Don’t come between a young girl and her baseball cards

Editor’s Note: In this guest essay, author and poet Susan Perabo recounts the story of showing Willie McGee his first baseball card when she was a young St. Louis Cardinals fan. Perabo has published “Who I Was Supposed to Be” and “The Broken Places” on Simon and Schuster. Her latest book, a collection of short stories titled “Why They Run the Way They Do,” debuted this week. Perabo is currently a writer in residence and Professor of English at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Penn. She also holds the distinction of being the first woman to play men’s collegiate baseball, for Webster University in 1985.

When I was a kid my father took me several times to the St. Louis Baseball Writer’s Association annual dinner, which may well wind up being the collective highlight of my childhood. By the age of 13 I’d had the opportunity to hear speeches in person by the likes of Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Ozzie Smith, Jack Buck and dozens of other Cardinal greats. Actually “speeches” doesn’t quite cover it; often former players would stand up and start recollecting (“One time in ’67 McCarver and I were on a bus in Chicago …”) and it might be a half hour before the story wound to a close. Perhaps most notably I also got to hear Stan Musial play the harmonica, which basically means you’re a St. Louisan forever in the eyes of God and should be buried in one of those Cardinal coffins with the birds-on-bat on the lid.

I was one of few females in attendance and one of fewer kids — certainly the only person who fit into both of those categories. Of course the dinner was an autograph seeker’s dream — baseball players just standing around talking like regular people, and most of the actual regular people too mature and/or too shy to ask for signatures.

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Those were the years when I waited for baseball cards to come out the way some people wait for college acceptances to arrive or babies to be born. The upcoming season’s cards were always released in the depths of January, just when you were starting to think spring would never arrive, and the only way for me to know if they had hit the stores was to get my mom or dad to drive me up to the Ben Franklin “dime store” in the Warson Woods shopping center. I’d go in almost every day starting in early January, burst through the glass doors, anticipating that bright box on the counter filled with wax packs. This year I’m talking about, 1983, the Donruss packs showed up first — a day or two before the Baseball Writer’s dinner, which meant I could take the new season’s cards to the dinner to try to get them autographed. I bought as many packs as I could afford – maybe ten or fifteen? – and was happy to get a handful of Cardinals.

The 1983 dinner was extra celebratory because it came only three months after the Cardinals had won their first World Series since 1967. There was so much joy and love in that banquet room that it seemed there was no problem in the world that could not be solved by St. Louis baseball. After the dinner but before the speeches, there was a half hour or so of mingling time. Cards gripped in my sweaty hand, I left my father at our table and began my stalking, quickly catching sight of World Series hero, rookie Willie McGee. McGee was 24 years old and had exploded onto the scene the year before, joining the club in May and performing brilliantly in October. He was standing by himself near the stage and I approached him and asked if he’d sign an autograph. He said yes, and I handed him the baseball card I’d gotten in a pack the day before. He took it from my hand and looked at it for several seconds, silently. Finally he looked up at me.

“Where’d you get this?” he asked softly.

“In a pack I bought yesterday,” I said. “They just came out.”

“Wow,” he said. “Wow.”

I didn’t understand what the big deal was it so I just stood there quietly, happy to have a few extra moments beside him. Eventually he looked up again from the card and smiled at me. I won’t bother to try to explain Willie McGee’s smile to you. There’s no way I could do it justice.

“I’ve never seen one before,” he said.

Because it was 1983. There were no mid-season rookie sets, no minor-league prospect cards. Nowadays, by the time a player starts his second season, he’s been on a dozen baseball cards. But not then. Then, you were a real baseball player before you ever got your first card. And this was Willie McGee’s first card.

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He turned the card over and read the back of it – a year’s worth of stats – and then flipped it back to the front and looked at it for another few seconds. Then he signed it and handed it back to me.

‘Thanks,” I said.

“Sure,” he said.

If I’d been any older, I probably would have told him he could keep the card. That would make for a better story, right? But I was thirteen, and I wanted my card back.

You can find Perabo’s “Why They Run the Way They Do” on Amazon and at other major book retailers.

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