We can remember it for you wholesale

For arcane reasons I found myself in a memorabilia store in Boulder yesterday. It was a positively anthropological experience, as I was drawn into whole worlds of elaborate obsessions that I had never before encountered. (True story: prior to yesterday I was unaware there is a thing called Magic: The Gathering. I’m still very unsure exactly what this thing is, but it is definitely a Thing, in a big way).

I blogged a little while ago about Julio Rodriguez’s rookie baseball card being auctioned off at a staggering price — another thing that I didn’t know is that there is a whole subindustry dedicated to grading the exact conditions of baseball and other collectible cards — so I gravitated over to the baseball card section, where I found this:

How old would you say Hank Sauer is in that photo? 65?

The copy I was looking at was signed by the man himself, and available for the low low price of $27.99 American.

This led me down a Hank Sauer rabbit hole, who frankly I often confuse with Hank Bauer, and I discovered that Sauer had one of the weirdest major league careers ever. Specifically, he basically didn’t even play in the majors until he was 31, which is an extraordinarily old age to reach the Show for a position player — by 31, 99.95% of professional baseball players are either established major leaguers (a tiny fraction overall of all professional players of course) or they’re never going to make it to the big time.

Sauer is a crazy outlier to this rule — he was a career minor leaguer throughout his 20s, had two big years in AAA ball at ages 29 and 30, and made Cincinnati’s roster the following year, in 1948, thus being both simultaneously a rookie and one of the oldest players in the league, back in the days when 31 was definitely on the old side for a major leaguer.

Then even more bizarrely, after getting traded to the woeful Cubs the next year, he goes on three years after that, in 1952 at the age of 35, to win the MVP award, as memorialized in the signed card above.

Now he was actually a very good player, but statistically it was a pretty ridiculous award: his 5.6 WAR was miles behind Jackie Robinson (8.4) and Stan Musial (7.5), while the highest WAR in the league was actually a pitcher, Robin Roberts, at 8.6.

Some pills make you smaller, and some pills make you small . . .

Speaking of white rabbit holes, did you know that statistically speaking the most similar player in all of major league history to Hank Sauer is Roger Maris? The funny thing about that is that Maris’s whole career was practically over at age 31, which is when Sauer’s began. The other funny thing is that Maris won back to back MVP awards in 1960 and 1961 and then was almost literally never named on another ballot, even though the MVP voting structure means that about 30 players a year get some sort of vote share. (He was picked seventh on one voter’s ballot in 1964). Sauer’s MVP history is somewhat similar in that outside of his freakish win he went almost completely unmentioned, as his second-highest finish was 19th in 1949.

He was a popular player for the Cubs when the Cubs were really terrible — a slugging left fielder with little defensive range not that anyone was paying attention to that at the time. After his career finally ended at the then-truly extraordinary age of 42, he went on to work for the San Francisco Giants’ organization for 35 years. He died in 2001 in California at the age of 84 while playing golf.

Anyway, one thing I’m sorry I didn’t study and the write about in the book I’m publishing in a couple of weeks is the whole world of memorabilia, which has clearly become a kind of parallel universe to the “real” worlds of sports, comic books, films, role playing games etc. — a kind of meta-fandom as it were.

Maybe next time.