For those of a certain generation, The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book, was the greatest book ever written, certainly the greatest book we had ever read, and Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris were Bouton, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare rolled into two. In 152 pages, Boyd and Harris mined the ore of why we all collected baseball cards.
For their literary efforts in shaping a generation (or two, or three) of card collectors, Brendan Boyd and Fred Harris are the recipients of the 2023 Jefferson Burdick Award for their contributions to the baseball card hobby.
GABCFTBGB was, and is, wildly funny, hysterically funny, tears, rolling down your face funny – but with healthy servings of nostalgia, tragedy, and pathos. Sandy Koufax’s 1955 Topps rookie card – his bar-mitzvah picture, wearing a uniform that was a present from his grandmother – is offset by the tragedy of Harry Agganis (and his 1955 Topps card). A few pages after Albie Pearson and his favorite bat Merle, is a solemnly stark page with both 1956 Jackie Robinson and 1963 Roberto Clemente cards surrounded by black. Their deaths were recent, shocking and still raw, and you can feel it on the page.
For young card collectors, the book had serious import. First of all, most of us had never seen these cards. This was the early years of card shows, there were a few dealers, and fewer checklist books, and seeing hundreds of cards from Ted Williams to Whammy Douglas was a feast.
Second, and maybe paramount, was that it gave real validation to our collecting passion. As some of us were bordering on junior high and high school, card collecting became our dark secret. We were at the age where we knew that talking about the 1974 Topps Hank Aaron subset was not going to get us a girl. It was the beginning of card collecting feeling a little weird and a lot uncool.
“I was 12 when this book came out,” recalls Mark Armour, SABR Board President, “Most of my friends had moved on to cooler hobbies and girls, and I had slowed down a bit myself. But Boyd/Harris made me realize that someday people might look back on the cards I collected with the same nostalgia, and maybe I wasn’t so uncool after all. [I might have been wrong about that.] My father and his friends started to pick up the book and read some of the passages aloud—not just the funny ones, but the more poignant ones too. Suddenly adults started to ask me about what was in my shoe boxes, and Mom began to tell her friends that her son had a card collection. It was a real game changer.”
SABR Baseball Cards Committee member Mike O’Reilly adds that “this book will take you back to the days when baseball cards served as kid currency among friends. When a quarter bought 5 wax packs and enough bubble gum to mimic Nellie Fox all day on the sandlot. A time when Ted Lepcio was your white whale, and there were no takers for your Mantles because everybody you knew was a Red Sox fan and hated the Yankees.”
Boyd and Harris showed us a different, and better, way to think about all of this – the nostalgia, the players, the sport, the cards. Each entry was a human interest story of people we had grown to know about, and even care about. The cards themselves became something personal, and not strange. The book made us feel like we were part of a larger family that we never knew existed. Yet I don’t think that was their goal when they wrote “Who the hell is Cuno Barragon?”
Congratulations Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris on their much-deserved 2023 Jefferson Burdick Award. And goodnight Sibby Sisti, wherever you are.
Editor’s Note: Attempts to locate or contact Mr. Boyd have been unsuccessful, and there is reason to believe he may be deceased. Readers with pertinent information are encouraged to contact SABR Baseball Cards.
SABR's Baseball Cards Research Committee 