Читать книгу One Season in the Sun онлайн

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One night, I read through twenty or thirty cards, doing the math, checking to see if the statisticians at Topps had made errors in their calculations. They had not.

While I coveted the baseball cards of the stars in the game then, the players who would eventually be in the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York—Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Bob Gibson, Carl Yastrzemski, Sandy Koufax, Harmon Killebrew—the players who most intrigued me were the marginal ones. I was interested in the players who would never be in the Hall of Fame or earn a place on an All Star team.

In 1964, The Topps Baseball Card Company produced 587 different baseball cards, numbering each in a tiny image of a baseball on the back in the upper left corner. The company honored the best players by giving them numbers ending in a zero. Number 50 was Mickey Mantle, who had been a member of his League’s All Star team in all twelve of the previous years. Willie Mays, an All Star for ten years, was card 150. Sandy Koufax, who was such a great left-handed pitcher his nickname was “The Left Hand of God,” appeared on card 200.