I Just Found The Book of 1993 Baseball Cards! People Will Want To Read My Thoughts On That!

Don’t be thrown by the SNES controller. I took this picture today.

I’ve been meaning to get back to creating content for this bad mamma jamma of a blog here for several weeks now, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I found the proper inspiration to do so. Some might credit fate or say it was “written in the stars” that I would happen to find this near 2o-year-old hardcover book about baseball cards whilst agitatedly shoving items aside during the process of resetting my crappy wireless router. Others, perhaps those who have been in my home recently, may have observed that the book had been resting on a shelf near the router — maybe even unavoidably close — for quite a while, and that I am simply romanticizing what really occurred here for dramatic effect. We may never know what the real reason was. Regardless, I soon found myself skimming through the contents of The Book of 1993 Baseball Cards, mildly intrigued by which players’ cards were considered excellent investments before a shared period of ridiculous overproduction in both the sport itself and the trading card industries largely made such speculation a waste of time.

The format of the book is very simple. With the exception of a seven-page introductory article, each page contains pictures of the 1993 baseball cards of two players, along with a short blurb detailing the player’s career achievements and stat lines for the 1992 season, as well as a player’s career stat totals. The blurbs also tend to recommend a reasonable price to pay for each player’s card, as well as an opinion on which of the player’s 1993 cards is the most aesthetically pleasing. The pricing recommendations were where I paid the most attention thanks to the combination of hindsight being 20/20 and the always amusing suggested retail value of five cents for common cards featuring non-star players.

Is Straw Man Bill James Baseball’s Harold Camping?

Today is May 22, 2011 — a great day to be alive in general, but particularly for the bevy of baseball traditionalists out there.

It doesn’t take much thought to realize why it’s generally great to be alive. In this case, however, the allusion is to the fact that in recent days, weeks, and months, speculation began to run amok that the rapture would occur on May 21. It was said that God’s “select people” — a cross section comprised of around three percent of the world’s population — would be invited into His kingdom, leaving the remaining 97 percent of humanity to await their and earth’s inevitable demise five months in the future.

Fortunately for the wicked, this doomsday scenario did not pan out. The void of devastating earthquakes sweeping the globe at each time zone’s 6 p.m. local time was surprising to some, but most had discounted, if not ridiculed, the notion that any man could successfully forecast earth’s destruction. Still, when someone makes this type of prediction — bold as it may be — he or she should be held accountable when things don’t turn out as expected.

The individual responsible for the May 21 rapture alarm was Christian radio host and author Harold Camping, who has surely already taken his fair share of abuse following his missed prediction. Yet, a quick review of his resume — specifically the area detailing prior hunches about the end of the world — revealed that this wasn’t his first would-be-rapture rodeo. Camping had his first swing-and-miss on the issue back in September 1994, a failure he chalked up to spotty math.

Math? That’s right. Camping, a civil engineer with a degree from Cal-Berkeley, arrived at his two failed predictions of the rapture through numerology. He contended that he had discovered a way to quantify various prophecies within the Bible, and used the data to extrapolate the date that the Earth would end. Nefarious as this all might sound, many chose to believe Camping’s calculations and prepared for May 21 by taking drastic measures such as quitting their jobs or emptying their bank accounts. Clearly, there were some believers out there.

What does any of this have to do with baseball?