Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards

by Josh Wilker

Cardboard Gods is the memoir of Josh Wilker, a brilliant writer who has marked the stages of his life through the baseball cards he collected as a child. It also captures the experience of growing up obsessed with baseball cards and explores what it means to be a fan of the game. Along the way, as we get to know Josh, his family, and his friends, we also get Josh’s classic observations about the central artifacts from his life: the baseball cards themselves. Josh writes about an imagined correspondence with his favorite player, Carl Yastrzemski; he uses the magical bubble-blowing powers of journeyman Kurt Bevacqua to shed light on the weakening of the powerful childhood bond with his older brother; he considers the doomed utopian back-to-the-land dreams of his hippie parents against the backdrop of inimitable 1970s baseball figures such as “Designated Pinch Runner” Herb Washington and Mark “The Bird” Fidrych. Cardboard Gods is more than just the story of a man who can’t let go of his past, it’s proof that — to paraphrase Jim Bouton — as children we grow up holding baseball cards but in the end we realize that it’s really the other way around.

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Audiobook, Autobiography

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Brad Herzog · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an author of creative nonfiction, I occasionally come across examples of the genre and think, "Man, I wish I would have written that." THE KNOW-IT-ALL by AJ Jacobs (about his mission to read the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica) was certainly one of those books. Brilliantly funny. CARDBOARD GODS is another. I bought the book for the concept -- using baseball cards to tell the story of childhood angst and exploration. Great idea. But I'm writing this rare (for me) review because I just LOVED the way that concept played out. Josh Wilker really knows how to extrapolate profundity from the seemingly mundane, how to turn a 3-page essay into a story that touches the soul, how to turn a phrase as smoothly as Trammell and Whitaker used to turn the double play. Reading CARDBOARD GODS was like watching Greg Maddux pitch, like watching Carew wield a bat. Sure, I was a 1970s baseball card collector,too, and I got a kick out seeing those names and faces -- Ivan Dejesus! Biff Pocoroba! Kurt Bevacqua! -- that were such a vivid part of my childhood. But this book is a very adult reminiscence. And it is written beautifully. So for me, there was some envy and surprise involved in the reading. It was an unexpected home run -- sort of the way Wilker must have felt when Bucky Dent took his infamous swing...

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Let me preface this review by stating that during my youth, I was obsessed with baseball cards. I understand. I am part of the fraternity.

Needless to say, when I stumbled upon this book (after reading a Ben Tanzer review on Goodreads) I was excited. The reviews were outstanding. And then I opened the book.

This book is little more than a gimmick, and like all gimmicks, it wore thin quickly. When the novelty has expired, there needs to be something more. While Josh's writing is peppered with angst and depression, it is lacking something substantial.

Unremarkable people have no business writing unremarkable memoirs about their unremarkable lives. I believe that one of the motivating forces preventing me from pitching this into the fire was the expectation that something was bound to happen. Surely, no one would have published the adolescent ramblings of a moderately well adjusted child from a typical American broken home. They did.

I gave this book two stars. Two or three of the ancedotes from Josh's later years were entertaining. I particularly enjoyed his musings on Doc Ellis' acid laced no hitter. When given something to write about, Josh executes. My belief is that he would probably be a gifted sports writer. Unfortunately, his life [thus far] is not worthy of 200+ pages.

This is a coffee table book. It is enjoyable to flip through. You can read most of the "chapters" in under 5 minutes.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the book but I didn’t feel it was as good as it could have been. I enjoyed the observations of the old baseball cards and the author’s comments on the players. Beware thought that the book is more about the author and less about the players and the cards.
And that’s ok but wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. I felt like toward the end of the book the author maybe got a little tired of writing and decided to wrap it up a little too quickly.

