The only baseball card I ever coveted was of a first baseman for the Atlanta Braves named Mike Lum. This was in 1976, the prime of my baseball card trading years, when I was at the top of my game both in experience and skills. I was a veteran trader from as far back as second grade and had amassed an awesome collection that spanned three decades and almost as many shoe boxes. Although I was consulted a lot on other people’s trades—What do you think about being offered a Whitey Ford in his declining years for a ‘73 Vida Blue and Rollie Fingers?—like an experienced criminal attorney, I was approached in the most serious trades, by someone wanting to trade up for my rookie Mantle or pre-war Williams, for example. I often used my reputation of fear and intimidation to negotiate my exchanges.
At W.O. Gladden Elementary in Kansas City, the only person in the fifth grade who could barter as an equal was my friend, Jimmy, who initiated me into the world of baseball card commerce. He was the middle brother from a family of three boys, and the only one in a family of Sicilian descent whose hair was not dark brown, but firecracker red, a trait that had last surfaced from the genetic drift in a nearly forgotten aunt from the old country. I’ve always thought it was this red hair that accounted for the bravado in his personality that I admired. Outside of my peers, I was a quiet kid, but Jimmy was a ribber among kids, grown-ups, friends, and strangers. He could not let a situation pass without comment, and he often ventured into the good, bad, and inappropriate for a laugh. He was fearless about making fun of everyone to their faces, even his parents, an action in my family that would have been akin to condemning myself to death.
He was one of my oldest friends more by happenstance than by devotion, since both our fathers were officers in the Air Force and worked in the same unit. As a result, our families were sometimes stationed together at the same base, moving in tandem at the will of the Air Force. He joked that I had to remain his friend because my dad worked for his dad, and “You gotta suck up to the boss’s son.” But in reality, he was the only friend I had known longer than two years, the typical duration of my father’s postings.
Perhaps because Jimmy was my baseball card mentor, he was also my fiercest opponent. He had a completely dispassionate attitude about baseball cards. In his hands, the cards were mere commodities, the players just value indicators like the designs on a bill, for the part that really interested him, the transaction. He was a consummate capitalist with a robber-baron mentality that even grown-ups could recognize. Once, sitting in the back of my family’s station wagon, we were trying to complete our fifth-grade homework. We were discussing a problem that had stumped us for miles: “1/4+1/4+1/10=?”, when from the driver’s seat my dad asked, “If I gave you two quarters and one dime, how much money would you have?”
“60 cents,” Jimmy said instantly.
My dad, raised in a generation that taught that sons could learn all they needed by silence rather than explication, paused to let this lesson sink in.
“Six-tenths,” I said finally in amazement at my dad’s creativity, “that’s our answer, Jimmy, six-tenths.”
But I could tell Jimmy didn’t get it. He was still looking at my dad, thinking about the sixty cents that might be coming to him.
If I had one liability as a trader, it was a touch of sentimentality, a penchant that drove me at times to make irrational trades – like a ‘54 Bob Feller for a Vince DiMaggio – just so I could complete the DiMaggio brothers trio: Vince, Dom, and Joe. Jimmy knew this about me and exploited my weakness to the fullest. Rather than deal with specific trades of such-and-such player for his Mike Lum, he instead dealt in options: Since it was obvious that he was the only one I knew who owned – what was his name again? Ah yes, card #208 Mike Lum – he would be willing to trade said card #208, for two…no, better make it three cards of his choosing from my entire collection. Such was the brutality of his methods.
