Nothing like baseball cards to restore youth
It's more difficult to wax romantic about baseball these days, what with all the evil potions and the culprits who use them to stack their stats.
But then I came upon a riddle that wasn't wrapped in a scandal.
Q. What do Edwin Encarnacion, Mark Reynolds, Mark Loretta, Jim Thome, Josh Anderson, Josh Willingham, Jimmy Rollins, Jake Peavy, the combination of Austin Kearns and Dmitri Young, and the combination of Alex Rodriguez, Magglio Ordonez and Vladimir Guerrero have in common?
A. They were in the pack of baseball cards I bought at a 7-Eleven a couple of days ago.
The purchase made my day, my week and hopefully my summer.
You see -- seriously, you can see looking at me -- I'm not into botox, liposuction, face lifts, implants or transplants.
I depend on baseball season to restore my youth in spirit if not in body.
This game is great, in spite of itself. It remains the national pastime, in spite of transgressions by the prominent people who populate it.
I won't tell you that if you don't let baseball get old, you won't either. Baseball can't warm spring even if it does the heart. It can't cure the common cold or make new shoes feel comfy.
However, you can be young in baseball years. Why else would countless fans with gray hair and wrinkles still wear uniform tops to games and bring mitts to catch foul balls?
My thing is I still get a tingle opening a pack of baseball cards. One pack used to be a nickel for five cards with bubble gum, and now it's $1.99 for 10 without the gum.
Either way the price is right because the backs of baseball cards don't have anything about salaries or steroids, ticket prices or naming rights.
Baseball cards are even better than the box that arrived last week from Triumph Books.
Inside were "Then Ozzie Said to Harold … the Best Chicago White Sox Stories Ever Told" by Lew Freedman and Billy Pierce; "Billy Williams … My Sweet-Swinging Lifetime with the Cubs," by Williams and Fred Mitchell; and "Cubs Forever … Memories from the Men Who Lived Them," by Bob Vorwald with photos by Stephen Green.
Included were compact disks and DVDs, apparently this era's bubble gum.
Some day I'll have someone read the books to me. For now I'll focus on Thome's baseball card, just as a kid I did on Moose Skowron's.
By the way, did you know Encarnacion played at Billings, Savannah, Dayton, Potomac, Chattanooga and Louisville before reaching Cincinnati?
Don't ask me why I find this fascinating. Maybe it's because it isn't a grown-up schedule of McCain-Obama-Clinton campaign stops.
Rollins' card says he "was the first player ever with 200 hits, 15 triples, 25 homers and 25 steals." Reynolds' says he "hit .426 in his first 15 MLB games."
On the backs of baseball cards, ERA and RBI supersede HGH and BALCO.
On a baseball card and in the mind's eye, an impure game is pure and an imperfect player perfect.
In other words, the game becomes what it's supposed to be even if it isn't on the field, in the Mitchell Report or in headlines.
That's why despite the scandals revolving around baseball, attendance records are broken and the game continues to be romanticized.
So bring on another season just like the ones when we were kids.