[Dani Shuping · Rating 3 out of 5]

Couple of things right off the bat:
1) This is NOT a book about baseball cards or how to collect them or anything like that
2) This book is a memoir of the author
3) Recommended ages for this book 16+

With that out of the way...I've collected baseball cards for over 25 years now so when I saw this book and saw images of baseball cards from the 70's and 80's throughout the book I was excited. I thought "Here's a book that's going to talk about how collecting cards influenced the writer's life" or how it impacted his life in some amazing way and that each of the cards had some great significance. But...honestly I was left disappointed. Yes baseball card's were a major part of his life and was one of the ways the writer connected with his brother and at some points the cards did have an impact in his life. But, often times it felt like the card chosen was tacked on to the story and really had no bearing. Even worse this story was, I don't want to say boring, but it was depressing. It seems like he didn't really have any happy moments growing up. He was called names constantly, his family life was weird, he and his brother didn't always get along, and on and on. Even moments that should have been happy, such as going to a concert, become depressing because a) they didn't really know anything about the guy playing and b) they didn't realize that there was an act beforehand the main guy and left before he ever came on.

Honestly I wish I could have liked this book. I even tried picking it up on different days in hopes that I just wasn't in the right mindset when I started...but the feeling didn't change. The book, while well written, is just depressing to me. It is a creative way to tell a memoir, using baseball cards as the starting points for the chapters, but it just doesn't work for me. Perhaps it will for others though.

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It is, refreshingly, utterly without pretense. The author has such an authentic, humble, and honest voice that he simultaneously manages both gritty realism and vulnerable eloquence. Even if it wasn't about baseball and baseball cards, it would have been worth the read for the moving personal and family narrative (the only time I have ever cried while reading a book came during the brilliant final three pages of this book). But then again, his personal and family narrative could not have been told without baseball and baseball cards, and that is part of the point. Now I admit, as someone who also grew up in rural Vermont, and whose childhood also revolved around all things having to do with baseball, little-league, the Red Sox and baseball card collecting, I felt at times as though I was reliving my own mental journal from over a decade ago. While Wilker is older than me (his prime baseball card years were 1975 - 1980 and mine were 1989 - 1993), I was still part of that last generation of boys who could go to their local general store (mine was in Fairlee, VT, his in Randolph, VT) and buy packs of baseball cards with powdery sticks of stale gum inside. Our favorite cards and favorite players are different (more than once I found myself pondering which cards I would include in my own narrative were I to copy Wilker's project) but I nevertheless felt a strong connection from our shared mania and addiction, not to mention our shared home state and current occupation. If you are reading this Josh (I know from personal experience that some authors read their goodreads reviews!), thank you, thank you, thank you for writing this book.

[Mike Kennedy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book, and it just didn't deliver. The premise of the book was pretty cool, telling his story through baseball cards. Two problems with this idea. One about half of the stories didn't seem to represent the cards he chose. It almost felt like he forced the stories to mesh with the baseball cards. The second problem is that his life doesn't seem worthy of a book. I kept waiting for some great wrap up to make it all worthwhile. It just never seemed to happen. I'll give Josh credit as he did a great job painting a picture of what was going on. The problem was it was boring. About the only interesting thing about his life was for a while he lived in a house with three parents. I was cool how he talked about the different cards, and it brought me back to my own days of collectIng cards. I just wish this was a more interesting story.

[Jay French · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of my favorite books is about baseball cards – “The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading And Bubblegum Book”. In that book, the author shows baseball cards from his youth with a pithy paragraph or more of writing about the card, the player, the name, the pose, what the card makes him remember, …those kinds of things. It is very funny and I felt a kinship with the author in the way I bonded with my baseball cards, although mine were a few decades newer. In “Cardboard Gods”, Josh Wilker takes this concept into the eighties era of cards, while combining it with his autobiography of growing up. I really enjoyed his takes on baseball cards. He captured the fun of the earlier book and you can tell he had an intense interest in his cards when younger. His life story, though, is one with a lot of … not so much hardship but negativeness, and with a little humor thrown in. Wilker writes about getting hit a lot, then about doing drugs a lot. The story does have its “sweet” moments, often about his relationship with his brother after their school years, and a few funny anecdotes, like his first rock concert with his classical music-loving father, and cheering for Carl Yastrzemski. He writes himself as a sometimes likable, though often clueless, victim. By far the best parts of the book are relating to baseball and baseball cards, and had the author focused there, I’d have liked the book much more. This is the second book I’ve read by Wilkers where he mashes up sports with a downbeat take on his own life. I wonder what he could do focusing on one or the other.

