Cardboard Gods (10 page)

While there has never been a salary cap in baseball, I sometimes suspect that in the mid-to late-1970s, as a reaction to the dominance of the early 1970s Oakland A's, American League owners instituted a secret Mustache Cap that restricted the amount of total facial hair each team was allowed to carry on its roster. Consider:

1. After winning three World Series titles in a row, 1972 to 1974, the roster of the overwhelmingly hirsute A's was almost completely dismantled within a couple years, as if some secret and severe penalties for overmustaching had been levied. The skyrocketing salaries spurred by the introduction of free agency have most often been noted as the cause of this dismantling, but I'm not so sure that tells the whole story. If it does, then how do you explain the lack of a similar instantaneous dismantling of the successful National League team that had an even more star-studded roster than the A's, the Cincinnati Reds (who were all as clean-shaven as boot-camp marines)?

2. When Charlie Finley tried to hasten the dismemberment of his A's dynasty by selling two of his stars to the Boston Red Sox, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn disallowed the transaction, citing the damage it would do to competitive balance; however, I believe this justification was a screen to cover the real reason: Joe Rudi and (especially) Rollie Fingers would have put the Red Sox, already fairly well mustached, far over their facial hair allowance. Supporting this point is that Rudi later came to the Red Sox anyway, sporting his modest gun-shop-cashier 'stache, while Fingers, the facial-hair-cap-wrecking A-Rod of the Mustache Years, had to spend some years
with the smooth-cheeked Padres of Enzo Hernandez and Randy Jones until the apparent lifting of the Mustache Cap in the early 1980s allowed him to join the malodorous unshaven rabble known as the Milwaukee Brewers.

3. The California Angels and Boston Red Sox constantly shuttled similarly mustached guys back and forth, as if the deals depended on the equal exchange of facial hair. The unremarkable mustaches of guys such as Jerry Remy and Joe Rudi came east, and the unremarkable mustaches of guys such as Dick Drago and Rick Burleson went west. Even when clean-cut fellows such as Denny Doyle passed between the two teams, the transaction seemed to come with hidden “facial hair to be named later” clauses that impacted (and explained the seeming imbalance of) later trades whose principals, such as clean-cut Butch Hobson and walrus-faced Carney Lansford, did not balance out on the facial hair ledger.

I'm not quite sure how Rick Miller fits into all this, but when I was a kid he seemed to drift back and forth between the Angels and Red Sox like a Mustache Years version of a Cheshire cat. Because he was obscure to me in each place for different reasons (on the Angels because they were so far away and on the Red Sox because he was always buried on the outfield depth chart), I was never completely sure which of the two teams he was on at any given moment, and so there always seemed at least a shred of him in both places, a brown medium-sized mustache hanging in the clubhouse air, waiting for the rest of him to appear and collect a pinch hit or make a diving grab in the outfield just when you thought for sure he was on the other side of the continent.

The Mustache Years weren't my father's happiest. He spent most of them living in a studio apartment in Manhattan while his family lived with another guy several hours away by bus. In that apartment, he had one window, a desk, a small table, a foam mattress that he slept on at night and rolled up and stowed in the lone closet in the morning, and some board and cinder-block bookshelves. In the hollow of one of the cinder blocks he kept a stack of curling photographs, mostly of my brother and me, the two of us changing as the years went on, our blond hair darkening, our bodies getting taller and thinner, the look in our eyes growing dimmer, warier, as if the photographer was becoming a stranger.

 

My card collection calmed me throughout my childhood, in part because it had elements that seemed as if they would stay the same forever. For a long time, Paul Lindblad provided one of my favorite of these comforting repetitions. As the years went on, it came to seem that Lindblad always had been and always would be

But nothing and no one is immune to change. In this 1978 card, my last Paul Lindblad, the only remaining constant is his puzzled expression, which seems in the context of this card to be and perhaps to have always been a reaction to the inescapable impermanence of life.

In my first card of him, from 1975, he is shown looking clean-cut and puzzled after helping the A's win their third straight World Championship by posting the best ERA of his career, 2.06. Just below the stat line with that information is a (somehow fittingly) terse textual note further attesting to Paul Lindblad's capabilities: “Paul had 0.00 E.R.A. in 1973 series.”

I'm inclined to believe the effective middle reliever plied his trade with very little ego. A man who seems to be perpetually aware that a tornado could appear at any minute on the horizon and wipe out everything in its path certainly seems unlikely to display the air of complacent self-congratulation that supposedly has a tendency to infect members of a championship squad.

