The Wax Pack, Brad Balukjian
The Wax Pack, Brad Balukjian
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

The Wax Pack
On the Open Road in Search of Baseball's Afterlife

Author: Brad Balukjian

Narrator: Brad Balukjian

Unabridged: 9 hr 57 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/12/2020


Synopsis

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.

About Brad Balukjian

Brad Balukjian is director of the Natural History and Sustainability Program and teaches biology at Merritt College in Oakland, California. He is also a freelance writer and has published articles in Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, National Geographic, Slate, Discover, Smithsonian, Natural History, NOVA Next, and Islands.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Tom on July 10, 2022

This is an interesting premise. Take a random pack of unopened baseball cards and try to meet every player in the pack. 1986 Topps. 15 cards. One Hall of Famer, Carlton Fisk. One player who had the talent to be an all-time great, Dwight Gooden. Cy Young winner, Rick Sutcliffe. Garry Templeton and Vi......more

Goodreads review by David on December 31, 2020

This book is first and foremost about its author. The whole part about meeting the ballplayers is really just window dressing and underwhelms. The book was published in 2020 but the events take place in 2015. There are unhidden spoilers below. The target audience will mostly care about the baseball pl......more