[bamlinden · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this book to read because of my love for sports cards and my memories of cards as a kid. In fact, I remember owning some of the cards depicted in this book.

But the more I got into this read, the more I became disconnected with the writer, the dialogue and the cards that were referenced.

This book felt more like a fictional tale than the story of someone's life growing up in a dysfunctional family environment. The author's experiences in school, sports, work and recreation just didn't do enough to make me care. The more I read....the more I saw this book as narrated by a fictional person.

Now that might be unfair (since Josh Wilker does actually exist) but I just didn't feel like there was enough within these pages to make me really feel the few high highs and the numerous low lows. Sadly, I just didn't care.

And yes there was a good deal of angst, confusion, frustration, indecision, struggle and reprieve. But there was also a great deal of "I don't care". The author's struggle with taking charge of his own life.....caring, made me not care. How can I get behind someone who doesn't want to get behind himself?

The one (convenient) thread that I did enjoy was the kingpin of cards in his collection - Carl Yastrzemski. What started out innocently and with care came to a nice conclusion.

I think Josh's writing style worked for this book and I did enjoy it for that. But in the end, the overall story didn't tug at me as much as it seems to for others.

[L · Rating 1 out of 5]

Won a First Reads copy.... and couldn't even finish it. I seem to be in the minority on this, but I really could not get into this book at all. I don't understand the recent trend of personal memoirs from people who haven't led particularly memoir-worthy lives. A regular person who's had an extraordinary job or been in an exceptionally odd set of circumstances or has an interesting or funny or engaging writing style can make it work, but this is just a book about a regular guy and his angst-filled childhood. The ploy of including baseball cards and anecdotes about baseball players to tie into his life does not make his stories more interesting.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

The greatest baseball card memoir I've ever read. Also, the only baseball card memoir I've ever read. In Cardboard Gods, Josh Wilker tells the story of his childhood through his baseball card collection. In surprisingly poignant and heartfelt vignettes, Wilker chooses a childhood card and lets it be the springboard for his reminiscences on growing up in Vermont in the 70s. He makes many wonderful and surprising connections between the players on the cards and the era he grew up in. Towards the end he loses the thread a little bit and things feel somewhat rushed, but overall this was a highly enjoyable read.

[Ben]

A triumphant exploration of childhood, pop culture, the last third of the last century, and the start of the new one, rooting for the Boston Red Sox and the birth of the writer through his youthful obsession with all things baseball card, the players, both obscure and star, their stats and back stories, and the endless hopes, needs, and anxieties we can project onto an object of desire.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

What started as a somewhat interesting exercise in memoir whereupon the author uses his collection of baseball cards from the mid-to-late-70s to relive his unconventional childhood quickly turned into a long slog through his and his brother's unremarkable and rather feckless adulthood.

Neither the life nor the prose justify the interesting premise.

[Caleb Wills · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was more depressing than watching your dog die.

[Fred · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is some kind of genius. The premise seems simple -- a memoir told through baseball cards. It sounds wistful but the narrative is much more complex and thoughtful than simply remembering the good ol' days when such cards were "a big deal." There are books about growing up in the 70s that are largely nostalgia and, when they are well written, like Steve Rushin's "Stingray Afternoons," it is a wonderful ride. But Josh Wilker's book is much more than fond remembrances. His baseball cards were one of his main coping devices in navigating childhood pain, disappointment, fear and shame. The stories he shares are real, and they hit hard because the peer pressure and childhood cruelties are banal and ordinary and yet no less painful for that. Wilker's parents experimented with a crazy open-kind-of-marriage that only made sense in the 70s and was part of a larger post hippy dream of living authentically. Walker understands the dreams that drove his parents and "step father" (it's complicated) but the effect was disastrous for the children. This is not a book about blaming but a re-telling. Wilkins is grateful to his cards for saving him and focusing his attention. Finding them again after a decade of uneasy adulthood becomes part of putting his life together and moving forward. I loved this book.

