The Wax Pack, Part II

Back in June 2020, going slightly batty with pandemic boredom, I read a baseball book called The Wax Pack by an author named Brad Balukjian. Based on the premise of Lawrence Ritter’s excellent book The Glory of their Times, Balukjian opens an old wax pack then spends the better part of a year tracking down each of the players in the pack. It’s an entertaining read and if you haven’t read it, you should give it a try. I don’t have a year to spend tracking down former players, but at a recent card show, I did have a dollar which was good enough to buy two unopened packs of Topps 1988 baseball cards. Each pack contains 15 cards and one stick of hardened, dusty, nasty-looking gum.

I wasn’t…