The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife
by
Brad Balukjian

3 Stars

I was disappointed in The Wax Pack. It wasn’t that the book was bad; it was enjoyable enough. It’s just that I expected something very different, and something that I think would have been considerably more. The concept grabbed me as soon as I saw the book for the first time: open an old pack of baseball cards and then track down the players pictured to find out what their lives after baseball have been like. Unfortunately, there was far too much of the author’s own story and far too little of the players’ stories for my taste. There really wasn’t anything about Brad Balukjian that I was particularly interested in, but I really wanted to know a lot more about the players he managed to meet.

A refreshing take on nostalgia, baseball, fathers, children, motivation, and second chapters. In a really interesting conceit, the author opens a pack of 1986 baseball cards and tracks down every player in that pack. I probably opened several hundred packs of 1986 Topps cards, so this hit me right in the childhood feels. It was also interesting to see the themes that emerged across the different players: the importance of fathers (often more bad than good); the difficulty for many of stepping away from the game (what do you do when your life's dream is over in your 30s?); and the wide range of differences in passion and purpose across the former players. The range of players was interesting too, from superstars like Dwight Gooden, to journeymen and lesser stars like Don Carmen, Randy Ready, and Rance Mulliniks. And while it's something of a cliche to think that "stars are just like us," I really enjoyed the ways in which the players were humanized in ways fun (yoga! tinder! cards against humanity!) and not so fun (systematic racism, heart disease, substance abuse, divorce). At it's heart, this book is about how you react to the changes in your life and the life you build for yourself in your second (third, fourth, fifth) act.

This is an interesting premise. Take a random pack of unopened baseball cards and try to meet every player in the pack. 1986 Topps. 15 cards. One Hall of Famer, Carlton Fisk. One player who had the talent to be an all-time great, Dwight Gooden. Cy Young winner, Rick Sutcliffe. Garry Templeton and Vince Coleman, two guys who were minor stars for a short time. Then a bunch of journeymen, Rance Mullinicks, Jamie Cocanauer, Randy Ready, Richie Hebner, Gary Pettis, Lee Mazilli, Don Carmen, and Steve Yeager. Also in the pack was Al
Cowens who had already passed away a decade earlier.

Our protagonist sets off on his summer break to cross the country and racks up 9,000 miles or so. While the players all struggle to adapt to their post playing career, the author struggles with the meaning of his own life. Baseball is something he experienced with both parents. He went to games with dad and he went to baseball card shops with mom. The parents are now divorced, and the cards are in storage. He’s nearly 40 by all calculations with a respectable day job. This quest is an attempt to reconnect with his youth by connecting with these players as he only knew as pieces of cardboard.

The interviews with the ballplayers themselves are not memorable as I had hoped. It's not a Glory of Their Times approach where he gets the players talking about how the game has changed or what it was like hitting Blyleven’s curve or Ryan’s fast ball. It's more philosophical or psychological about how world class athletes are finished when half their lives have yet to be lived. How does one go on after the most substantial parts of life are complete? Each ballplayer has their unique take on retirement and yet there are common themes the author finds along the way, especially the importance of fathers. And you leave the book thinking the author's relationship with his own father is the better for it.

During the time of social distancing, what better book to read than one where an author hits the road to track down baseball players from a random pack of old cards? A strong personal narrative, a good group of players, and you have yourself a really interesting read.

A quirky, fun baseball travel book with a unique premise: The author opened a 30-year old wax pack of 1986 baseball cards with the intention of meeting and talking to each of the players who appeared in that randomly opened pack of 15 cards. One is deceased so he tries to track down the other 14 ex-big leaguers from the 1980's. One Hall of Famer, a couple of minor stars and a whole bunch of what baseball card collectors would call "commons," that is regular, journeyman-type ballplayers.

For me it was those journeyman type players I most enjoyed meeting in this book. How they grew up and got into the big leagues. How they left the game. What are they doing now.

A great read for the baseball fan, of course, but also for the more casual fans of the game.

Highly recommended!!

I miss sports. You miss sports. We all miss sports. Good news, there is a new book to make it better.

