Dave Parker...and navigating change.

 

I don’t like change.

            There.

            I said it.

            But I’m one of those people who thinks he likes change. A “roll with the punches” kind of guy. I tell my wife change is inevitable. Change is the only constant. Change is the only thing that we can truly count on in this world. Nothing ever stays the same. I expect changes to happen and I always try and act like I’m not bothered by change.

            I’m a bad actor.

            I’ve never “rolled with a punch in my life”

            I live as if I’m forever sailing upstream against the wind.

            Oh…

            And…

            Fuck change.

            Or maybe I’m just going through a lot of changes right now, so I’m taking change to task. I’m writing this at my desk in the bedroom of our new apartment. We lived in our previous place for fourteen years. That’s a long time. For me it’s five poetry books, thousands of poems, and at least three published novels long. The only place that I ever lived longer was one of my boyhood homes. And only by months. You get used to things, both good and bad, when you live somewhere for fourteen years. Things around you may change. Circumstances. You get older and look older in the mirror. But home can be a constant.

            I liked having a constant.

            But my wife and I fell out of love with our apartment. We used to call it The Bunker ala William S. Burroughs. By the time we moved out last week, we’d been calling it The Shithole for at least three years. There were a lot of constants that made us fall out of love with the place. The apartment got old and things broke. Our landlord, who had been used to NOT hearing from us, really didn’t want to fix things when they began to break down after fourteen years of use. Case in point, our bedroom ceiling has been leaking on and off for three years. We lived on the first floor of a busy street in Brooklyn. You get tired of people stopping in front of your window to talk, or the constant stream of people looking inside your window when you're just trying to read, watch TV, or make a meal. Get tired of watching people clean up their dog’s shit. Get tired of the cars roaring by.

            When we moved in, we were the younger people in the building.

            Now we’re the middle-aged people.

            Young people are loud.

            It’s amazing we stayed as long as we did.

            My job is changing. Or, rather, it’s going back to the way it was. I’m not going to go on a long prosaic diatribe about Covid-19, but like many people my work was affected by it. I work with the public. You can’t work with the public during a pandemic. So, they sent us home. They paid us but they sent us home. For four months (middle of March 2020 to middle of July 2020) I didn’t go to work at all. Since July 2020, I’ve been working two to three days a week with very limited contact with the public. Where I work the place is busy and the public is demanding. I’m the supervisor there and before Covid-19 it was stressing me the hell out. Without that stress I probably wouldn’t be writing about baseball cards on a baseball card blog. For evidence please read HERE.

            Starting next week, we’re going back to the way things were.

            The hours.

            The public.

            The stress.

            This is a change I’m not ready to make.

            I might be the only person who truly misses 2020.

            I was thinking about these stresses, about change, when I was trying to figure out what to write about this week. Then it hit me. Change is inevitable in your favorite sport, in your favorite hobby. Your team doesn’t stay together. Us Pirates fans know that more than most. Your favorite player changes teams. Players retire. A young star gets hurt and is gone for the season. I remember being sixteen or seventeen and complaining when the baseball card companies began changing their product to compete with Upper Deck, an expensive upstart that I wrote off from the beginning. I missed my wax packs. I missed the old cardboard on the cards, especially Topps. I didn’t want glossy this or glossy that.

            I didn’t give a shit about gold inserts.

            I still wanted to pay forty-cents for a pack of cards.

            But…

            Change…

            I wonder if I was thinking about change when I pulled this card from a pack way back in 1985.

            Dave Parker left the Pirates in 1984 when I was ten. He’d been a constant presence on the Pirates and in Pittsburgh for as long as I could remember being a baseball fan. He was the Cobra. A fixture in right field. A member of the Lumber Company. A key cog in the Fam-I-Lee. A four-time All-Star up until that point. An MVP. A batting champ.

            What in the hell was he doing in Cincinnati?

            Playing for the goddamned Reds?

            Sans beard and earring?

            It appeared that Dave Parker needed a change too.

            Or he needed some familiarity.

            Dave Parker is from Cincinnati. As a ten-year-old kid I didn’t know that. I guess I was a crappy baseball card back reader. Later on, I could appreciate him wanting to play in front of his hometown fans. But the ten-year-old me wanted Parker in right field at Three Rivers Stadium. Before I realized that I absolutely SUCKED at baseball, I often dreamed of becoming a big leaguer and playing in front of the cheering hometown crowd at Three Rivers Stadium.

            What baseball-loving kid didn’t?

