It’s a game to help schoolboys forget about school for a few months and to help grown men bond with their sons late into the still-light nights of June, July, August.

You cannot remove the heat from baseball anymore than you can remove the “Big” from “Big Unit” Randy Johnson.

But baseball is also a game for the ages … and a game for the seasons. In fact, baseball — with actual, live practices and games — covers every season of every year.

And that means there are plenty of cold days at the ballpark, in October during the playoffs and World Series, but most especially in February, March, and April, as spring tries to brush back winter.

So our 2019 Spring Training Baseball Card Challenge could not possibly be complete without a tip of the cap to those frigid early contests, which is why today — Day 5 — focuses on a baseball card that looks cold.

As with most of the days in this challenge, this particular theme gives us plenty of fodder to work with, and you can usually get a “feel” for the cold of a particular shot based on what the player is wearing, or maybe where he’s wearing it.

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Both of those apply resoundingly to my ultimate choice — the 1965 Topps Casey Stengel card.

There sits The Old Perfessor in his New York Mets warm-up jacket, propped up on the top step of the third base dugout. Out there where the wind can blow and suck the warmth right out of a man’s body and soul.

And behind him, the Polo Grounds loom dark and cavernous like an abandoned mine. A cold abandoned mine.

As befits his reputation, Stengel looks to be in mid-sentence, his arms flapping in said frigid air. It’s almost as if he’s explaining the history of cold-weather baseball to the photographer.

“In my day …,” you can almost hear Stengel saying.

And he had plenty of “my days” from which to draw, which means plenty of cold days. For goodness sake, dude played in the Major Leagues from 1912 through 1925 and then made his way into the managerial ranks with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1934.

From there it was on to the Boston Bees and Boston Braves before landing the gig that would make Casey a household name. As manager of the New York Yankees from 1949 through 1960, Stengel guided his crew to ten World Series appearances and seven championships.

Not a warm-weather city in the bunch, and plenty of October baseball to keep his blood on ice.

Then, at age 71 in 1962, Stengel took the reins of the expansion New York Mets and suffered right along with the team and the local faithful as the (not) Amazin’s racked up historic loss totals.

No Octobers for the Mets under Casey, but plenty of cold spring games, and plenty of cold vibes as the defeats mounted.

By the time Stengel’s 1965 Topps card made its way into collectors’ hands, his career was pretty much on ice, too. After 95 games that summer, and after posting a 31-64 record, 75-year-old Casey Stengel was dispatched to baseball’s dustbin for the last time.

He would be elected to the Hall of Fame as a manager in 1966, but as far as actually managing? Stengel’s luck had finally run cold.

Check out the entire series of 2019 Spring Training Challenge posts here.

If there had been such a thing as rookie card hype in the early 1950s, Jim Gilliam of the Brooklyn Dodgers would have been near the top of every collector’s hot list.

The National League Rookie of the Year in 1953, Gilliam was part of the first generation of black players to spend the majority of their prime years in the Major Leagues. Although he began his professional career with Baltimore Elite Giants of the Negro National League when he was just 17, Gilliam was in the Dodgers’ farm system by 1951 when he was 22.

Two years later, he joined color-line pioneers Jackie Robinson and NL MVP Roy Campanella in the Dodgers lineup as their starting second baseman –no mean feat considering that Robinson himself had manned the keystone in Ebbetts field since 1948.

Gilliam eventually banged out nearly 1900 hits and stole more than 200 bases in a 14-year career spent entirely with the Dodgers in both Brooklyn and LA.

And yet, you don’t hear much about him.

He was an unsung hero among the Bums and even his retirement was dwarfed by Sandy Koufax‘s decision to walk away from the game after the 1966 season.

Cardboard Limelight

But none of that mattered a whit to me when I somehow got my clammy little mitts on a worn copy of his 1957 Topps baseball card sometime around 1985.

It was the most beautiful card I’d ever seen, and I just couldn’t stop staring at it.

I was in cardboard love.

The card probably came along for the ride in some small lot my parents bought at an auction, or maybe it was part of a long forgotten collection owned by one of my junior high classmates. Most of them were moving on from childhood baubles by that point, which gave me plenty of opportunity to add to my stash.

However the Gilliam came to be mine, it soon dwarfed any of the other cards that came with it. For a time, it even dwarfed my other cards, including the stacks of Pete Rose pasteboards I’d worked for two or three years to build.

I knew the 1957 set was famed for its nearly full-bleed photos and minimal design elements, and I’d seen enough of them to be impressed. But the visuals of the Gilliam card were unbelievable.

Here was a young man in the (for me) mythical Brooklyn Dodgers cap, looking to the horizon of what he hoped would be a bright future, an eternity spent roaming baseball’s green cathedrals. All of it was washed in Dodger Blue and tinged with age just enough to lend an air of … sadness? Maybe, but a golden era lost to the ravages of modernization for sure.

Looking to Deal

About that same time, a dealer from Californa advertised a partial set of 1957 Topps baseball cards in Sports Collectors Digest. The cards, he said, were in fairly “loved” condition but intact, and there were 250 or so of them. They were nearly all commons with a few very minor stars here and there.

I don’t remember his exact asking price, but I knew it was way more than I could lay my hands on.

What I did have, however, was my own collection, which was by all accounts the best in my school and probably one of the best in the county.

I must have read that ad in SCD a hundred times over the next few days, always with my 1957 Topps Gilliam in one hand or resting on the page in front of me.

Wouldn’t it be great if I could get that “starter set” and add my Gilliam to it? I just knew that other cards from 1957 would be gorgeous, too.

Finally, I got up the nerve … to ask my mom to call the guy and see if he’d be interested in making a trade.

He wasn’t.