I never told Jimmy directly that I wanted the card, but with the instincts of a used car salesman, he had surmised my desire from the feigned disinterest I tried to show the card every time I thumbed through his collection. If I didn’t pause to look at it, he would wait until I was well past the card before he fished it out of the stack again, parading it in front of me, wondering aloud why I wanted that card so much. And who wouldn’t wonder? As a baseball card, it was nothing special, it wasn’t an action shot from an actual game like the ‘76 Johnny Bench, just up from his crouch, mask off, rising from the dust after making a play at the plate. The Mike Lum card was a staged figure card in the most generic of poses: Standing in the field, not even at the plate, the bat resting on his shoulder, with an indifferent grin aimed at the camera. It exuded none of the fierce competitiveness I associated with professional baseball. Even in Lum’s best year of 1973, when he batted .294, with 82 RBI’s and 16 home runs, that card in mint condition commands only a humble fifty cents. Not exactly an investment grade instrument.
As a player, Mike Lum wasn’t any great shakes, either. He wasn't The Hammer. He never held a batting title in the league or even on the team. Mike Lum was solid and dependable, a journeyman player who had come up through the ranks to earn his starting spot on the roster. He had none of the flashy pizzazz of a Mays or even the sex appeal of the young George Brett. Mike Lum was the kind of guy you hired to plug a hole in your defense, not the kind of guy you created your game plan around.
Aspiring to the Major Leagues myself, I practiced my fielding in the back yard regularly, throwing the baseball as hard as I could against the concrete foundation of the house, then running down the grounders that came barreling back at me. I was the starting shortstop for my team, a position for which I was always picked even though I did not have the feline quickness required for the spot. Even at that age, I knew I wouldn’t be able to improve my reflexes, so I worked at the only things I knew I could improve: my fielding and my stupidity. What I couldn’t stop with my practiced glove, I would stop with my body, and this willingness to step into the path of the ball was considered a rare ability in the jittery Little League.
On Sundays, my father also joined me in the backyard, ostensibly to do yard work, but little by little drawing closer to me and offering me advice in his usual father-as-coach manner: “Are you an old lady? Bend your back and get that glove all the way down to the ground…What kind of move was that? This is baseball, not ballet—don’t anticipate, just move toward the ball…Jesus H. Christ! The job of an infielder is to stop the ball before it gets past you, not to watch the ball go by and then try and stop it!” This continued as it always did until he was throwing me the grounders himself, spicing up the fare with an occasional line drive (“You just dropped the easiest out in baseball!”) or pop fly (“You should be thinking of the infield fly rule right now. Explain it to me!”), leaving the lawn mower idling in the corner of the yard, snuffling like an abandoned child.
Eventually his keen eye picked up on my throwing motion, a gruesome sight that caused him, I believe, real physical pain not unlike an ulcer. Although he had been the person who taught me how to throw a baseball, I threw, in his words, “worse than a girl, like a duck almost.” The textbook throwing method he had tried to instill in me —three-quarters over the top, upper arm parallel to the ground, hand pointing at ten o’clock, and cranking the whole assembly forward —never felt natural, so I had developed a kind of throwing shorthand: not throwing the ball so much as propelling it with an ungainly push. A push, I might add, that had speed and accuracy and could, from shortstop or third base, nail a runner down going to first. Nevertheless, every time my father noticed it, he would speculate on the physics of my motion and wonder aloud how I managed to get the ball moving at all.
Eventually he would try and reteach me how to throw, winding his arm back and snapping it forward in an exaggerated, heuristic motion that sent the ball rocketing to me, where it slammed into my glove with a bone-splitting crack. This day, perhaps because I was tired out by the fielding practice earlier, I did not even attempt to follow his example, and he became increasingly agitated. His throws came harder and harder at me, and I threw the ball back more and more limply, hoping that by association he would also start throwing weakly. I allowed my concentration to stray just a bit, indulging in nostalgic remembrance of my carefree practices with the wall, when an explosion jarred me from my reveries. When I came to, I was flat on my back with the taste of blood in my mouth, staring up into the blue summer sky. My mother hovered over me, berating my father for his carelessness.
We all moved inside, where my father went in the kitchen to suffer more abuse from my mother and get his usual post-yardwork beer. I retreated to the family room where I could tend to my wounds in front of the television.
A few minutes later, my dad came in and watched me nurse my bloody nose. “Use your glove next time,” he said as he handed me a box of tissues, “That’s what it’s for.”
