Bats, Balls & Bubble Gum Cards

Baseball fans of all persuasions will enjoy this book as much as a good hitter likes a fastball down the middle. For those who have played the game as amateurs, there are great stories by author George Altemose of playing in the first days of the Mens Senior Baseball League (MSBL), the Stan Musial League, and the Roy Hobbs League, with tournaments all over the country in fields in Cooperstown, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Boston, Chicago, and Florida.

George's opponents in these games included major leaguers Rico Carty, Ron Santo, Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Phil "The Vulture" Regan, and Oil Can Boyd, and his teammates included Dante Bichette and Rusty Meacham. There are fascinating encounters with a number of legendary baseball figures, including Leo Durocher, Charlie Grimm, Specs Toporcer, Tom Seaver, and authors Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ritter. But the main players in the stories are the ordinary players, those who were not destined to play professionally, but who played single games on Saturday and doubleheaders on Sunday, simply because they loved to play.

To pass the time during cold winters and rainy afternoons, George also collected baseball cards and other memorabilia, including bubble gum cards from the 1950s and 1960s and tobacco cards from the T205 and T206 series of 1909 to 1911. Stories of how these cards were acquired, as well as a brief but interesting history of baseball cards over the years from the late 1800s to the present day, will bring a smile to the face of anyone whose mother threw out his cards while he was still in high school. Whether baseball is played at the highest levels, such as we see at Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, or down at the sandlot level on a poorly maintained junior high school field, it is still the same game. Nowhere is this shown more clearly than in this great story of baseball and those who love it.