Monday, April 09, 2007

i remember 1992

ESPN.com - McAdam: Young Bucs giving Pittsburgh a reason to believe

i remember 1992, the last season the pittsburgh pirates posted a winning record. i was a kid in the northern panhandle of west virginia then; that was the summer we moved from the little town of chester (pop. 3000) to the "big city" of wheeling (pop. 30,000), both to get away from a waste incinerator that had been built across the river and to allow my sister and i to go to the Linsly school in wheeling. the pirates were a big deal for me then; they had an amazing team, featuring not just the stellar Barry Bonds in his true 300-30-30-100-100 prime, but also Andy Van Slyke, as the article notes, and the then-rookie knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, whom the article omits.

i was a baseball card collector then, like any good 11 year old boy. but, presaging later in life in other contexts, i was a few years behind the times, and baseball cards were being overproduced (both in numbers and in flashy graphics) and were no longer very valuable or interesting. i clung strongly to the few older cards i accumulated, and to the few rookie cards that i bothered to mail to the players to have signed and returned. and then, a year later, in the summer of 1993, i left my few favorite cards behind by accident when i moved out after a summer geometry class at the Center for Talented Youth in baltimore. we went back a few hours later, before we left town, but the cleaning crews had come through, and i never saw them again.

i'd like to say that this incident had a transformative effect on me, something about not growing too attached to material goods, or appreciating the transience of value in general. but i doubt it. i think there's a box in my parents' garage somewhere with the remnants of my baseball card collection. if they didn't toss it when they moved from wheeling down to sunny st. augustine, florida. but, if they did throw it out, i can't say that i would mind much. and i'll always have the memories.

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