Orange County, California ain’t exactly a destination—what with its scenic strip malls and sprawling housing divisions—so when I was growing up my biggest interest outside of video games and Choose Your Own Adventure books and trying to figure out how to get my next door neighbor Darcy to fall in love with me was Angels baseball, and the Angels were a fitting team for Orange County because they weren’t storied and they’d never won anything and they had no real history and were therefore a lot like Orange County itself.
We used to spend a lot of time at Disneyland because when you live in a cultural wasteland like The OC then piling the family into the station wagon for a weekend of “culture” via the Walt Disney Co. is just something you do, and because when all you’re surrounded by on a daily basis is asphalt and Carl’s Jr. and conservative politics it’s easy to confuse It’s A Small World After All with Wagner, and there was this baseball card shop off the side of the highway I’d beg my parents to take me to every time and every time they’d give me $10 and every time I’d try to buy the Topps 1986 Wally Joyner rookie card for $10 and every time my father would tell me that my $10 could buy me ten packs of cards and wouldn’t it be a more fun to get two hundred cards instead of one card and every time I’d tell him that all I’d be getting was four duplicates of some benchwarmer on the Pittsburgh Pirates and ten sticks of shitty gum but every time he’d persuade me anyway, until one time in one of those ten packs I finally got the Wally Joyner rookie card and life finally felt complete and I could finally stop trying to woo Darcy (though I never did).
One day in the summer of ‘86 after Wally had been voted onto the All Star Team I rode my Schwinn down Puerta del Oro to my friend Billy’s house and we were flattening out Fruit Roll-Ups and laying them on the street and daring each other to eat them after they’d been run over by passing cars and joking about how Fruit Roll-Ups were better than gold and so maybe they should’ve renamed our street Puerta de Fruit Roll-Ups, and when that got old we started looking at baseball cards and I showed him my Wally Joyner and he told me he’d trade me his Eric Plunk for my Wally Joyner and I didn’t know who Eric Plunk was but he had a cool name and Billy swore he was going to be the next Dennis Eckersley so I made the trade but when I got home that night my mother marched me right back to Billy’s house and made him give me my Wally Joyner back.
The Angels went to the ALCS that year and played the Boston Red Sox and we went to all the home games and watched the Angels get to within one strike away from winning the pennant when Dave Henderson muscled a Donnie Moore forkball over the center field wall and the Angels imploded and the Red Sox went on to the World Series instead.
It’s twenty-three years later and I’ve lived in about a dozen different places since Mission Viejo and fallen for about a dozen different girls since Darcy and even though I don’t really care about baseball anymore and even though that Wally Joyner rookie card is long gone I live in Boston now and the Angels are coming to Fenway tomorrow with a two-game lead in a best-of-five series and I’ve got tickets right behind home plate and it’s Autumn and it’s that time of year when we have no choice but to reminisce about all the years behind us and to faithfully clutch those few things like playoff baseball which can still remind us of the time when all we wanted was to ride bikes and eat Fruit Roll-Ups and get a Wally Joyner rookie card.