I was disappointed, sure, but it didn’t really matter. I might never be able to build a complete ’57 set (I haven’t), but I had plenty of other cards to keep me warm by the hot stove and under the summer sun.

And, most of all, I still had that beautiful 1957 Topps Jim Gilliam, still one of my all-time favorite baseball cards, and surely one of the very best from the 1950s.

(This is Day 9 of our response to Tony L.’s 30-Day Baseball Card Challenge. See all our posts in this series here.)

Koufax is the ultimate “what-if” pitcher, and it’s that uncertainty that gives even us old-timers an entry into the …

30-Day Baseball Card Challenge

As a general rule, Wax Pack Gods don’t come in Mylar packages or with published odds of pulling them or any of the other esoteric features of modern baseball cards.

So, under normal circumstances, you won’t read about any quasi-cardboard rectangles issued after about the mid-1990s in this space.

But today …

Well, today is Day 1 of our take on the 30-Day Baseball Card Challenge, a brilliant idea originally offered up to the collecting community by Tony Lehman at Off Hiatus Baseball.

(See all our posts in this series here.)

And Day 1 means we have to select … a card from the current year with a photo we like.

We’re just lucky that Topps is as sappy about their heritage as we are, because that means we can wax poetic about beauties like ….

2017 Topps Archive Sandy Koufax (#175)

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This may not be the greatest photo available among 2017 baseball cards in an artistic sense, or even in a technical sense, but it’s hard to beat for those of us who appreciate the past and pondering what might have been. A 1982 Topps Sandy Koufax card?

Yes please!

In case you hadn’t heard, Sandy Koufax retired after the 1966 season due to elbow troubles that had plagued him for years.

His announcement shocked the baseball world and put an end to an astounding career that seemed to be getting only better when Koufax was just 30 years old. What he lacked in longevity, Koufax made up for in jaw-drops, and he set a record for “most incredible final season” that may never be broken.

That year (1966), Koufax posted a 27-9 record with 317 strikeouts in 323 innings while sporting a 1.73 ERA. If you’re a SABR-rattler, then you probably already know that his 0.985 WHIP, 2.07 FIP, and 10.3 WAR were all out of this world, too.

For his efforts, Koufax nabbed his third Cy Young award in four years and finished second to Roberto Clemente in the race for NL MVP.

Koufax lost his only World Series start that fall even though he gave up only one run in six innings, but his Los Angeles Dodgers were overpowered by the Baltimore Orioles. The Frank Robinson-led O’s swept LA in four games, and then Sandy rode into the sunset.

The loss of a prime-time Koufax was a baseball tragedy, but he had to say goodbye to the game he loved if he wanted preserve what health remained in his precious left arm.

He had no choice.

Or did he?

My Left Arm for a Time Machine

Fast forward to the summer of 1974 when another lefty was leading LA toward a pennant. With a record of 13-3 in mid-July, Dodgers ace Tommy John had to shut down his season due to what was commonly called “dead arm syndrome” at the time. Tests concluded that John had severely injured the ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) in his pitching arm, which was more or less a death knell for his career in the 1970s.

But team physician Dr. Frank Jobe wasn’t quite ready to give up on John and set to work on an idea that would help revolutionize orthopedic treatment for sports injuries: UCL replacement surgery.

On September 25, 1974, Jobe replaced John’s left UCL with a ligament from somewhere else in the hurler’s body, and the wait began.

Though Jobe himself gave John just single-digit odds of ever returning to the mound, the 31-year-old entered into a prolonged period of intense rehab. Finally, after more than 18 months away, John toed the rubber once more on April 16, 1976, when the Dodgers visited the Atlanta Braves early in the Bicentennial season. Though John pitched only five innings and lost 3-1, he came back five days later.

And five days after that.

And pretty much every five days all season long, totaling 31 starts.

He returned the next season, too, and the next and the next.

In fact, John pitched another 14 seasons and racked up three 20-win campaigns after his surgery — he didn’t have even one before the surgery.

So what does all this have to do with Sandy Koufax?

Nothing, really, other than …

• Both Koufax and John were left-handers who starred for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
• Both sustained significant damage to their left (pitching) elbows.
• Both were at the top of their games when they got hurt.
• Both were in their very early 30s when they went down.

Granted, John was a soft thrower — he never reached 140 Ks in a season even before his elbow fell apart — and Koufax was a flamethrower.

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Sandy Koufax in Sideburns?

Still, imagine what might have happened had it been Koufax who was the guinea pig for Jobe’s new surgery rather than John. It’s not that far-fetched when you consider that Jobe started working for the Dodgers in 1964 and that he thought the two pitchers had essentially the same injury. Jobe lamented the fact that he wasn’t “smart enough to do this 10 years before.”

[bctt tweet=”It could have been called ‘Sandy Koufax surgery’. — Dr. Frank Jobe” username=”WaxPackGods”]

So, if Koufax had undergone “Sandy Koufax surgery,” would he have tacked on 14 years to his career?

The idea seems almost preposterous considering how much of a freight train he was, but pitchers have been known to change their style after injury and craft successful second acts — hello, Frank Tanana.

If Koufax had followed the Tommy John schedule, he’d have gone under the knife before 1967 dawned and maybe been on the mound by the middle of 1968. If he had pitched until he was 46, like John did, Sandy would have finally hung up the spikes after the 1982 season.

It’s far-fetched.

It’s impossible, maybe.

But what if? I mean, what IF?

Had Frank Jobe been eight years quicker on the draw, these 1982 Topps Sandy Koufax cards might be buy-backs instead of Archives.

Koufax would have been a true Wax Pack God to a second generation of Little Leaguers and card collectors.

And wouldn’t that have been sweet?

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