[Chad · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is sure to be an instant classic. The nostalgia it triggers is a fun trip through memory lane. Any kid that ever bought a pack of baseball cards can surely relate. Though the years and sets that Wilker collected were a decade earlier than mine, our experiences are so closely relatable that its almost a bit creepy.

This guy brings back a purpose for all the "commons." His story about the various cards and players was done so well. I never thought I would learn so much about Tom Seaver or Bucky Dent.

The Buster Olney "cameo" was a nice surprise. Though I think I could beat him in wiffle ball.

I did not care for the way too detailed masturbation scenes and I am still not sure how that fits in a book about baseball cards. I guess it just represents the coming of age experiences of a teenage boy.

I loved the days catching the bus out to the various card shops. Mowing lawns all morning Saturday to get enough money for bus fare and some wax packs is probably the quintessential defining moments of my childhood. Waiting around by the bid boards hoping to be the winning bidder for the Ken Griffey Jr Rookie card, spending way too much money on my favorite player Will Clark and having to own every card ever made of him, and trading 2 common cards for 1 to complete the sets. Those were the days.

[jesse patton · Rating 4 out of 5]

As an avid baseball card collector, I was intrigued by this book. At times, it was full of interesting memories of a young boy escaping his sometimes chaotic life through the simple joy of opening a fresh pack of baseball cards and biting into the stale stick of bubblegum contained inside. For me, these memories were where the book really shined.

However, as the author began talking about his older years he delved with full detail into his adolescence and his angsty teenage years and early adulthood. He mostly forgot about baseball cards during this time, both in real life and in written form as the chapters seemed to be more Wilker's (mis)adventures than baseball cards.

Overall a very interesting approach to a memoir that is well done. The picture of old cards at the beginning of each chapter added a touch.

[Steve Wilhoit · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have certainly not read a book quite like this before. The baseball references were, to me, wonderfully amazing as the author described things in a way which hadn't been articulated in print before.

Some of the issues Mr. Wilker made mirrored unexplained feelings I had experienced in life. Did his sharing help me come-to-terms with issues which have stuck around in my subconscious? I would say yes, to know some things I felt were not isolated to just my personal experiences.

Some of the subject matter and language, though honest and sporadic, did make me uncomfortable to see it documented in print, the only reason I didn't give this five stars (and that's just a personal preference issue, not a criticism).

The baseball cards shown, the games experienced, for better or worse in their perceptions were so intriguing to me. In short, I could relate to so much that's here.

[zxvasdf · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I got Cardboard Gods in the mail, I loved the feel of its almost rough covers in my hands, found the thick bond with intervals of brightly coloured vintage photographs of baseball cards pleasing to my eyes. It was then I immediately regretted throwing in my lot in the book drawing. Baseball?! What did I know about baseball, other than it was one of the most boring sports to watch on TV, second only to golf? I reluctantly gave it a try.

Josh Wilker is a talented very writer, despite any personal doubts you find he might possess. In reference to Cardboard Gods, the word "nostalgic" might seem overused, but there is no other word that describes this as it is. You don't need to know baseball, have a brother, or born to hippie parents to feel Josh's words resonate within your breast. The portrait of himself, naive and socially clumsy, might as well have been you, never mind the decade. You escaped into your books, your video games, or your idiosyncratics, like Josh found solace in his cards.