The Wax Pack is a new book from author Brad Balukjian. The concept for the book is a fun one. What happens when you open a pack of baseball cards and try to find every player in the pack and where they are now in life. I won't spoil it, but the results are super interesting.

Where this book really shines is when things get tough; both with Balukjian confronting his personal life/past and when some of the baseball players he tries to find dodge him or are unavailable. Both Balukjian's writing and his actions the story are the strongest when things aren't easy for him. The Wax Pack is just an excellent story of sports nostalgia and self discovery.

Final Score 4.75/5 Stars This is just an excellent book; especially now when everyone is missing sports. And yes...he eats the gum in the pack.

When I first heard about “The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball's Afterlife” by Brad Balukjian, my reaction was pure and basic: “God, that’s a f---ing good idea.”

Even after a decade-plus of literary reviews, I can count on one hand the times that I was legitimately envious of the idea behind a book. Not necessarily the best books or the most interesting books, but the ones with an underlying premise that spoke directly to me.

“The Wax Pack” is one of those.

Balukjian, a lifelong baseball fan, undertook a simple, yet deeply fascinating adventure. He bought a pack of Topps baseball cards from 1986, the year he got into collecting. He popped the decades-old gum into his mouth and flipped through the 15 cards, regaling himself with ghosts of seasons past. And then, he packed up his life and embarked on an epic road trip, a cross-country voyage in which he hoped to make contact with the players he found when he peeled the paper from the titular wax pack.

The result is something unexpected, a thoughtful exploration of fandom that also serves as a glimpse of the different directions a faded athlete might go. And in the process of delving into this sports-loving memory hole, Balukjian himself becomes more present, undertaking an effort to look back at his own history.

The names on the list run the gamut. There’s a Hall of Famer (catcher Carlton Fisk) and a handful of notable names (Dwight Gooden, Vince Coleman, Garry Templeton, Rick Sutcliffe), but for the most part, it’s a collection of … guys. Men who were good enough to make the major leagues, but who perhaps weren’t destined to be among the legends of the game. It’s a chance to check in on the post-playing careers of people who bade farewell to the only job they ever wanted, a chance to think about who they were then … and who they are now.

It is a chance, as former Deadspin editor David Roth would say, to Remember Some Guys.

The cards in the pack are as follows: Rance Mulliniks, Steve Yeager, Garry Templeton, Gary Pettis, Randy Ready, Jaime Cocanower, Carlton Fisk, Don Carman, Vince Coleman, Dwight Gooden, Lee Mazzilli, Richie Hebner, Rick Sutcliffe and the late Al Cowens (the fifteenth card was one of the dreaded checklist cards that no one ever wanted and that inevitably appeared in just about every pack you bought).

As you might imagine, my envy regarding this idea raised my expectations; I wanted this wonderful idea to come to fruition. Happily, Balukjian doesn’t disappoint, presenting this blend of baseball and personal history with charm and humor, all of it infused with a love of the game and more than a little well-placed self-deprecation.

Over the course of his weeks-long journey, Balukjian drives across the country, trying to make contact with as many of these players as possible. Some of these efforts were more fruitful than others, leading to experiences bordering on the surreal – hanging out with Yeager at the sandwich shop he owns, getting a hitting lesson from Mulliniks and (my personal favorite) watching kung-fu movies with Templeton. He even got a chance to talk to his childhood hero, pitcher Don Carman – and they went to the zoo, because of course they did.

Other encounters never happened, due to scheduling or other difficulties – Coleman never happened, for instance. Nor did Gooden. Meanwhile, the meet-up with Fisk – such as it was – ultimately took place in an autograph line at Cooperstown’s Hall of Fame Induction Weekend.

But the majority of these men were generous with their time, even as they were varying shades of nonplussed by the whole thing. They were thoughtful with their answers, expressing a degree of honesty regarding their lives both inside the game and in its aftermath. Some stayed connected to baseball, while others moved in different directions, but all spoke with warmth about their time in uniform.

(Note: Balukjian even spent some time with a couple of the folks who worked in the Topps factory during the time when the ’86 packs would have made its way down the line. Specifically, there was one worker who almost certainly handled the very pack that would become the foundation of this book.)

