When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to become a professional baseball player. I loved playing ball, and all of the adult men in my family seemed to respect it, too. When I wasn't playing ball, I'd be in my room, listening to the radio, and drawing up my own baseball cards. Collecting cards, too, was a wonderful hobby. The photographs on the fronts were nice, but I was more interested in the information on the backs. Even when UpperDeck came out with their glossy, action photos, Topps cards remained, in my mind, the absolute best. Topps cards listed all of the stats for every single season of a ballplayer's career, even going back at times to his minor league years. How can you beat that?
Of course, there are the intangibles: a player's attitude, the way he hustles, his clubhouse presence, etcetera, but I don't think I considered those things very much back then. It was the certainty of statistics that mattered most to me. There's no doubt about a strikeout, no doubt about a run batted in, no doubt about a win. Stats told a clear and simple story, stats told the truth.
And, with that in mind, I created my own stories — a career's worth of games played, at bats, hits, runs scored, doubles, triples, home runs, runs batted in, strikeouts, walks, batting averages, and more. I was traded, I was injured, I made it onto All-Star teams, collected Gold Gloves and Most Valuable Player awards, led the league in a number of offensive categories, fell into a slow but steady decline, and, finally, retired.
