Everything I Need To Know, I Learned from '59 Topps

It sounds like an indictment of the modern educational system to suggest that there was nothing left to learn after a couple of balmy summer evenings in 1959. Actually, I did pickup a few odds and ends, mostly technical stuff, in high school and college, but the really important foundation was already there. All for a nickel.

While my own education came from the classic 1959 set, the process works with virtually any of the sets from 1952 to 1980 or so. Quite arbitrarily, I exclude all of the sets, regardless of manufacturer, from 1981 on, since all that they have managed to provide in the way of education are the underpinnings of a graduate-level course in economics.

Think about a youngster nine years old. Restless, inquisitive, eager for knowledge but often resistant to traditional forms of learning. What better vehicle to get the old brain working than baseball cards? We learned stuff from those cards without even knowing that we were learning it.

Sometimes even complicated concepts that made pointy-headed English teachers groan were easily dispensed with by the good folks at Topps.

Want an example?

How many out there understand the idea of "damning with faint praise?" I watched a college English teacher work himself into an hysterical frenzy trying to explain it to bored freshmen in 1973, and if I'd had a handful of '59 Topps in my pocket, the whole class would have gone home early.

Pete Whisenant was a guy who looked like he should have hit 30 homers in his sleep, and his name even sounds like a baseball player's name.

But what does the famous Topps cartoon on the back of his card talk about? Pete's 5 for 5 last year, or his three-homer games? Nope. "Pete's favorite hobby is eating," it says nicely under a drawing of a fellow having a snack. I can't speak for the rest of you, but it made me wonder what his other hobbies might be; breathing and sleeping?

So by noting that Topps could think of nothing else swell to say about Pete other than pointing out how much he liked food, I understood what "damning with faint praise" was all about.

How about geography? We carefully examined where everybody was born, and also where they lived that year. In the course of trying to find a ballplayer that actually came from a town that your older brother Biff had heard of, a brisk lesson in geography inevitably followed. Mudcat Grant's cartoon (card #186) offered that the big right-hander had gotten his nickname from a teammate who had mistakenly thought he was from Mississippi, the Mudcat State. We were highly contemptuous of such errors... everyone knew that he was from LaCoochee, Florida!

Math was easy. Wading through the embarrassing wealth of statistics that Topps provided every year certainly gave me all the math I ever wanted to know (It may not have been all the math I ever needed to know, but it clearly was all I ever wanted). To this day I am obscenely proficient at figuring someone's age from his/her date of birth, and I have no one to thank for the skill but Sy Berger (Topp's baseball card guru for most of the really classic years).

The 1959 set may not have been a complete historical anthology, but it did offer a glimpse here and there. Various cards at least depicted some of the highlights of baseball history, and all the rest is really nothing more than just filling in the gaps.

Ted Williams missed a couple of years to military service in the mid-forties and again in the early fifties. Nowhere in the card does it say World War II or the Korean War, but we knew that nothing short of global conflagration could make Teddy Ballgame miss entire seasons.

What a marvelous lesson for life, to understand at such a tender age the awesome responsibility that comes with the knowledge that such historical blips on a baseball card were really genuine disruptions of people's lives; that information would be helpful for those of us just a couple of skinned knees and a bout with puberty away from Vietnam.

Those of you who are old enough to think of U2 as a spy plane rather than as a rock group may recall that Williams didn't actually have a card in the 1959 Topps set. It was a fairly troublesome development at the time, but by the time the Seventh Series rolled around and he was nowhere to be found, it was getting a little late to make a fuss. His absence from that classic set was the stutter that calls attention to the eloquence, the one flaw that made us now, if not at the time, even more aware of what a great set it was.

But it was in teaching of the King's English that Topps really sparkled as a private tutor. We shall start alphabetically, which by the way Topps was instrumental in teaching, since the really anal retentive kids kept their cards in alphabetical order instead of the more logical and visceral team arrangement.