“The Wax Pack” is “On the Road,” only with a lot more baseball and a lot less self-seriousness. It is a story that is two trips in one – a present day road trip, a trip down memory lane – with baseball at its center. In a way, it’s a meditation on time and how we mark its passage, as well as a consideration of why we choose those specific markers.

For what it’s worth, my personal baseball card journey began just a year later than Balukjian’s – I started with the 1987 Topps, with the classic wood grain border. Those early entries led to a several-year stretch where I was obsessed with the hobby before moving on to other interests (though my love of the game stayed strong and remains so to this day). Still, the fascination with cards never fully faded. I even bought a box online a year or so back to take that walk down memory lane myself. And before you ask, the answer is yes – I ate the gum. It was gross.

So yes – I think this is a brilliant idea for a book. And with “The Wax Pack,” Brad Balukijian has realized that idea beautifully. Anyone who has ever had a love affair with baseball cards – or just baseball in general – is going to be simply enraptured by this book, transported to that time when there was no thrill greater than feeling that wax crinkle as a pack was unwrapped, the stack of cardboard within rife with seemingly infinite possibility.

THE WAX PACK, by Brad Balukjian, is a nostalgic trip to childhood (using a pack of cards) where something as simple as baseball can bring a child so much happiness. Balukjian uses baseball, but really the book is about discovering the inner happiness children discover and hold onto as they mature into adulthood.
Bakuljian uses the pack of 1986 Topps cards as his premise to search for these men who had varying levels of success in baseball. As Balukjian meets these men, he starts to connect to them in different ways. Many of them had to be superfocused on their career and talent in order to succeed which parallels several of the hurdles that Balukjian had to overcome. Relationships varied from strained to idyllic which is similar to Balukjian romantic struggles. Balukjian writes from a very emotionally connected place and while I'm sure his interaction with these men was edited down to the best parts, Balukjian seemed to be infiltered and raw when talking about his own life. Putting all of that deeper stuff aside, the journal log of his escapades in finding (or not finding) these guys is wonderful entertainment. The failures are just as fund to read about as the successes.
A great ride along with a man driven by a purpose, THE WAX PACK reminds the reader that whether you were a baseball nut as a kid or had some other healthy attachment to a activity or TV show or person or whatever, that rekindling that attachment, even just for a little while, can still bring us joy and reminds us what makes us feel good inside.

This book is a combination of baseball history, travelogue, and memoir. The starting point is simple, Balukjian bought an unopened pack of baseball cards from 1986, the height of his childhood collecting passion. In the summer of 2015, he traveled the country talking to the players on the cards.

The first-person encounters with the players were interesting, but the travelogue and the memoirs while they do serve to hold the book together, just weren't that interesting.

I love books involving people who feel compelled to go on arbitrary adventures. Danny Wallace specialised in this area with his books Yes Man and Join Me amongst others. Last year I really enjoyed Europe United by Matt Walker which involved a quest to visit a soccer match in every UEFA country.

The Wax Pack is Brad Balukjian account of tracking down all of the players whose baseball cards were in a particular pack of 1986 Topps baseball cards some 30 years later. Balukjian travels across the USA to track down the players who range from Hall of Fame players to 10 year journeymen to players who spent only a very short time in the Major Leagues.

Each player gets a chapter as Balukjian managed to spend time with almost all of them. Even where Balukjian doesn’t get to meet the player, he recounts his odyssey to find them One refuses to talk despite Balukjian showing up at the ballpark where he was working as third base coach. The other, Carlton Fisk the most famous player in the The Wax Pack, is in the midst of descending back into addiction.

The Wax Pack becomes a unique and fascinating insight into what happens players when they retire. The random nature of the players he follows ensures an interesting diversity. It also becomes a reflection on father-son relationships as each of the players recounts their own, often troubled, relationships with their fathers and also with their own children.

The book and trip are deeply personal for Balukjian. At times there is definitely some oversharing and unnecessary details about the minutiae of the trip. However there are a couple of very funny stories from Balukjian’s own adolescence which had me laughing out loud. As the trip progresses the book becomes more and more a soul-searching journey for the author. Along the way he meets his ex, reconnects with his father, visits his childhood hero and tries to find love. Ultimately, the book feels more authentic for how personal it is.

