The Saga of Mike Corkins
Baseball cards were the Ur-books for me. They were the breasts at which I nursed, portable and potable, able to comfort the rational side with sublime columns of agate statistics and nourish the artistic side with photographs that were minor works of art. There is my '72 Topps Frank Robinson, a moment frozen in time, his swing arrested, his blue spring training jacket billowing in the wind. How could you feel homesick after looking at smiling Frank?
I say homesick because I went to Camp Campbell Guard for a week at the age of 8, the first time I’d ever been away from home. It was a Darwinian hell, like prison but without the rape. Think Midwestern equivalent of a British boarding school. I toted that black box of baseball cards - in the shape of a pirate’s chest – to camp and examined them whenever we were releasted to our bunks. I brought the same cards and chest to a party a couple years a later.
What was it that made knowledge, even trivial knowledge such as Davey Johnson’s batting average in ’73, so gratifying? Why did the long list of type in the Sunday newspaper, that long column titled “MAJOR LEAGUE AVERAGES” send a shiver of delight from 1972 to around 1983? How many a Sunday was spent perusing the list, memorizing the list and delighting in the news that Manny Mota was hitting a purplish .362? Why did St. Bernard so dismiss knowledge acquired merely for the sake of curiosity?
My first card were collected in 1970. I recall the very first pack, bought at United Dairy Farmers, purchased for my friend and me by his dad. His dad unlocked the secrets of the flip side of the card - what a batting average was, how it could be calculated from hits and at bats; he showed us the columns from which the average could be derived and how to calculate it. We were only seven years old, precocious but not ready for long division.
We dismissed him as he droned on about the division, assuring him we got it. Giddily we compared all the averages to see who was best. It was one of mine – Mike Corkins from the San Diego Padres. He hit something like .472! My friend was jealous. I’m not sure who found out first, but we’ll remember to our dying day the shock of finding out that Mike Corkins wasn’t the best. He was the worst. He was a pitcher, and that last column wasn’t his batting average but his E.R.A., and it was 4.72, not .472 (we learned decimals points mattered). And unlike batting average, the lower the ERA the better.
Preversely, that card became one of our most esteemed. Due to sentimental value, Corkins would demand an intra-trade value far higher than his numbers would indicate. Years later we had an English teacher who collected baseball cards and who looked exactly like Mike Corkins. We brought and showed him “his” card and to this day the card has a double-sentiment attached – reminding us of a favorite English teacher and our first great error.
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