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. Alternately elegiac and uplifting,
The Wax Pack is part baseball nostalgia, part road trip travelogue,
and all heart, a reminder that greatness is not found in the stats
on the backs of baseball cards but in the personal stories of the
men on the front of them.