‘The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife’

There are quite a few different things we’d like to revisit from our childhood, but chief among them is our adolescent love of cracking open fresh wax packs of baseball cards. There’s just something about a newly opened collection of fifteen cardboard ball players and a stick of bubblegum that will always take us back to our formative years. That’s where author Brad Balukjian’s The Wax Pack book comes in. Balukjian had this crazy idea for the book–what if he opened a pack of cards from his childhood and tried to track down all the players on them? As they put it–“To get a truly random sample of players, Balukjian followed this wildly absurd but fun-as-hell premise: he took a single pack of baseball cards from 1986 (the first year he collected cards), opened it, chewed the nearly thirty-year-old gum inside, gagged, and then embarked on a quest to find all the players in the pack. Absurd, maybe, but true. He took this trip solo in the summer of 2015, spanning 11,341 miles through thirty states in forty-eight days.” It seems like absolute insanity, but in practice, it’s the kind of things that dreams are made of. The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife will be released on April 1st this year.