(or 2001 a Strat-O-Matic
Odyssey)
by Phil Trygar
Over the years, I have seen all manner of mayhem and destruction done to Strat-O-Matic cards. I am proud of the fact that I have never intentionally defaced, ripped, flushed, or otherwise destroyed a card. Even when I was a young lad, I had respect for baseball cards, and I treated my Strat sets no differently. My Dad taught me to treat baseball cards well and not use them for anything other than looking at…unless they were a Yankee card. If they were a Yankee, they were fair game to whatever punishment you could dole out. My Dad was a Red Sox fan…ya think?!
One of the more amusing demises that I have witnessed regarding Strat cards came over 2 seasons of playing in the Lackawanna Strat-O-Matic League in Pennsylvania. The LSL was my first Strat league, and it holds many fond memories for me from the almost 17 years I played face to face with other Fanatics in Northeast PA. It also holds the most personal, eye-witness accounts of anger being taken out on those little paper cards than I can possibly remember. This tale, however, is not one of a moment of weakness or loss of self-control that caused the mangling of a poor, innocent Julio Cruz. It is far more insidious than that. It is the heartless, cold-blooded, pre-mediated destruction of scores of non-descript player cards, that no one really knows for sure how many of these face-less masses met their demise. This story makes Hannibal Lechter look like Little Jack Horner and Wade Boggs’ daily chicken gorging look like Akeem Olajuwon during Ramadan. It is the story of…the Card Glutton.
Really, it wasn’t all that, but it looks good in print. It seems that during the off-season one year, one of our league members became the proud father of a baby boy. Being the good baseball fan that he was, he named his son Tristan, after Tris Speaker. At least that’s what he told us. Anyway, as the young lad grew from infant to toddler, he was, as all young children are…curious about their surroundings. Now I don’t know how many of you have kids, or how many have attempted to play a Strat game with 3 year olds or younger in close proximity, but let me tell you, it is not a pleasant experience. Heimliching dice out of a 2 year old is not my idea of a pleasant Saturday evening at home.
Now young Tristan, being ever at his Dad’s side whenever I went to their house for a series, was fond of grabbing handfuls of cards from the table. After a look of horror crossed my face when he grabbed my 1987 Mark McGwire one night, his Dad realized that a diversion was needed to keep the youngster from totally disrupting the game everytime we tried to play. I believe Tristan’s presence in the basement with us during our series was probably meant as payback by his Mother for other alleged transgressions by his Father, but that’s probably a tale left to the Strat Wives. But the means that Dad used to preoccupy his son may have been defeating the purpose, in my opinion.
What Tristan’s Dad did, was allow the toddler to have any Strat card that was not on an LSL roster that season, to do whatever he wanted with. You can imagine what that entailed. After watching the young lad devour Dan Pasqua and Steve Balboni in a single mouthful, I had to say something. “How many cards does he usually eat a day?” I asked. “I’m not sure.” I was told. “I ran out of this years cards and now he’s into last years.”
“You’re kidding?” I said. “He’s eaten over 400 cards?” I was truly amazed. “No, not that many. Most of the time he just spits them back up. See…” I was told. As proof, he held up a wet glob of pink and blue that resembled a large spit-ball, except this one had Tom Nieto’s name on it. “I gotta know.” I told him, as I shook the dice in my hand in preparation for the next roll. “Do you think it’s a good idea that he’s eating Strat cards, even if he is spitting some of them back up?” “Well..” he said. “Sometimes when he spits them back up, it brings the dice he swallowed back up with them…”