century suburbs with Willie Mays fluttering in their spokes, or whatever. I never collected baseball cards as a kid, but I wasn’t immune to the same kind of pull. In the closet of my childhood bedroom, there are binders full of Yu-Gi-Oh cards that I’ve never compelled myself to sell or throw out. Somewhere in there, there’s also a Vince Carter rookie card, entombed in clear, hard plastic, that I bought for $8 from a kiosk in West Town Mall when I was, I don’t know, 10; not that I was ever a particularly huge Vince Carter fan, but it featured him dunking acrobatically — or more accurately, about to dunk, his body facing away from the hoop, hands and ball frozen just above the rim — in one of those great late-90s Raptors jerseys, with the crimson cartoon dinosaur looking indignant, and like everyone else I’d seen his elbow dunk, and what was cooler than that? The card lived at the back of my little wicker nightstand for a couple of years, one of many elementary school talismans. Anyway, that’s what lends the Trout sale an ironic air: Baseball cards are trinkets of enthusiasm, at a moment when enthusiasm for the sport itself is scarce as ever.

Scarcity is also why it seems appropriate. As Eric Moskowitz traced for The Atlantic last year, baseball cards started accruing huge value in the 1970s. Nostalgia was actually the axis the market turned on then — Boomers wanted cards immortalizing their childhood heroes, which by then had become hard to find, driving prices up; the market eventually went bust, then found its feet when card grading emerged in the 90s (the Trout being mint, e.g.). Now baseball cards are engineered toward rarity and thus resale value, and trade shows cater to people like Sharon Chiong, a former diamond dealer who’s now, Mostkowitz wrote, “a high-end broker-dealer and card-buying consultant with a network of clients around the world.” Card trading seems powered now by the same forces that have turned the art world into a playground of investment, fraud and thievery for the ultra-rich and the ultra-rich at heart.

Maybe I’m being too cynical. But it’s hard to know, since the kind of people who buy these expensive cards at auction often stay anonymous, and since the biggest cards can bring huge, quick returns on investment — before the recent auction, the Trout card was last bought in 2018, for $400,000.

Part of the card’s appeal or value or whatever is that it’s signed. I get that memorabilia culture long ago collectively decided that signatures connoted value, but that doesn’t really make sense to me, in the same way none of this makes sense to me. What strikes me as valuable about a signature is not so much the fact of the ink and the cardboard but the action of it — what did it mean for an 18-year-old Trout to put his signature on his own likeness, one that could have stepped straight out of a high school hallway and into big-league batting practice? A rare, mint-condition card gets put in a vault for safe-keeping; a kid relishes the process of tearing open the foil of a pack of cards, of tucking a favorite player into a plastic sleeve or maybe passing it around the classroom or dugout, bringing it home with the corners bent and the back streaked with dirt — what lasts? I hope the Trout card means something to whomever would spend $4 million on it. But I doubt they keep it where they can see it and feel it, propped on their nightstand or rattling in the spokes of a bicycle, in the air and sun until one day it fades or maybe falls away into memory alone.

More Thoughts

Hi, friends. Thanks for reading this first installment of I’ve Been Thinking A Lot About It. My plan is to write essays like the one above pretty regularly, at least once a month, maybe more often. In the space below, I’ll write little blurbs or recommendations about what I’ve been reading or listening to or watching or eating or otherwise contemplating; in between the main-event essays, I may send out some shorter newsletters that just comprise these blurbs.

Rod Wave, “Through the Wire”

I love the striking frankness Rod Wave (St. Pete’s own!) brings to this song, about the drug dependency and mental anguish that led up to his near-fatal car crash earlier this year. “If I’m sober for too long, I get in my feelings,” he sings, and later: “I think it’s safe to say I lost my damn brain, but the pressure on my chest made me feel a certain way.” It feels rare for an artist — of any stripe — who’s so young and on the cusp of fame to articulate the stresses of potential success so clearly and compellingly. I also love the way he sings it, his voice eroding over solemn piano licks, stretching his need to slow it down into “shlow it dowwwn,” bursting into falsetto when he sings the word “pain,” like he’s trying to break the surface.

