Just down the street from my uncle's house, shielded beneath inch-thick glass in a baseball card shop in Ames, Iowa, braced inside a screw-fastened Lucite brick, the Holy Grail stared back at me: a mint condition 1985 Topps rookie card. His 1985 Topps rookie card. Not the Fleer card with its lame profile shot. Not the Donruss issue with those stupid red stripes along the bottom third. No, the tried-and-true Topps card, the one whose price I had watched climb steadily from his 1988 decimation of enemy bats to this, the summer of 1992, just over halfway through a campaign he spent winning games for a Boston team that otherwise did an extraordinary amount of losing.
This was the best card ever made of the best pitcher in baseball, and I, having waited for so long to gamble so big, had to make my move.
Twenty-four dollars, you must understand, was a lot of money. Twenty-four dollars could buy a lot of discounted school lunches, a wealth of mac and cheese and a mountain of pancakes mom could make for dinner but I was absolutely certain he would make it all worthwhile in the end. He would reward my faith, one day turning this slab of cardboard into pure gold. He had to. He was the best. He could do anything. Outshine future Hall of Famers while only playing every fifth day. Strike out twenty at a time. Award after award after award after award. Throw inside with control. Throw outside with perfect recklessness. Instill terror in the hearts of those once considered fearless.
The man behind the counter saw me staring into the case and walked over. "Anything good in there?" he asked.
I pointed nervously at the card on the top shelf. Number 181. "How much for that?"
"Beckett list price," he said, reaching for his copy of the accepted Bible of our hobby.
"Okay," I said. "Twenty-four sounds perfect."
As he set the magazine down and flipped open to the listings in the middle section, I noticed something different about his copy; it didn’t have the same guy on the front cover - not the guy in Atlanta who also played football, but instead the home-run clobbering lumberjack from Oakland.
"Sorry kid," the man said. "Looks like it’s up this month. Twenty-six fifty."
Twenty-six fifty? Where was I going to get that kind of money? If I didn’t act now, I didn't know what I would do? Who knew how much higher it would go? This month it was up a few dollars. Next month it could be a few dollars more. If I sat back long enough this one could get away. That, I told myself, would just be unacceptable. I had to do something, but what? What in the world could I say that would get him to back down, get him to bring the game back to where even I could be a player? Maybe I could trick him into looking at an old price guide, or get it without the fancy case, or wait, wait, wait I’ve got it: "But that's the price for mint cards," I blurted out, "and you don't have a mint card."
I could see the shock register in his eyes, this man silently asking just who I thought I was to come in here and question his inventory.
"Listen kid," he started, "We don't deal in damaged goods."
"No no no," I said, "that's not what I meant. I want to buy it, I just mean it's a little off-center."
He reached into the case - the card was so close, I could almost touch it! - and inspected the card, turning it side to side, towards and away from the light.
"I don’t see anything," he said.
"Look closer," I replied.
He held it up again, maybe thinking he saw something or maybe seeing the same nothing I knew was there, but finally conceding. "Alright, kid," he said. "Twenty-four and it's yours." I reached into my pocket, removing the two fives and fourteen singles, laying them out on the countertop so the whole store could see that in this moment I was the richest boy in the world.
"But kid," he started, pointing to the baseball cap resting atop my head, white caligraphy stitched in that timeless pattern on solid black, "why him? Why not your guy? You like rooting for the enemy or something?"
"That's different," I said. "My guy's my favorite, but this guy's the best."
He shrugged. "Those don't have to be different things," he said. "There's always gonna be people better than the guys you root for."
Oh whatEVER, I thought. Like this guy knew what he was talking about, living out here in Iowa where they didn't even HAVE a baseball team to call their own. I lived in Chicago, right next door to not one but two teams. We had a choice. We were for real. We could like whoever we wanted, not whoever was only 200 miles away.
But walking outside to celebrate my arrival as a big spender, I could feel his questions weigh on me. How could I want someone to win even when it meant the team, the organization, the institution I had grown up loving was no better (and in some cases worse) for it? Who, really, was this stranger taking the hill for some company out in Boston? And what had I done going so far out of my way to capture the ultimate prize he had to offer?
The moment faded, as moments usually do, but the idea stayed with me, echoing in my head with every win I read about in the newspaper, with every strikeout he notched on some far-off battlefield, with every batter who would later think twice about trying to take the inside corner.
Through his glorious renaissance in Toronto, somehow posting a pair of historically spectacular seasons as his team carried out otherwise unremarkable years. Through his awkward, mostly reprehensible move to New York. Through his garbage-time successes in Houston, brilliant against the dregs of the National League but folding in the face of true competition and ultimately disappearing once the lights shone too brightly. He had gone off to places the team I loved would never go, to where he and they would never cross paths again.
Except, however unlikely, they did.
