Faces

On the wall in front of me is a potpourri of baseball memorabilia: pennants, scorecards and whatnot. You can never have enough whatnot to go around in life. There are some baseball cards with the likes of Luis Aparicio, Nellie Fox and Sherm Lollar, Billy Pierce and Floyd Robinson. Perched atop a scorecard from 1941is my most recent addition the wall, a membership card for the Woodland Bards Clubroom at Comiskey Park. If you wrote about baseball back in the day, you wanted admission to the Woodland Bards/ A ticket to the last game of the 1964 season rests about a foot beneath a “phantom” ticket to the ’64 World Series; I’m sure the White Sox could’ve beaten the Cardinals. I doubt that would’ve saved Comiskey Park, but I do think ownership of the team would’ve gone differently. It’s March, I dream. There are also pictures: Jimmy Austin; Smead Jolley; Monty Stratton. These are mostly reproductions, unlike the shot of Carlton Fisk I took in 1990; #72 is standing at the plate, catcher’s mask perched atop a batting helmet turned around. The tools of ignorance become the wearer. Off to the left is a photo of Ted Lyons and Johnny Rigney, autographed by both, and to the right two snapshots of Zachary Taylor Davis, architect of two great Chicago ballparks. On a day like this, with snow flurries fouling the air and cold trying to dig inside me, I like looking at my wall. Do I spy Dom DiMaggio, and his brother Joe, Frankie Crosetti…