I really enjoyed the book which exceed all of my expectations. Balukjian is an interesting character and he has done a great job to get such fascinating insight from the players he meets.

Brad Balukjian has delivered the first great baseball title of the new decade with his wonderful book, The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball's Afterlife.

Balukjian had a simple idea- open a single pack of 1986 Topps baseball cards (the first year he remembers collecting) and track down the players on the cards he finds inside. Having an idea is half of the equation, but he follows through by executing it brilliantly.

Continuing in the spirit of baseball adventures like Joe Posnanski's The Soul of Baseball, we follow Balukjian from his home base in Northern California as he drives east across the United States and then back home again in tracing the path he mapped out to connect with the players he found in his special pack of cards. The pack was a mix of solid major leaguers, stars, and short timers, but there are common threads that run through the journey of each player through childhood to the major leagues and beyond. His journey includes meeting players in public spaces, meeting them at their homes, joining one's family for a holiday celebration, and an interesting encounter with an uncooperative Hall of Famer. Whether the player agreed to meet with Brad or not, he gets the full treatment from early life to present day.

More than just a baseball book, The Wax Pack is an open and honest reflection on the author's own life, with introspection regarding mental health, love & loss, and family dynamics . In the midst of a journey to visit the hometowns and explore the backgrounds of a handful of former major leaguers, he also revisits sites and people important to him personally.

I read a lot of books and a lot of baseball books, and The Wax Pack is instantly one of my favorites. I cannot recommend it highly enough or widely enough. Thanks to NetGalley for providing an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed “The Wax Pack” and the search made by the author for the players in the pack. I thought that he did an excellent job of humanizing the players and showing how baseball may be how we remember them, but they’ve still got a lot of life to live after they stop playing. It was fascinating to see the different paths that each player took to even make it to the major leagues, and how their paths diverged after retiring as well. Again, it served to show the players as complete people as opposed to a collection of statistics on a baseball card. In a way, this was just a baseball centric version of Sports Illustrated’s “Where Are They Now?” yearly feature, but presented in an different and entertaining way. The fact that some of the players weren’t famous and wouldn’t have been on my radar as a fan was a big part of the enjoyment of the book. I did appreciate the author trying to bring himself into the book to make it connect more personally, but I felt those parts often fell flat and seemed to drag the pace of the book. I also wish he had given us more about the Topps factory and the workers there. Maybe that’s a book for another time.

Overall, very enjoyable and recommended for baseball fans.

The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife. By Brad Balukjian. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. 280 pages.

The Wax Pack is a high-concept book for baseball fans. In 2015, Brad Balukjian, a natural history professor at Merritt College in Oakland, he bought a random unopened package of 1986 Topps baseball cards on eBay and spent his summer trying to track down the 14* players lying underneath the bubblegum. In 49 days, Balukjian put 11,341 miles on his 2002 Honda and fueled himself with 123 cups of coffee.

Balukjian chose 1986 because it evoked fond childhood memories of enjoying baseball with his father. Twenty-nine years later, the 34-year-old Balukjian was single, renting a room in Oakland, and in therapy for OCD and emotional issues. His coast-to-coast-to coast baseball journey took on a second life of sorting out his own life. His Topps pack included–in the order Balukjian discusses them–Rance Mulliniks, Steve Yeager, Gary Templeton, Gary Pettis, Randy Ready, Don Carman, Jamie Cocanower, Carlton Fisk, Vince Coleman, Lee Mazzilli, Doc Gooden, Richie Hebner, Rick Sutcliffe, and Al Cowens.

Balukjian bookends his sojourn with stories gathered in Duryea, Pennsylvania, where Topps cranked out 170 packs of cards per minute before closing the plant in 1996. Mary Lou Gula missed the steady employment and comradery at Topps, though it was hot, hard work. It’s not easy starting over when you’ve doing something for a long time. Balukjian wanted to learn if that was also true for the faces on the cards.

Getting to the major league usually entails devoting one’s youth to endless hours of playing, practicing, and attending coaching clinics. Those who become prospects spend around four years in the minor leagues, and just one in 33 will make it to the majors. Even then, the average career is less than 6 years; most players retire in their 30s. What one does for the next 30-plus years? What kind of person does one become once the cheering ends?