I wonder now if part of the puzzlement in his face was the result of an ongoing inner debate over whether to grow a mustache. By the time he started showing up in my collection, clean-shaven and puzzled, the hoopla that the act of growing a mustache might have once created was long gone. It had been three years since the A's broke the baseball facial hair line in 1972 after Reggie Jackson showed up at spring training with a beard. A's owner Charlie O. Finley, attempting to get Reggie to shave by making him feel less special, offered money to anyone on the squad who grew facial hair; they did, Finley found that he liked it, and the A's set a trend that soon began to spread face to face around the league. Not coincidentally, Paul Lindblad, after spending several years with the A's prior to 1972, had been toiling for the Rangers that pivotal year, and by the time he returned to the A's the hippie-lip revolution had already occurred. In fact, by 1975, players on most teams were busting out beards and mustaches, muttonchops and fu manchus. To have a mustache was no longer in any way a declaration of independence. It was merely a personal choice.

And this is exactly when the world got confusing. This is exactly when the 1970s truly became the Me Decade. Everyone was on their own to make their own choices about everything. Grow a mustache, don't grow a mustache. Do your own thing, don't do your own thing. Who cares? No one. You're on your own.

 

For most of that decade my father was a project leader on a sociological research team charged with a massive evaluation of the effects of city services on all levels of the population. He worked hard, quietly, selflessly. A Paul Lindblad type. He showed up everyday, benefitting
not only the project he was working on but also helping to feed much-needed money to the imperiled utopian dream of his distanced immediate family.

He wore a mustache for some of that decade. But this facial hair was never part of some rousing movement, large or small, like the swashbuckling 1972 A's or the “let that freak flag fly” hippies. I have sometimes thought of the mustache he wore during the 1970s as hair shrapnel, a fragment of the general hairiness of the culture of the time that seemed to have landed randomly on my dad's face. But he made a decision to grow a mustache, and he made it alone, and he wore the mustache for some years. And then, in another solitary decision, he chose to remove the mustache. I can see him shaving it off one evening in the bathroom of his apartment, then leaving the bathroom to unroll his foam sleeping mat on the floor below the one window, going to sleep, getting up the next day, and going to his job.

I don't know what he did beyond that. There were never any signs that he had a social life. During each of the yearly visits Ian and I made to see him in New York, there would always come a moment when he'd stare at us across the table of a Bun-N-Burger or Chock Full o' Nuts.

“How's your mom?” he would ask.

On some level I understood he was waiting for her, like an aging veteran who'd been demoted to the minors, hoping in spite of his ballooning ERA and diminishing innings for the call from the big club once again.

Once, not so long ago, I got him talking about those years. What got him through? We were out at a restaurant, a bottle of wine on the table, almost gone. He stared past me, a Lindbladian wince rippling momentarily across his features. He shook his head and his expression flattened.

“I absorbed myself in my work,” he said.

 

I absorbed myself in my cards. I absorbed myself in the sameness of them, even as the sameness began to show signs that it was an illusion.

By the time I got my penultimate Paul Lindblad card, in 1977, the clean-cut pitcher was still pictured in an Oakland A's uniform, left behind in the green and gold by most of his championship-winning teammates. The expression on his face in that card suggests that he senses the end in Oakland is coming for him too. By the time the
card came out, Paul Lindblad had been sold to the Texas Rangers.

And the next year, finally, Paul Lindblad was in a new uniform, far away from his normal team, far away from championships. Worst of all, he now had a mustache. The only remaining constant, his expression of melancholy confusion, was no longer the humorous center of comforting sameness but a jittery undertone revealing everything to be a temporary disguise.

Right around that time, funding was rescinded for the research project my father had absorbed himself in for several years. In such a world where the very ground can be pulled from beneath you, where your team can be taken away, where your family can be taken away, where the job that absorbs you can be lost, certain personal choices turn out to be all you really have left. They are the only things you can control. And yet, they are pointless, absurd. To grow a mustache or not to grow a mustache, that is the question. The implied answer—
What's the difference?
—lingers on the horizon like some kind of soundless cosmic tornado with the power to level your world.

I was walking to the general store one day to buy more baseball cards, and a girl who lived in a house on the way came out onto her lawn as I was passing by. Her name was Donna and she was a couple years older than me. It was a quiet summer day—the buzz of insects, my sneakers scuffling along in the gravel. That's about it. I must have been wearing my green little league cap, which I wore all the time.

“Hey,” Donna said. “Only faggots wear green on Thursday.”

 

Embarrassment. It was like a contagious disease in the 1970s. Call it the Age of Embarrassment. Everything was unfathomable, bulging, lopsided, upside down. The first president of the decade was revealed to be a paranoid criminal and had to quit, disgraced. He was replaced by a guy known for being ineffectual and tripping over things. The replacement lost his reelection bid to a peanut farmer who revealed more than anyone wanted to know in an interview in
Playboy
, admitting he had “lust in his heart.” Later, in a nationally televised speech, the embarrassingly frank president described America's “erosion of confidence”; in his estimation the whole country by the end of the 1970s was demoralized and ashamed, as if it were somehow channeling from sea to shining sea the cringe-shouldered stoop of a reedy-voiced chronic teenage masturbator.