Goodnight J.B., wherever you are.

As many of us did in the uncertain early days of the pandemic, I sought out the learned scientific counsel of immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci. While watching an interview with Dr. Fauci, I scanned the items sitting behind him, as one does in this strange new world of home studio set design. My eyes locked on two familiar objects over his right shoulder, small rectangles featuring round photos:

I knew those two objects to be Topps baseball cards of a certain vintage. How did I know, you ask? Well, that's largely why I'm here today. One of my most treasured books, which I've managed to keep through all the moves away from the Oak Square triple-decker in which I grew up in the 1970s, the address for which is inscribed inside the cover, is this most colorful little paperback called The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book:

It featured vignettes and faithful reproductions of baseball cards of players that had impressed upon its authors, Brendan C. Boyd and Fred Harris. Though both the players and their cards were well before my then young time, I devoured the book all the same. The reverent irreverence in its writing clearly spoke to the budding wise-ass I dared not openly be, and the cards from the preceding two decades were a revelation.

Back to today. Upon recognizing that those were Topps baseball cards behind Dr. Fauci, of course I had to know which players merited such prominent display, so it was off to the attic to retrieve my copy of Topps Baseball Cards, The Complete Picture Collection: A 40-Year History, 1951 - 1990. Why the attic? Because where else does one keep one's former toy chest that now holds one's baseball cards and other sports collectibles? And thank goodness for the New England Mobile Book Fair back then, because that catalog itself fetches a rather exorbitant price these days. 

So, let's see, round photos? Aha, 1959. The players? Who might a young Tony Fauci growing up in 1950s New York idolize? Sure enough, there they were: card number 180 in the set, Yogi Berra, and card number 10, Mickey Mantle. 

 

So the memorabilia mystery was solved, but I no longer wanted to relegate the Topps catalog to the attic. However, that would mean finding room for it downstairs on a bookshelf already crammed full - no mean feat, as the catalog is the epitome of a coffee table book in its heft. Therefore, something else had to go, or at least go elsewhere. The first candidate for displacement was The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, a reference much heralded at the time of its publication, but one I hadn't consulted in decades. Per its inscription, it had been gifted to me at Christmas, 1985, by my high-school bud John, and I'd tucked the gift tag inside its cover; as was John's wont, the tag had been fashioned from a scrap of wrapping paper and, bless them, the rest of his family signed it as well:

One signature, however, was an outlier and gave me pause: Guido Grilli. Who the hell was Guido Grilli? If the signature had registered at all at first sight, any memory of it had long receded into my subconscious. The signature itself was the first clue, however, as it was in the same pen and script as that of John's father Bernie, the J.B. on the tag, short for John Bernard, though I still balk at addressing him or John's mother as anything other than Mr. or Mrs. Cusack. Given the nature of the gift, the best bet was that Grilli had to be a ballplayer of Mr. Cusack's past, because he certainly was not one of mine. So back to the Topps catalog I went where, lo and behold, I found an entry among the pitchers: "GRILLI, GUIDO... 66/558" - 1966 set, card number 558.

Sure enough, there he was, one of the Sox rookies that Topps was projecting would make a splash in 1966, featured on one of the vaunted "rookie cards" that commands greater attention among collectors, but if and only if it features at least one player whose career panned out, more so in this case for "The Boomer", George Scott, than alas for Mr. Grilli: as 1966 was his only season in the Major Leagues, this would come to be his only Topps card.

But still: why Guido Grilli?

It wasn't long after making John's acquaintance through the Boston Latin School Drama Club in 1980 that I had been invited to his family's home near Brighton Center, ridiculously close to, and yet a world away from, the Oak Square enclave of my youth. The walls of the home's connecting hallway had been fashioned into a library like nothing I had ever seen before. And there, among all the volumes, I spotted a hardcover copy of The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book! I knew there and then that I was among kindred spirits, if not family. 

Now, seeing Guido Grilli again after all these years begged the question - was he in fact in The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book? The problem with a work so scattershot in its reminiscences is that it has no index. If ever a work merited a modern treatment of annotation and hyperlinking in order to facilitate locating information about those featured, surely this would be a prime candidate. Luckily however, fate smiled upon me as I flipped pages backward from the end, for there on the last page of player profiles I found it:

Some things are just funny in and of themselves.

I shudder to think about where I'd be were it not for making that bibliographic connection all those years ago that cemented the relationships that bring me here today. So it's with a tip of the cap, and a homage to the farewell at the end of The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book, that I say, "Goodnight Sibby Sisti, and Guido Grilli, and J.B., wherever you are."