One revelation is that there is generally a reverse correlation between being a great player and a good human being. Jaime Cocanower, for example, grew up in Panama and lasted just three years in the majors. He now lives in Arizona with his wife, a teacher who works with Asperger kids. Cocanower experienced few problems with walking away.

Professional baseball is notoriously hard on marriages–especially for players from dysfunctional birth families. “Boomer” Yeager was tightlipped about his unhappy childhood, but you don’t need a degree in psychology to imagine how it contributed to two collapsed marriages and struggles with alcohol abuse. Rance Mulliniks also divorced before he finally found peace in not being the center of attention. Most of the players in Balukjian’s wax pack divorced at least once.

Cocanower is an outlier in severing ties to baseball. Rick Sutcliffe had an afterlife in broadcasting, Yeager as a coach for the Dodgers, Gary Pettis with the Astros, Richie Hebner with the Blue Jays, and Lee Mazzilli with both the Mets and Yankees. Balukjian’s boyhood idol, Phillies pitcher Don Carman, became a sports psychologist who works for superagent Scott Boras.

Wax packers Carlton Fisk and Doc Gooden milked their fame while showing little respect for the fans who idolized them. Balukjian observes that Fisk, “never won any nice guy awards.” He comes across as a prima donna and world-class jerk. His agent claims Fisk is a private man, which begs questions of why someone wishing anonymity needs an agent, or why he agrees to act chummy with anyone who pays for an autograph.

The most direct way of describing Gooden is that he is simply bad news. Through his son, he extorted hundreds of dollars from Balukjian for an interview he never intended to give. Gooden is a junkie who has been arrested for everything from DUI and domestic abuse to child endangerment and cocaine possession.

The wild card in the wax pack is Balukjian’s attempt to connect with other black players. Gary Templeton was extremely open about being the “black kid” who refused to “kiss white butt." He accused his former manager Whitey Herzog of living down to his name, and cited racism to explain why the percentage of black major leaguers has fallen from 18 percent in 1976 to just 7.2 percent. Balukjian positions Templeton as a complex and misunderstood man whose pride was never broken.

On the other hand, neither Pettis nor Vice Coleman would speak to Balukjian, moments that provide space for Balukjian to discuss his own demons or speculate about non-present subjects. Often, these breaks are book-within-a-book digressions that weaken the book’s coherence. Plus, should someone in therapy try to psychoanalyze others? Vince Coleman’s run-ins with the law are fair game, but few fans would agree with Balukjian’s assessment that Coleman was “a pretty mediocre player” whose sole attraction was base-stealing. Coleman played for 12 years and was a career .264 hitter. That’s solid, even if not earth-shattering.

The book is much stronger when Balukjian immerses himself in the hometowns of the players. Al Cowens died in 2002, and Balukjian visited Compton and elicited remembrances from community and family members. Especially moving was Balukjian’s trip to Carman’s boyhood home of Camargo, Oklahoma, a dead oil-patch outpost now defined by crystal meth and low aspirations. Carman left it behind, a reminder that professional sports are often a one-way escape from nowhere. Metaphorically speaking, that’s a much longer journey than 49 days crisscrossing America.

Rob Weir

* Normally there are 15 player cards, but one card was a checklist.

I really enjoyed this book. Many other reviewers have already presented what the book is about so let me share my review a little differently. I had just finished Cardboard Gods by Josh Wilker which I really enjoyed as well and this book felt a little similar and enough different to keep it interesting and one that I recommend.

You get to learn about 14 random players who were in the 1986 pack of cards that the author opened and seeks out roughly 30 years later via a roadtrip to spend a day with to learn what they are up to and how their life has gone. Also, you get to learn a little bit about the author, and you get to learn a little bit about life.

If you were or are a collector of baseball cards and loved learning about the players in the packs of cards you opened, if you have interest in mid-1980's baseball, if you want to learn more about players life after baseball, or if you really want to settle into reading about an awesome road trip, you will most likely enjoy this book.

At ~280 pages it is a quick, good read!! Go for it!