Alliteration. Like so many advanced concepts, we learned this one without even knowing the technical term for it. Words of Wisdom, Batter Bafflers ... these multiple-player cards were two of the forerunners of rhythmic beauties like Master and Mentor and Lindy Shows Larry that would follow in years to come.

The 1959 set also had Keystone Combo, which is an even higher form of alliteration where the two words sound alike but begin with different letters.

I'd like to tell you that the exercise also helped me learn what "keystone" meant, but to tell the truth, I always thought it meant second base. Later in life, when I moved to Pennsylvania, I thought it a little odd that it was known as "The Second Base State."

Topps also helped us with synonyms, familiarizing us with twirler and circuit smashes, the hot corner, southpaw, second sacker and so forth. All of this generally left many fourth graders with enough of a grounding in the art form of the hackneyed to be competent sports writers or even elected officials.

Vocabulary probably got the biggest boost of all. Card number 208, Willie "Puddin' Head" Jones, included a reference to "doldrums". By utilizing our considerable understanding of what playing with the Phillies was like in those days we learned to pick up the meaning of words by their use in context, another handy trait for life if ever there was one.

Gene Oliver's card (#135) points out that the Redbird backstop had caught eight men stealing the previous season. Gene's cartoon shows a catcher saying "Halt, vile thief."

Know any nine-year-olds who use "vile" with any regularity? I took an informal poll at a video game arcade last week of 73 youngsters ranging in age from seven to 12, and only one knew the definition of vile, and he looked like Mel Roach.

Which brings us to the more subtle things that Topps taught us, the misty, elusive skills so useful in life but clearly lacking formal inclusion in the curriculum of the day. Like confirming stereotypes. Mel Roach (#54) attended the U. of Virginia, and, by golly, he looked like he attended the U. of Virginia.

Jim Brosnan's cartoon (#194) noted that "Jim was a constant reader," which was sort of an educational double play (confirming stereotypes, since with his thick glasses he looked like a constant reader, and damns with faint praise). My best friend at the time, Tommy Fallon, even suspected that Brosnan might someday write a book divulging dugout secrets, presumably arriving at that conclusion by using his own intuitive skills and those telltale hints from Topps.

The gang from Brooklyn was perhaps at their best when it came time for their intricate billing system that probably would have made a Hollywood producer envious.

Just as we know that Jerry Mathers was really the star of "Leave It To Beaver" even though his name was the fourth one mentioned in the opening credits, so too did each youngster in 1959 understand the status-accordings aspects of Topps assigning numbers like 100, 500, etc. It was never stated anywhere that they would do it that way, but they did it enough so that you knew someone was applying some kind of formula to the process.

Long before there was much talk of Numerology, we would get into heated arguments (which, no doubt, was good training for the debate team) about some of their selections for the various honors. For example, I was always particularly bothered by Bob Cerv being given Number 100 that year. True, he had hit 38 home runs in 1958, but his best year before that in the four bagger department was 11. Perhaps it bothered me most because Hank Aaron, easily my favorite players and one coming off yet another fine season enroute to Cooperstown, wound up with #380 that year.

No way this nine-year-old could stand still for Hank as #380 while Bob Cerv was perched on #100. I figured that if you are that short of numbers that Aaron has to take #380, then Cerv should have been something like the dreaded #427 or the like.

I must admit that I don't know to this day how Topps managed this final bit of education. Countless Topps cards of that year and many others spoke of this bonus baby or that, frequently stating to the final dollar how much this cartooned fellow in diapers received for signing on the dotted line. Maybe it was their selection of players, or maybe it was just a coincidence, but somehow we knew that Tom Qualters (#341), despite his bonus baby status, was more likely to remind us of Gig Young than Cy Young.

All told, not a bad education. All that was lacking was a diploma, which they easily could have included as an insert in the Seventh Series packs.

Go ahead and laugh, but it doesn't sound much sillier than a Houston Astros hologram. My Topps-inspired education left me fairly smart but still not nearly smart enough to figure out what to do with a hologram.