Sad at moments, when a young Josh is repeatedly confounded by life and half understood precepts, forced to endure the confusion of adults and a drifting sibling. It is a loss of innocence, a relinquishing of cherished values for meaningless gestures. It is a sad and gradual uncoupling of childhood. You swallow a lump in your throat whenever the young Josh beseeches into the darkness, grasping for what turns over in the night: "Ian? Hey, Ian?"

It is also hilarious, like when you read about Josh trying to understand masturbation as per a hippie sex ed book for children, or when the brothers share real and uncomplicated laughter that makes you want to join in, whatever the reason. Chuckles escape your lips at a father's instinctive reaction to a Ted Nugent concert. The mockery of certain gods, in poises of unwitting nonsense. The little things.

Running a golden thread throughout this is a gallery of heroes, farces, and unknowns, the cardboard gods, with who Josh defines moments in his life. These gods were his secret place, the eye at the center of the storm, sturdy cardboard rectangles that made sense in a vastly uncomprehending place. There is a story for each god, and you turn to the vibrant color photographs to try and see what Josh saw. Sometimes, through the adult Josh's sheer virtuosity of words, you do see.

In the final chapters of Cardboard Gods we find a much older, disillusioned Josh stumbling through life, grasping at straws of meaning. Cardboard Gods is about growing up, and in a way, not growing up. It's about nostalgia and stagnation, the moments mired in the breast, and the memories of these moments. It's about a struggle to comprehend, to turn over and understand the cards one was dealt. Josh Wilkens is unabashedly honest in his accounting of himself, inviting the reader into his soul to laugh and cry with a childhood amber with honeyed nostalgia.

*I received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads.*

[Scott Breslove · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have to preface this review by saying that I have never read anything else that Josh has ever written, including his blogs. This book was my first experience with his writing, and I have to say I wasn't a huge fan. I was not born yet, in the generation he is mostly focusing on in this book, and it makes me feel, kind of, detached, or distant from the book. Now, I am not saying that I cannot read a book that is written about a generation, more so, that this book didn't do its job of making me feel like a part of its generation.
Another problem I had with this book was the feeling that the baseball card link was used as too much of a gimmick. Like I said, I haven't read any of his stuff before, so it is possible that the baseball cards did really represent cardboard gods, whom he still reveres to this day, but as a casual reader just picking up this book, it came across as very gimmicky. The links from the authors life to the baseball card leading off the chapter, while sometimes proving to be very interesting and informational (Herb Washington for example), sometimes seemed very forced. Like psychic readings, and Nostradamus's predictions, the link from life story to baseball card feels very generalized, and if you look hard enough you could find some card to fit any life experience, or some life experience to match a specific card.
My third problem with this book is that, it feels like, just as the chapter is getting good, and we are building up to a great conclusion, the chapter just kind of ends. I don't know if that is done intentionally, letting the reader glean their own conclusions, or whatever, but I am not a big fan of that premise. I do not want to try to figure out what I "get" from the book, it is your life story, tell me what happens next.
I feel like I am being very harsh to this book, but it really wasn't all bad. It was well written. It was enjoyable. Like I said before, it was loaded with interesting facts and anecdotes. It was very well reviewed by most other people that I have seen. I guess it just wasn't really for me.

[M Christopher · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was really excited when I received this book as a gift this Christmas. It had been highly praised by the baseball writers on ESPN.com as a worth successor to a book I greatly enjoyed as a teenager: "The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book" by Brendan Boyd and Fred Harris. Indeed, shortly after Christmas, I flipped through it and it appeared to have a good deal in common with that book: short chapters headed by the reproduction of a baseball card and followed by the author's amusing reminiscences of the card and player plus some reflections from the author on his boyhood.

Then, I looked closer and read the first chapter or two. This was NOT "The Great American, etc.," not by a long shot. The author's memories of the players were almost all bitter and brittle and his memories of his own life even more so. I put the book away and determined to tackle it later.