What a fantastic idea for a book. This brings back memories of opening the wax packs when I was a kid, knowing all the players, and everything (according to the card) about them. Fun following up with all of these guys year later, and a great road trip story as well

"The Wax Pack" starts with an interesting concept from an unusual baseball author.

Brad Balukjian doesn't have the standard biography. He has a Ph.D. in entomology from the University of California at Berkeley, and currently teaches biology at Merritt College in Oakland, California.

Balukjian admits he's always been a bit of a nerd, probably in part because he's been diagnosed with OCD. He's been a baseball fan for much of his life, and had the thought of seeing what some of his childhood heroes are like now.

Here's the concept - he bought an unopened pack of baseball cards from 1986, opened them up, and tried to figure out a way to meet everyone in that particular pack. Balukjian admits he actually bought a few different selections and picked one, if only so that most of the guys on the cards were still alive about 30 years later.

The 15 cards became 14 players, thanks to the inclusion of a checklist. Balukjian hopped in his car and drove across the country and back to chase them down. The list included everyone from Carlton Fisk to Jamie Cocanower, which you must admit covers a wide range of talents and careers. Al Cowens was the only one of the 14 who has passed away, and Balukjian checks in with a family member and a gravesite there. The author also looks up his favorite player of all time, Don Carman, as well as an old girlfriend and his father along the way as well. When you can see middle age, as Balukjian was at the time this was researched, you start feeling a little more nostalgic.

Balukjian takes a different approach than most journalists would use. He's more interested in the roots of the players and how they are handling life after retirement from playing than the details of their careers themselves. At the front end, he discovers several who came from divorced families, perhaps showing that athletics can be a refuge for the kids in such situations. There was still plenty of games of catch along the way between fathers and sons, though. At the other end, a good-sized number stayed close to the game.

Balukjian makes a a not unexpected but interesting discovery along the way - the level of cooperation to the idea is more or less inverse to the level of stardom that the player obtained. In other words, Cocanower couldn't have been nicer, inviting the writer to the house for a July 4 picnic. Meanwhile, Fisk was totally uncooperative, and Balukjian ended up getting into something of a shouting match with Fisk's agent over the phone. Rick Sutcliffe, a former Cy Young Award winner and television analyst, scores points as the most down to earth of the bigger names of the 14. Good for him. Vince Coleman never was located and Gary Pettis wasn't allowed to do interviews in his role as a coach for the Astros. No one said meeting everyone in the pack was going to be easy.

With that covered, the key question remains: Does it work? That may depend on your viewpoint, Mr. or Ms. Reader.

It's interesting to read about the players who were willing to sit down and talk at length about their lives. They all have a story to tell, partly because they are exceptional simply to play in the major leagues (and, of course, be on the front of a baseball card). But at times this has something of a "What I did on my summer vacation" feel to it. It's more of a journal of the trip, and the personal side of it gives this a less-than-traditional tone.

The early reviews of this book have been rather glowing. Even George Will was willing to supply some happy words for the sake of publicity. I'm not quite ready to go that far. The book held my interest, but I'm not sure I'll remember much beyond the idea for any length of time - well, except about Fisk's prickly personality.

You might find Balukjian better reading company for a long trip like this than I did. Therefore, by all means feel free to take a look at "The Wax Pack." If you like the concept, you'll be willing to go for the full ride.

First of all, I’m definitely the ideal audience for Wax Packs. I am a diehard baseball fan who collected thousands of cards in the ‘80s, and 1986 was the year I graduated from high school. I remember watching all of these players, and I was curious to learn about their lives after the majors. I really enjoyed tagging along for the cross country adventure. But I could never quite figure out what the main thread was. Was it a road trip or a nostalgia trip? Was he more interested in where they came from or what came after baseball?

I was hoping to hear more about how the Wax Packers viewed the game in retrospect. I wanted to know more about why some walked away, some stayed close to the game, and for others it was complicated. Would do they do anything differently? Do they appreciate the game today? I don’t expect them to be fans, but I liked it when their opinions were expressed. I wanted to know less about the author’s romantic dalliances. Much less.