            And why didn't the Cobra anymore?

Dave Parker probably also needed to get the hell away from the city of Pittsburgh. While there were a lot of good years with the Pirates, things began to turn sour for The Cobra in the early 1980s. There were injuries. There was weight gain. There was cocaine. There was that million-dollar contract that brought out the racist ire of sports fans in Pittsburgh, when Parker didn’t play at his elite level. Or just because he was wealthy and Black. Fans threw nuts and bolts and bullets and batteries at him from the stands. People I knew referred to him as that Rich N-Word.

I wouldn’t want to play for those bigots either.

Sometimes we have no choice but to make a change.

But I always loved Dave Parker. I followed his career in Cincinnati and then during his journeyman years in Oakland

Milwaukee 

Anaheim 

and finally Toronto. 

During those remaining years, The Cobra was an all-star three more times, He was a World Series champ with the A’s in 1989. When the Pirates started getting good again in the late 80s, I used to daydream that Parker would come back to Pittsburgh and be an elder statesman to young stars like Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonilla.

But while change is inevitable…you also can’t go home again.

plus...

Bobby eventually became a Met

Barry eventually became a Giant

When I got back into collecting in 2019, because I needed to make a change in my life, I started to think of players that I wanted to personally collect (PC for those who don’t know). Dave Parker was high on that list. But before I could even go and buy some Parker cards on my own, the wonderful poet and fellow collector, Steve Brightman, sent me some Parker cards along with a bunch of others cards to help get me back into the swing of things in The Hobby. While I thanked him then, I want to thank you again now, Steve, because those Parker cards are some of my favorites.

In fact, here ARE some of my favorite Dave Parker cards.

Obviously there's the 1974 rookie card that I bought in a Flea Market in the Pittsburgh suburbs back in late 2019....my last visit home before Covid.

            There's Parker's 1976 Topps card. One of my favorite sets of all time as well.

            1978 Topps. Dave deep in thought. Thinking of a home run. Or Europe

            1980 Topps Dave Paker. A bad ass card of a bad ass man from the very first year that I collected cards

            1984 Topps. Parker was gone but good ol' Topps still gave him one last card with the Pirates. The crown jewel of my team set.

            1983 Fleer. The uniform stands out. The Cobra looks bad ass yet again on Fleer's first really great design.

            1985 Fleer.  Parker's first Fleer base not as a Pirate. A bittersweet card. But a damned fine looking one.

Change is hard.

Change is frightening at any age.

Change is difficult.

Change actually is inevitable.

I’m writing this essay in a bedroom that is just over half-unpacked. The walls are bare and show no signs of a life lived. Items that I put on my writing desk are still in boxes, along with stacks and stacks of writing. The movers broke my desk during the move. It’s an old and cheap desk and I knew the risks with it. I’d been meaning to replace it for years.

How it’s still standing I don’t know.

All I know is that I’m going to be changing desks.

Very soon.

But the place we live in is much nicer than our old place. We’re on the second floor of a house instead of an apartment building. The street is quieter too. No one screaming in our windows. No cars racing up and down. No dogs shitting in front of me when I open the blinds.

No loud young people.

Once I get my new desk, I’ll unpack the writing stuff. The figurines. The signed balls. The 1984 Topps Dave Parker card that I keep on a little stand. I’ll hang the pictures of Pittsburgh and Jack Kerouac that I always had looking down on me. I’ll write my first new poems here. The first sentence of a new novel. Take a sip on my coffee and sit back when something good on the ol’ classical station plays.

Maybe change isn’t so bad.

 

Thanks for reading! Happy collecting!

 

If you’d like to learn more about the life an career of Dave Parker you can do so HERE and HERE.

           For those seeking a deeper dive, there’s an excellent bio/memoir out on Dave Parker called Cobra: A Life of Baseball andBrotherhood. It’s co-written by Dave Jordan and Dave Parker himself. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It’s a must for baseball fans, Dave Parker fans, and fans of those 1970s Buccos teams. Jordan does an excellent job of getting Dave Parker down on the page, to the point where it feels like you’re sitting there chilling with The Cobra over a few beers, while he tells you his life story. If you get a chance, read Cobra: A Life of Baseball and Brotherhood.

 

NEXT FRIDAY: I’m heading home to Pittsburgh and plan on doing some card shopping. Looking for a lot of cards of Steelers from the 1970s and 1980s, as I’m on a bit of a Football reading jag as of late. So we’ll take a look I what I was able to find, and maybe review a few of the places where I stopped.