Well, November 21st is about as later as you can get to read a book given at Christmas within a twelve-month. And as I sped through the book today (it is, mercifully, a quick read), all my fears were confirmed. The author had an unconventional and apparently miserable childhood. I would have flung the thing away in disgust at several points but I was determined to see it through, in hope of redemption at the end. The only redemption, as far as it goes, consists of Wilker's admission that he finally found a woman to put up with his whiney butt and that he and his somewhat estranged brother managed to enjoy the Red Sox championship parade together. O joy, O bliss, O rapture unhoped for.

Turns out that the reason the book got such high praise from the ESPN commentators is that Wilker lived in the same tiny Vermont town as Buster Olney for a brief period and Olney and his brother get about a paragraph in an early chapter.

Avoid like the plague.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw myself in this book in so many places that it was kind of spooky at times. Josh's feelings on baseball, baseball cards and growing up really resonated with me and brought back memories that I haven't recalled in many years. Like Josh, my obsession with baseball cards met an inevitable conclusion, but my love for the game continues even if it will never again reach that fevered pitch of youth where I would live and die by how my Astros did that night. I thought this book would be gimmicky with the baseball cards theme being forced and feeling contrived, but Wilker did a great job of tying each card into the story of his life in a way that sent my mind back to my collection time and time again. I cried when Josh surprisingly said that his childhood was happy, and my heart soared when his Red Sox finally won the World Series and he got to celebrate with his brother. I never have the desire to reach out to an author and personally tell him how his story impacted me, but I found myself wanting to do that with Cardboard Gods, probably because in many ways his story is my story.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am the target audience for this book.
[x] Similarly aged male as the author
[x] Baseball obsessed as a kid
[x] Baseball card collector
[x] Reads books

However, I don't think you need to be a (former) card collector and baseball fan to appreciate this story. I'd read a lot of Wilker's Cardboard Gods blog over the years and was excited to see it in book form. [If you haven't seen his blog and are a baseball fan then you need to look at it while you're still online.]

In the first few chapters of this book I was disappointed that it wasn't all about baseball, but was instead about this kid growing up. But it really grew quickly on me as a wonderfully written story about this kid growing up.

[Kev Willoughby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Equal parts "That 70's Show" and "Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy," author Josh Wilker tells the story of his childhood using his baseball card collection from the 1970s. I loved the concept. And anyone who has ever collected baseball cards would likely buy this one after thumbing through the pages, because there in all their psychedelic, full-color glory, he writes about Reggie Jackson, Carl Yastrzemski, Carmen Fanzone, Bake McBride, and just about anyone else in between. The cards he writes about from his collection span his formative years of 1975-1981.

Some of the stories are funny and others are sad. Some of the stories are endearing and others are quite crude. A very honest look at life as an adolescent growing up in 1970s USA.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was fantastic. I've read plenty of various peoples' memoirs, and his guy told his story in such a unique way. Wilker is great at conveying the attachment a child has to his or her favorite toys or collection, and he uses that attachment to tell the reader about his life, from childhood to marriage.

The chapters are short, which makes it extremely easy to say, "Oh, just one more chapter", which, in turn, makes it very easy to ready this book quickly.

[Deborah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Telling your story through baseball cards is a novel concept, but the reader really has to like or at least be interested in baseball to get into reading this book. I slogged my way through while breezing through other books. In all honesty, the only reason I kept slogging is because this was the kind of book I could read in bed and fall asleep quickly. A male baseball fan might find this book much more appealing than I did.

[Ed · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried to get through this book. I sincerely tried. The author came off as a whiner using a difficult childhood to be just that...a whiner. Unique concept with using baseball cards of the 70's to reflect upon an aspect of the author's life. Felt a bit disjointed at times. Which I guess was the point of life in the 1970's, a bit disjointed. I am sorry.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars is probably charitable. Had its moments, but overall was quite a downer.

[Brian S · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not really about baseball cards so much. Basically a childhood memoir that uses baseball cards as a structural story telling tool. Failed to keep my interest.