“Okay,” I said, accepting the tissues and the apology.
That being done, he directed me to turn the channel. I dialed through Gilligan’s Island and the PGA until I got to something we both could watch, a live game between the Braves and the Reds.
“The Reds will win,” I said, having unquestioningly swallowed the marketing of The Big Red Machine.
“We can watch anyway, can’t we,” snapped Dad.
I shrugged and purposefully made elaborate ministrations to my nose.
My father preferred an equitable, nonverbal approach to watching ball games on television, grunting up in appreciation when either team made a good play or hit, and grunting down in chastisement when someone performed poorly. Watching in this manner turned a baseball game from a competition between good and evil into a study of the game itself, and as such, a burden to those of us who liked to cheer undeservedly for our team and boo mercilessly at the enemy. At the time, the only benefit I could see from watching games his way was the calm c’est la vie attitude he exuded at the end of the game, having sided with neither the victor nor the victim in the contest.
So I knew something unusual was happening when in the midst of the third inning, my dad said, “Ahh, there he is.”
“Who?” I asked, scanning the screen.
“There, the first baseman,” my father said, pointing to the screen. “Mike Lum.”
“Who’s Mike Lum?”
My dad was struck mute by my ignorance. The look on his face at that moment must have mirrored the one he had earlier when he realized that I had done nothing to prevent a baseball from hitting me in the face.
“He’s our favorite player,” he finally answered.
“He is?” My dad had never mentioned having a favorite player before, preferring to praise individual performances or special talents, like Aaron’s run for the record or Seaver’s concentration on the mound.
“Of course,” he said. “He’s the first major leaguer from home.”
Home was Hawaii, the place where all my relatives and grandparents lived, the place where both my parents were born and raised, and the only mooring post, in our nomadic military life, that we ever meant when we talked about “going home.”
Suddenly, I felt I knew Mike Ken-Wai Lum personally, as if he had been a friend of the family for years. I could envision the scene at his parents’ house right now, aunties and uncles and cousins who, well, looked like my aunties and uncles and cousins sitting down to watch the game of their boy who had “made it.” From the dining table, I could smell the food I missed so much, sushi, poi, kalua pig. I could even see his old baseball coach from Roosevelt High School in Honolulu, sitting back on the sofa watching the game, telling his wife for the thousandth time, “See, I told you. I always knew that boy would make it.” At that moment, the entire gallery of my baseball heroes: Gehrig for guts, Mantle for bat, Robinson for fielding, dropped away in an instant for this Atlanta Brave whom, I was sure, had still retained the lilting rhythms and peculiar slang of the Hawaiian pidgin English that I loved to listen to every time we phoned home to Grandma.
“At first base, huh?”
“Umm,” he said. But instead of settling back into his silence, he leaned slightly forward as if to see the television better. “I wanted to go professional once.”
I froze. This kind of talk during a game was unprecedented and I didn’t know what to expect next. I remained quiet for fear of breaking the spell.
“And I think I would have made a pretty good first baseman.”
I didn’t doubt it. I had watched him play for the Air Force teams and had seen the intensity he brought to the games. He was solid, focused, and consistent, always waiting for the umpire to call a runner out before rising from his stretch. Even his teammates recognized his reliability and had taken to calling him Mr. Responsibility. Ask any major league manager, they’ll tell you that someone named Mr. Responsibility is the person they would want to guard their right corner.
“First base is the kind of position everyone thinks they can play,” he said staring at the screen, “but it’s a thinking man’s position. Your head always has to be in the game. A first baseman is involved with probably 90% of the plays in the game. Few can play it well.”
I nodded my head in agreement. I had never thought of first base in that way, having always reserved the position as the last stop for the overweight and over-the-hill players whose bats were too big to retire.