October 22, 2005. World Series game one. A Saturday night. Roger Clemens and a Houston Astros squad that had been left for dead against a Chicago White Sox team none of us, not even the most loyal hundreds of us gathered at Joe's Sport Bar, ever dreamed would get this far. Of course they wouldn't (come on, they were the White Sox) but they did anyway. And now the team I had spent so long cheering for was going for the ultimate prize. And they were going up against The Best, number 22 charging headfirst as the forward army of a vaunted one-two-three every expert and schmuck said would destroy these pretenders from the South Side of Chicago. Clemens. Pettite. Oswalt. Impending death threw a mean-looking curveball.
Out to the mound Roger strode, the voices in the television wasting no opportunity to remind us in the city by the lake that our favorite team's management had fared better against this right-handed monster than our favorite team's players. Behind his arm, common sense said, these riders from out west would prove once and for all that baseball would always be an arms race, and that Roger still carried the biggest gun.
Out of the gate, the Good Guys didn't do much to prove the talking heads wrong. Scott Podsednik grounded out to short. Tadahito Iguchi followed up by grounding to third and Oh no, we thought, here we go. Roger was going to kill us; not just the team, but literally every single person rooting against him. Our team, our hope, our thirst for some slice of glory had come this far. Did we really think Clemens would step aside for the White Sox?
But then, just like that, Jermaine Dye swung on a full count and we held our breath as the ball sailed on and on, the screamed ourselves hoarse as it landed in the right field seats. Sox 1, Astros nothing. And together we realized, against all odds and common sense, that Roger could be beaten.
Second inning, Clemens back on the mound, game tied at one run apiece. Carl Everett singles. Aaron Rowand singles, moving Everett to third. Two on, no out, Clemens on the ropes when A.J. Pierzynski hits a grounder to the right side; Rowand out at second, Everett scores, Pierzynski safe at first. One on, one out, Roger losing.
Roger losing!
Joe Crede grounded out, advancing Pierzynski to third. Two down now, the Sox with their collective foot on Clemens' throat. We can build a lead here, I thought. He's showing weakness. Juan Uribe up to bat, Uribe who had faced Clemens twice before with only a single to show for it. Roger the Great, the machine gun right arm against Uribe the Afterthought, a slick glove and a reckless bat. We never knew what we had with Uribe. One night he'd be making laser beam throws from short to first and hitting a walk-off home run, the next he'd strike out four times and commit two errors. We didn't just need the good Uribe here though, we needed the best Uribe possible. We hoped he knew that.
First pitch: foul ball. Second pitch: Uribe turns on a fastball, firing it back up the middle for a double. Piersynzki scores. Scott Podsednik follows up with a 12-pitch at-bat ending as a Clemens fastballs sails just over the outside corner. Inning over. White Sox 3, Astros 1. White Sox 3, Roger 0.
Roger never came back after that. Not that game or ever, really. He pulled a hamstring before the bottom of the third inning and turned the keys over to a young Wandy Rodriguez. The team I loved had handed a veritable death sentence to the supposed best of the best. Three runs, one measly strikeout. With that he disappeared into the tunnel, not as an inside fastball to nail my favorite team’s coffin shut but as a soft curve landing clumsily in the dirt, a gaping hole punched through whatever was left of him. Down a much-needed arm, the Astros were now vulnerable. The White Sox went on the attack and never looked back. Even before those half-hearted non-retirements spent holding any team, fan, and city willing to pay his steep price hostage well into the summer before letting anyone know he was coming back, Roger didn’t seem so important anymore.
Even before his name was named, his every achievement becoming suspect under the ugly light of injection, of interrogation, of investigation, the joy of watching baseball had nothing to do with whatever numbers the greatest right-hander of all time could post.
Even before so many of us learned all the things that made us wish we'd never heard of him in the first place, about the ease with which he could betray his friends, his family, his wife... even before all that the thrill of victory and the force with which The Rocket could beat his enemies into submission didn't need each other any more.
"Favorite" had brought me a season of joy culminating in a World Series crown that would last forever. "Best," on the other hand, went on to try its hardest to make me forget all about it. And I now understood what that salesman in Iowa had tried to explain to me that afternoon so long ago: "best" doesn't owe you anything, but "favorite" is always an investment worth making.
That rookie card that once held so much promise and potential goes for around $15 these days. Not a million, not a hundred, not even as much as the paltry wad of singles one boy's scrimping, saving, and hustling could amount to so long ago, those years of idolization and misplaced hero worship since rendered worthless as worthless can be. Had I known then what I know now, I probably would've held on to those twenty-four dollars. But it's hard to say it wasn't a fair trade.
[Andrew Reilly is the former editor of the 35th Street Review and present curator of Normal Words. His work has appeared in the Onion's A.V. Club, CellStories, and No Touching, among others, and he appears regularly with the 2nd Story reading series in Chicago, where he lives. To read more by Andrew, check out his profile.]
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