Since I feel like it is fans near my age and level of enthusiasm for the game who are the market for the book, I wish it had delved more deeply into their stories. Too often a brief anecdote led to some sweeping conclusion. “Jaime Cocanower was too smart, too timid, too nice for baseball.” “Randy is not afraid. All his life he’s been dealt a five of clubs…” I would have liked to have had a thicker description that showed this more than declarative statements that seem to stretch beyond what the reader has actually seen. The author talked about the “unexpected thrills” of watching kung fu with Templeton and playing Cards against Humanity with Cocanower, but I wanted to hear more about those experiences as they unfolded rather than characterizations.

I was grateful for the epilogue, because more than once I felt like the trip was already long enough ago that I wondered how much might be out of date. And while the focus of the writing confused me sometimes, it could also be delightful, e.g. the Oakland Coliseum as “postapocalyptic crated ringed with hot dog stands.”

All in all, it was like stumbling on a family reunion you didn’t know was happening, with a cast of characters both familiar and distant. A little weird to see who showed up here, but still glad to have made the trip.

I love the cover of The Wax Pack. Definitely brings back memories of opening up baseball cards and chewing that horrible gum. Brad opens a pack of 1986 Topps baseball cards and takes us on his road trips to learn what each of the players in the pack have done in their lives since the cards were printed .Brad's interviews and writing style are interesting and fun to read. We'll be buying a copy for our library.

Brad Balukjian collected baseball cards during that brief period in the eighties and early nineties before the hobby was ruined by corporate greed and the runaway speculation fever amongst collectors that largely turned collecting baseball cards into something akin to a Ponzi scheme or a game of musical chairs in which the real loser was whoever ended up holding the most cards when the mania stopped. Balukjian, though, came up with a brilliant way to put one random 1986 Topps wax pack to work for him.

He turned the fifteen baseball cards, and the certain-to-be-brittle piece of bubblegum, that came inside that old wax pack into a baseball fan’s dream road trip. The author’s plan was to visit (and interview) all fifteen of the players so that he could write a book (this one) about what life is like for baseball players when their careers, however brief some of them may be, are over and they have to return to life in the real world. The fifteen cards Balukjian pulled from the pack included a couple of superstars (Dwight Gooden and Carlton Fisk), several other relatively big-name players, a few who had to work extra hard even to stay in the big leagues, and one deceased player. Hoping to snag interviews with all fourteen of the remaining possibilities, Balukjian plotted his course and set out in his old Honda to see what would happen.

And what happened was, for the most part, beautiful.

Gooden and Fisk would turn out to be the biggest challenges for Balukjian, no surprise there. The surprises would come instead from the open friendliness of some of the other players and their families, a willingness to share their stories with an unknown young author that caught Balukjian so totally off-guard he sometimes felt like pinching himself to make sure that it was all really happening. There were other challenges along the way, but Balukjian was remarkably successful in snagging interviews with some of his old boyhood heroes – and even got to play catch, get batting instruction, or lift weights with some of them as they showed him around their old hometowns. Most of the ex-players are doing pretty well these days. Some have turned into real family men, some are still coaching or managing in the minor or major leagues, and one or two of them still hold grudges from their playing days.

Bottom Line: The Wax Pack is a special treat for baseball fans who still remember the excitement of opening up a pack of Topps baseball cards to see what was inside. The experience was a little like Christmas morning in the summertime because you never knew what red-hot rookie or star might turn up in one of those little fifteen-card packages. And at those prices, you could do it all season long. Despite one or two sad stories, and a couple of near-miss encounters Balukjian recounts in The Wax Pack, this is the kind of feel-good book about ballplayers that fans will enjoy reading. They may even learn something about the inner workings of the game they didn’t know.

Balukjian's premise (opening a pack of 1986 baseball cards and then tracking down all of the players) is clever in its simplicity, but an ultimately fascinating look at reality versus perception, especially when the latter is weighted with nostalgia. After all, the former players are just people, granted, people gifted with specific extraordinary talent, but people who have lived most of their lives outside the context of that talent. Definite recommendation for baseball fans, especially fans familiar with the players covered.

My only criticism is that the author shared too much intimate information. While a personal connection tot he writer is necessary to the story, as it is in any quest, some of the more personal details felt out of place.