“I could have gone semi-pro. I had some offers. But I had just finished college and the war was on and I didn’t want to get drafted into the infantry, so I went and volunteered with the Air Force. By the time that was over, why, I had already married and you were coming along and the Air Force seemed like a pretty good place to have a career, and well…” His voiced trailed off. In the wake of silence that followed, I could think of nothing to say that would console him.
“God,” he said, “I loved the game so much, I used to sleep with that mitt.”
My younger sister entered the room at that point and Dad and I said nothing more the rest of the afternoon. But for the rest of that game, I spent as much time watching him as I did the television.
More changed for me that day than my newborn desire to own a Mike Lum baseball card. By the next season, I began to spurn the vainglorious position of shortstop as all quickness and light and became enamored with first base. My father and I abandoned our peppery fielding drills for close exercises in subtlety and concentration, so that I could become, in his words, “a perfect first baseman, a player of composure.” He trained me in the arcane lore of the position: how to plant my foot on the corner of the bag so a runner could not dislodge it, how to open myself up as a target for the infielders, how to stretch that extra little bit to shave down the lead of a quick runner. At the end of my first season as the team’s starting first baseman, they awarded me a new nickname, Jr. Responsibility, and Dad awarded me a new first baseman’s mitt. An ugly contraption, it looked like the bastard offspring of an illicit union between a worn-out catcher’s mitt and a desperate oven mitt. But like a good first baseman, it was completely utilitarian.
The day I turned “one day short,” a military term for one’s last day on base, I took my final trip to Jimmy’s house. The next morning we would be flying out to my dad’s new assignment at Yongsan Post in Seoul, Korea, and Jimmy's dad would be transferring to Mississippi a few weeks later. I was armed with a shoe box of my top-shelf cards, the premium material: my Lou Gehrig card, my Sandy Koufax card, my Willie Mays (true, in his twilight years in a Mets uniform) and my entire set of both the championship ‘72 Oakland A’s and Cincinnati Reds cards, whole team sets that I had laboriously collected. I was even prepared to break one of our unwritten rules: I had brought my Bart Starr and Gale Sayers football cards, willing to trade cross-sport and risk introducing, at the very last minute, a whole new calculus. We sat down on his younger brother’s bed, the bottom mattress on a set of bunks, which Jimmy commandeered as his office during the day, and I prepared to deal. I dove into Jimmy’s pile of baseball cards and with no pretense, for there was no time, pulled out card #208. No words were spoken; we both knew what I wanted. I opened my shoe box and waited for him to make the first move. I was a warrior primed my whole life for this battle and I was prepared to throw myself upon my sword and fight down to my last card if I had to.
He picked up the Mike Lum card and studied it slowly, once again, from front to back. This was something he did only with this card, usually preferring to divine the fear of his opponent to discern the value of the cards being traded. He always inspected the Mike Lum card with the same quizzical look on his face; perhaps he had missed something, something he would be able to read from the stats on the back of the card at the last minute. Finally he shook his head, sighed, and put the card into his shirt pocket. “Let’s go outside,” he said.
The day was very cold, winter tapering off to a wicked tail that blew knives through us and froze the hard-packed snow onto the earth. We crossed his backyard and climbed to the top of the hill behind his house, neighborhood common property that we nevertheless considered “ours.” Over the winter we had terraced the hill with mounds of snow and spent our weekends carving out a sledding course with teeth-rattling, gut-impaling moguls along one side, and along the other side, a death-defying speed course that twisted sinuously through a stand of trees. However, our proudest construction, and the one that we reserved for ourselves, was a monstrous ramp that lay in the middle of the steepest part of the hill, which we had watered until it was as slick as a ski jump. One of us would add a new feature to the ramp, a left-hand twist to the exit or a greater curl to the end so that our launches would land us on our backs, and then dare the other to try it. The ramp had grown into an amalgamation of perverse stunts, a record of our sadistic imaginations over the long winter. We stood at the top of the hill for a long time, neither of us saying anything, he with Mike Lum safely ensconced within his jacket, and I with my shoe box under my arm, surveying our creation.