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read a lot of baseball books, and this is not only one of the best, but it's perhaps the most unusual. It's a memoir of a bizarre and often sad childhood for a kid/teenager growing up the mid-1970s, framed by his love of baseball. And while it's inspirational in some ways, it is not in any way the type of "sports teach you lessons in life" book that would be obvious and safe. This book is not safe in any way. It's as awkward and embarrassing as life itself.

I've read it at least 3 times over a decade, it's still magical. But you've got to be the right kind of person to love this book. Knowing baseball is important. But being a lunk-head sports fan wouldn't be enough, as this is a really personal book that would send a typical sports book reader into an obscenity-laced tirade about what a loser the author is.

And, truth be told, the author, Josh Wilker, was a misfit as a kid and probably unappealing to the vast majority of kids he met. Due to bizarre circumstances, his mom left his dad for another man, and took her kids with them from urban New Jersey to rural Vermont. She (they) pursued the goal of living off the land and, bizarrely, for the man to become a blacksmith. This failed miserably over the next 10 years, and Josh spent his school years intimidated by the hicks and rednecks of nowhere-ville (except for a couple of years in a classroom-without-walls setting that's among the funnier, sunnier parts of the book).

Naturally shy and introspective, he grew more so, as he had no one to connect with. His dad was in New Jersey. His mom and her boyfriend were hippies, who threw out as many norms of conduct as possible. His brother was several years older and light-years cooler, and then he went away to boarding school. The local kids picked on him. That's a tough recipe when you're a kid, because kids just want to fit in.

Josh retreated to the bedroom he shared with his brother, and he retreated to a love of baseball and baseball cards. The book itself is a series of short anecdotes about his life, and about life in general, each one inspired by one of the baseball cards he loved as a child and looked at obsessively. These tales cover the entire range you'd hope for from a great memoir -- humor, sadness, personal growth, loss, individual experiences that have universal application, and so on.

The connections that Wilker makes to the player on the card or the player himself or even just something in the photo on the card or the statistics on the back are remarkable. It might be something as simple as a player whose expression is ridiculous, and Wilker writes how he and his brother would laugh helplessly each time they looked at that card, and how that laughter bonded them together. Or it might be an unusual background in one of the photos, and Wilker relates it to a bleak moment in his life. Or it might be the card of a hated player (mostly members of the Yankees, because Wilker was a Red Sox fan), and his tale of what his distant, futile hatred says about him and our culture.

There are a few cringe-y moments when Wilker goes on too long about his fantasies about high school girls (when he was in high school) and movie starlets and models -- not so great in the MeToo era. Same with his decade or more of apparently non-stop drug use and drinking. But that's what a confessional memoir is, warts and all. Somehow, he found a woman and a career as a writer, and more power to him. And more power to baseball.

[Ed Wagemann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Early this summer I picked up Josh Wilker's non-fiction book about baseball cards called Cardboard Gods.  I hadn't read a book about baseball since about 1981 (and that was just the instructions that came with my Johnny Bench Batter-Up), but Wilker's book so completely awakened my long lost obsession for baseball cards and baseball that I immediately sought out two other recent non-fiction books about baseball.  My hope was that these books could not just sustain the nostalgia, but help me figure out why I had ever lost my love for baseball and baseball cards to begin with... 


Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards by Josh Wilker

I’m a notorious tightwad, my cheapness manifests itself in many forms. One such example is that each year, as a Christmas gift, I buy my biological father something that I want to inherit when he passes away. Generally this gift is a book, even though my father doesn’t even read books—except for THE book (the Bible that is). After getting less than 20 pages into Cardboard Gods, it became obvious that this was the one--the one that was going to be the old man’s gift for the Baby Jesus’s birthday this year. To use a baseball analogy, reading this book was like watching a little known big league hurler pitch a near perfect game. Right off the bat, as you start reading you realize that this guy has his good stuff. His curve ball is biting, his fastball has a sharp giddy-up, he is in command of the plate, pinpoint control. As the game goes on, he gets stronger, more confident—perhaps a lapse in judgment or a missed pitch here and there, but nothing to get him into trouble. By the seventh inning you are cheering him on with all you've got in total appreciation of being able to witness the greatness of a masterly executed shutout or no-hitter even. By the final out Cardboard Gods may not have been a perfect game for everyone who reads it, but it was an absolutely perfect read for me (sorta like the Doc Ellis no-hitter that Wilker's references). Of course part of the reason this book resonated with me certainly has something to do with the fact that author Josh Wilker is the same age as me, that 95% of the baseball cards he mentions were ones that I owned and coveted, that he grew up in an alternative family situation that involved moving from house to house frequently, he had a step-father, he had a brother who is close in age, and that both Wilkers and I were UPS package handlers in the early 90s. But there are plenty of aspects of Cardboard Gods that anyone can appreciate, for instance his brilliant use of a “device of continuity” that ties the book together. Wilker starts each chapter out with a reproduction of a Topps baseball card circa 1974 to 1980 and then goes on to connect an aspect of his childhood (and/or an aspect of American culture and/or the nature of mankind) with an aspect of that card. Wilker’s observations about the poses, gestures and facial expressions of the ball players captured on the cards were especially brilliant as he insightfully wove these snapshots into the parallel narrative of his childhood in 1970s America. One great example of this was the side-by-side chapters in which Wilker juxtaposes a 1978 Bo McLaughlin card with a 1976 Steve Garvey card:                                    
“Everybody was going from before to after. Everybody had a look on their face like they’d just caught a whiff of a nearby landfill. Everybody was ambivalent about the length of their hair…Everybody went back and forth from having a regular job to laying on rusty lawn furniture all afternoon unemployed…Everybody began wondering how to file for divorce…Everybody was Bo McLaughlin…Everybody except Steve Garvey.”

As Homer Simpson would say "It's funny cuz its true!"  Also true, almost alarmingly so, was how similar Wilker’s sense of these player’s essense (as obtained from their cards) were to my sense of these player’s essense (from what I gleaned from their card), and the sense that thousands of other boys growing up in the 70s must have gotten from these cards as well. Wilker’s was right on the money-- from his ruminations on the 1976 Victory Leaders card with Jim Palmer and Randy Jones to the old school admiration triggered by the 1978 Wilbur Wood card and so on and so forth.
It was also entertaining the way that Wilker used baseball cards to say so much about people, about the trials and tribulations of childhood and about 1970s America all at the same time.  As I flipped the pages from chapter to chapter, each revealing another lost treasured image of the Cardboard Gods from my childhood, I began to notice a sense of exhiliration—an exhileration that was similar to the exhiliration that (just like Wilker explained having as a kid) I also experienced in my youth every time I bought a new pack of baseball cards and then obsessively thumbed from one Cardboard God to the next. Wilker even pays homage to that lost experience of exhiliration (common to nearly every boy who ever bought a pack of baseball cards in the 70s) by opening the book with an offering (in image at least) of one of those rock hard miniature slabs of pink sugar/bubble gum that came inside every pack of Topps baseball cards from that era. Even the cover of Cardboard Gods is cleverly designed to replicate the packaging of a pack of baseball cards from the 70s era. This all resonated with me (a thrift store/garage sale junkie anyway) as Cardboard Gods displayed a rich understanding of that certain 1970s Americana vibe that only a kid growing up in that era could truly understand.

I imagine that a lot of guys in their 40s have experiences of wandering up to the storage area above their parent’s garage some weekend afternoon, looking for a tool or something, and stumbling upon a stack of shoeboxes that housed the thousands of baseballs cards that they once collected as a kid. Reading Cardboard Gods was like opening up those boxes and being bombarded with those long lost memories, and for this alone it deserves:
5 Wagemann Heads

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