Is there life after baseball? Starting from this simple question, The Wax Pack ends up with something much bigger and unexpected--a meditation on the loss of innocence and the gift of impermanence, for both Brad Balukjian and the former ballplayers he tracked down. To get a truly random sample of players, Balukjian followed this wildly absurd but fun-as-hell premise: he took a single pack of baseball cards from 1986 (the first year he collected cards), opened it, chewed the nearly thirty-year-old gum inside, gagged, and then embarked on a quest to find all the players in the pack. Absurd, maybe, but true. He took this trip solo in the summer of 2015, spanning 11,341 miles through thirty states in forty-eight days. Balukjian actively engaged with his subjects--taking a hitting lesson from Rance Mulliniks, watching kung fu movies with Garry Templeton, and going to the zoo with Don Carman. In the process of finding all the players but one, he discovered an astonishing range of experiences and untold stories in their post-baseball lives, and he realized that we all have more in common with ballplayers than we think. While crisscrossing the country, Balukjian retraced his own past, reconnecting with lost loves and coming to terms with his lifelong battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Alternately elegiac and uplifting, The Wax Pack is part baseball nostalgia, part road trip travelogue, and all heart, a reminder that greatness is not found in the stats on the backs of baseball cards but in the personal stories of the men on the front of them.

Wilker marks the stages of his life through the baseball cards he collected as a child. He captures the experience of growing up obsessed with baseball cards and explores what it means to be a fan of the game.

“An entertaining history of baseball cards . . . An engaging book on a narrow but fascinating topic.” —The Washington Post When award-winning journalist Dave Jamieson’s parents sold his childhood home a few years ago, he rediscovered a prized boyhood possession: his baseball card collection. Now was the time to cash in on the “investments” of his youth. But all the card shops had closed, and cards were selling for next to nothing online. What had happened? In Mint Condition, his fascinating, eye-opening, endlessly entertaining book, Jamieson finds the answer by tracing the complete story of this beloved piece of American childhood. Picture cards had long been used for advertising, but after the Civil War, tobacco companies started slipping them into cigarette packs as collector’s items. Before long, the cards were wagging the cigarettes. In the 1930s, cards helped gum and candy makers survive the Great Depression. In the 1960s, royalties from cards helped transform the baseball players association into one of the country’s most powerful unions, dramatically altering the game. In the eighties and nineties, cards went through a spectacular bubble, becoming a billion-dollar-a-year industry before all but disappearing, surviving today as the rarified preserve of adult collectors. Mint Condition is charming, original history brimming with colorful characters, sure to delight baseball fans and collectors. “Jamieson explores the history of card collecting through an entertaining cast of characters . . . For anyone who can recall being excited to rip open their newest pack of cards, Mint Condition is a treat.” —Forbes

Rescued in 2010 from the small creek that runs next to Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, New York, a simple baseball launched an epic quest that spanned the United States and beyond. For eight years, "The Hall Ball" went on a journey to have its picture taken with every member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, both living and deceased. The goal? To enshrine the first crowd-sourced artifact ever donated to the Hall. Part travelogue, part baseball history, part photo journal, this book tells the full story for the first time. The narratives that accompany the ball's odyssey are as funny and moving as any in the history of the game.

This is the true story behind the creation--and re-creation--of America's most popular sports board game ever--Strat-O-Matic. Growing up, a young Hal Richman dreamed of producing a game that accurately recreated entire Major Leage Baseball seasons. More than a tale of a single man and his company, Strat-O-Matic Fanatics shows the power of a dream. It details Hal Richman's youth; the first, tenuous years of Strat-O-Matic; numerous episodes of conflict and opposition; and the devotion and addiction of the hobby's fans. Along the way, author Glenn Guzzo reveals a universal story of determination, love, loyalty and honesty in the face of seemingly unbeatable odds that has made Strat-O-Matic an icon in the board and computer game industry.

“This is one of the very best baseball books in years.” Booklist, Starred Review Reaching the major leagues is a pipe dream for most young baseball players in America. Very few ever get to live it out. A select number of those players face the elation and frustration of getting to play in just one major league game. The Cup of Coffee Club: 11 Players and Their Brush with Baseball History tells the unique stories of eleven of these players. It details their struggles to reach the major leagues, their one moment in the limelight, and their struggles to get back. They include a former Major League Baseball manager, the son of a Baseball Hall of Famer, and two different brothers of Hall of Famers. Exclusive interviews with each of the players provide insight into what that single seminal moment meant and how they dealt with the blow of never making another major league appearance again. Spanning half a century of baseball, each player’s journey to Major League Baseball is distinct, as is each of their responses to having played in just a single game. The Cup of Coffee Club shares their unique perspectives, providing a better understanding of just how special each major league game can be.

""The Wax Pack," part baseball nostalgia and part road trip travelogue, follows Brad Balukjian as he tracks down players from a single pack of baseball cards from 1986"--

A collection of all 206 colorfully over-the-top images from the first five series of the popular collectible stickers from the 1980s. Garbage Pail Kids—a series of collectible stickers produced by Topps in the 1980s—combined spectacular artwork and over-the-top satire. The result was an inspired collaboration between avant-garde cartoonists and humorists including Art Spiegelman, Mark Newgarden, John Pound, Tom Bunk, and Jay Lynch. A new generation of fans continues to embrace this pop-culture phenomenon as Garbage Pail Kids stickers are still being published. Now, for the first time, all 206 rare and hard-to-find images from Series 1 through 5 are collected, along with a special set of four limited-edition, previously unreleased bonus stickers. This exciting follow up to Wacky Packages is guaranteed to appeal to die-hard collectors as well as a new generation of fans. Praise for Garbage Pail Kids “If you ask me, reliving my time with Bad Breath Seth and Potty Scotty is worth the cover price alone.” —USAToday.com “A wonderfully designed tribute to these shit-disturbing cards in all their graphic, full-color glory.” —ComicsBeat.com “There’s a lot of interesting stuff in Spiegel man’s intro, and in the afterward by John Pound, the artist who originated and drew the bulk of the Kids. But the real reason to buy this book is for the graphic brilliance of the art itself.” —Boston Phoenix

The untold story of baseball’s nineteenth-century origins: “a delightful look at a young nation creating a pastime that was love from the first crack of the bat” (Paul Dickson, The Wall Street Journal). You may have heard that Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright invented baseball. Neither did. You may have been told that a club called the Knickerbockers played the first baseball game in 1846. They didn’t. Perhaps you’ve read that baseball’s color line was first crossed by Jackie Robinson in 1947. Nope. Baseball’s true founders don’t have plaques in Cooperstown. They were hundreds of uncredited, ordinary people who played without gloves, facemasks, or performance incentives. Unlike today’s pro athletes, they lived full lives outside of sports. They worked, built businesses, and fought against the South in the Civil War. In this myth-busting history, Thomas W. Gilbert reveals the true beginnings of baseball. Through newspaper accounts, diaries, and other accounts, he explains how it evolved through the mid-nineteenth century into a modern sport of championships, media coverage, and famous stars—all before the first professional league was formed in 1871. Winner of the Casey Award: Best Baseball Book of the Year