Although it was not yet dinnertime, the evening had surrendered quickly to night and the darkness was pouring like ink over the land. Soon we would hardly be able to see. Finally, Jimmy turned to me and said, “Do you think we’ll still be best friends next year?”
I was stunned by the question. Neither of us had ever mentioned anything about being best friends. We never felt the need for confessions of that sort. Yet, as soon as he said it, I knew he was correct. It dawned on me that this must be the way of true best friends, neither needing to speak about it. “I don’t know,” I answered.
He didn’t say anything, and we both knew my answer had been inadequate. We could see our mothers through the windows in his house, getting the dishes ready for the last big feast between our two families. Both our mothers had prepared their specialties: Jimmy’s mom had made her Italian sausage and apple pies, and my mom had made her won-tons and sweet-and-sour spareribs. “Probably not,” I decided.
Jimmy just nodded, and I felt a sudden relief as it became clear to me that he had been thinking the same thing. We watched as Jimmy’s mother walked out the back door looking for us, soon joined by my mother, both of them retreating back inside when they could not find us in the darkness at the top of the hill. Jimmy fished around in his jacket and then flipped me Mike Lum. “Here,” he said, “you can have this.”
I looked at Jimmy. I looked at the card in my hand. I repeated these movements one more time before I could think of something to say. “I can trade you for it,” I said, motioning to the box.
“Nah,” he said, “let’s go.” He started walking down the hill toward his house, but I was still too dazed to move.
“What do you want for it?” I called after him. He didn’t say anything. I wanted to trade him for it. I had been prepared for a long, grueling night of negotiations, angry words, betrayals, and last-minute desperation tactics. Haggling had always been part of our relationship. I ran up alongside him. “How about this? Or these?”
I even pulled out my Babe Ruth Batting Champion card, not a real Babe Ruth player card, but the only baseball card we had ever seen that had the Babe’s picture on it. I had traded with someone’s father to get it and we both considered the card one of my better deals. Jimmy didn’t even look at me and continued his silent walk toward the house.
We were almost to the back door and I was getting desperate. “Here, take this,” I said and handed him the whole box.
But Jimmy just ignored me and walked through the back door, where I followed. We located our spots at the kids table and sat down for our families’ final meal together.
We moved the next day, and a couple of months later in Korea, I gave away my entire sports card collection to my sister, who was just then entering the prime of her trading card years. I had lost interest since I couldn’t find a sparring partner as good as Jimmy. His sleight-of-hand and cold calculations had always kept me teetering at the razor’s edge of trading exhilaration or failure. I kept the really good cards for myself—the Hall of Famers and of course, Mike Lum. But my sister never approached the cards as I did. Her temperament was more like that of a private collector: organizing the cards first by year and then by team, instead of by value as Jimmy and I had preferred, noting which ones she was missing and trying to find those by buying packs of cards. She never really traded because she couldn’t bear to part with something that she owned.
I saw Jimmy again, when I moved to St.Louis for graduate school and he lived a few hours away in rural Illinois. He is now a mortgage broker with his own 800 number. He still trades as a hobby, but instead of cards, he now trades cars. His most recent trade involved exchanging his early-eighties dandelion-yellow Corvette for a worn-around-the-edges, sixties-model steel-blue convertible Mercedes, a much less common car and hence, a greater value. He traded the car with a professor at the university I attended. “Someone you might know,” he told me, as if we all belonged to the same secret club. He seemed to delight in the fact that he had gotten the upper hand over this economics scholar.
Once, I even cautiously brought up our final baseball card trade, at the wedding of Jimmy’s younger (no longer littler) brother. Jimmy, though, seemed to have forgotten all about Mike Lum, talking instead about other cards he had taken at a steal, and what those cards are now worth and how those people must be kicking themselves. Neither of us has ever mentioned our conversation at the top of the hill on that cold winter evening, but with best friends, sometimes you don’t need to. 