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights

Reading the poet’s great collection of essayettes from last year was the push I needed to start writing more for myself (which, because I have trouble writing without a hypothetical audience, is why I’m doing all this). Gay fashions miraculous little pieces from bits of the everyday: flowers, snacks, the sounds of words, laying down on the sidewalk, pissing one’s pants, the just desserts of a predatory gold-buying shop, vicious weeds, a worn-out backboard, etc. Thematic nimbleness is one of Gay’s strongsuits here, perhaps no surprise for a great poet, as he holds his joys in one hand and meditations on race and class in another and then lights them on fire and juggles them while riding backward on a unicycle. Literarily, I mean. Other writers can probably describe that ability better than I can; what stands out to me even more is the bright casualness of these essays. I think it probably takes one kind of great writer to write not just tolerably but wonderfully off the cuff, spinning charming digressions and surprising turns of phrase on a whim (a memorable one: the name Curtis is “a clothesline of a name, really. The football kind.”) and another kind of great writer to revise with such effort that their writing seems effortless, and I think Gay transcends both designations here: He proclaims his love for tangents and run-on sentences, the rewilding of the mind, but also notes in the acknowledgements his “thoughtful and rigorous conversations” with his editor; it’s to the book’s great credit that it’s impossible to tell what has been cut and moved, what has been rewritten, and what flowed straight to paper from one of Gay’s bountiful pens — another delight he extols, by the way.
Also recommended: Gay, along with his student Noah Davis, wrote one of my favorite magazine pieces of this year so far, an epistolary essay about poetry, basketball and friendship.

Young Jesus, Welcome to Conceptual Beach

This is my favorite band to tell people about these days, so I’m gonna do the whole thing: Young Jesus came up in the Chicago emo-revival scene before moving to California and reconstituting as a “philosophy jam band.” They’ve since put out three records on the venerable Saddle Creek label (you know: Bright Eyes, Rilo Kiley, Cursive, Hop Along, Big Thief — liking any of those bands may predispose you toward this stuff, but it’s no guarantee), each better than the last. The newest, Welcome to Conceptual Beach, is named for a place that exists only in bandleader John Rossiter’s psyche, and it contains their most conventionally satisfying music and their most exciting extended explorations. In the lead-up to its release, the band cited Alice Coltrane, Jeff Buckley, Sun Ra and the Dave Matthews Band as influences; at various points on Conceptual Beach, they also sound like ‘80s King Crimson, early Modest Mouse, late Talk Talk, Dismemberment Plan, Pedro the Lion, and even (close your eyes here, Real Indieheads) super-accessible stuff like Bon Iver and The National. This is the rare band where playing spot-the-influence is so fun, because it’s actually kind of hard — as a whole, they don’t sound like anyone else working now. The current band they remind me most of is the aforementioned Big Thief, not because they sound anything alike but because they’re the increasingly rare bands in which each member has a style that’s distinct and crucial to the music’s structural integrity. Conceptual Beach is largely about finding peace and joy amid turmoil both internal and external, with Rossiter working through crises of faith, ghost sightings, a judgmental streak and imposter syndrome. On “(un)knowing,” the band’s best entry point and maybe best song, the music crests and then suddenly quiets as Rossiter is brought back from one of those tracing-the-cracks-in-the-ceiling-at-3-a.m. spirals by the sound of his lover’s breath next to him. Very nearly as lovely is the final track, “Magicians,” where Rossiter’s epiphany is banal and surreal: “But there are magicians making love and doing dishes / I make my way to magic or belief in love.”
Also recommended: This album may pair well with Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which I read this summer and may write about eventually.

Hilary Leichter, Temporary

I will try to stay short in my praise of this incredible, under-acclaimed novel, as I feel like I may write a separate post about it later. For now I will say: Temporary is essential reading for anyone working in an unstable industry or really anywhere in this hellish economy, even if not in the kind of gig work that Leichter twists into a blackly comic framework (her protagonist gets temp jobs on a pirate ship, as a ghost, as a murderer’s assistant, as a distributor of carnivorous pamphlets). Leichter builds kind of a glass casing over her story, in large part through her playful reclamation of corporate jargon; in less able hands, that ironic distance could suffocate, but she succeeds by taking an emotional hammer to the veneer every now and then. I particularly appreciate how she articulates something I’m not sure I’ve ever come across in a novel: the sort of work-death drive, where the hopelessness of striving in a post-retirement, post-social-safety-net, post-middle-class economy makes you want to drop a bomb on your own life and curl up underground, which Leichter exemplifies by having her character drop a literal bomb and then crawl into a sewer system.

Jay Caspian Kang, “Ball Don’t Lie” (New York Review of Books) / Vinson Cunningham, “The Exhilarating Jolt of the Milwaukee Bucks’ Wildcat Strike” (The New Yorker)

These two essays, each on its own but especially in concert, will help you understand what’s happening with the NBA right now better than any amount of Woj-bombs could ever hope to.