Baseball cards and collecting same is a subject we’ve touched on a few other times, but, not this week. No, this week, we’re talking about bubble gum and baseball, including the bubble gum that came in the packs of Topps baseball cards we all collected back in the old neighborhood.
But, before we go any further, let me stress that we collected the cards and not that nasty gum. I can still remember what would happen any time a bunch of us went down to the corner store and bought some cards. Sometimes, we’d open them right away, but, usually, we’d walk back to whichever house was our “base” for the day, sit down on the porch or in the yard, and begin opening. First, the packaging would be tossed aside, and, then we’d begin looking at the cards. And, half way through the first pack, you’d hit that piece of pink bubble gum. And, toss it onto the packaging.
Pack after pack was opened that way. And, when we were finished, we’d each have a pile of cards (and, usually, immediately commence trading), and a pile of wrappers and gum. The cards eventually went into pockets and home with us the next time we went to our own respective domiciles. The gum and wrappers? Right in the nearest trash receptacle.
Now, this isn’t to say no one ever chewed the gum. Folks did. But, not very often. Because, to paraphrase Chuck Noll’s opinion of one of his players, the gum’s problems were great and they were many. First, unlike just about any other kind of chewing gum you might find, the gum inside the baseball card packs was hard. Sometimes diamond hard. If you put one of those sticks in your mouth and began chewing the wrong way, you could end up with blood soaking your bubble gum. And, if you never chewed any of that gum, I am not exaggerating. Because, more than one member of the gang cut his gums or the inside of his mouth with said gum. More often, though, the stick would simply disintegrate as you began to chew, breaking into about twenty little pieces in your mouth. (In fact, sometimes it was in twenty little pieces in the pack.)
Thus, there was a method to chewing the baseball card gum. (Though, again, the best method for dealing with it was trashing it right along with the packaging.) You put it on your tongue and let it sit there, softening in your saliva. Then, when it started to have the consistency of, you know, non-nasty gum, you could start chewing, carefully, softening as you went.
Eventually, the gum would get soft, and then something else would happen that only happened with baseball card gum. You’d start rooting for the gum to lose its flavor. Because, that flavor can best be described as dirt laced with toe funk. So, while we hated when our Wrigley’s would lose its flavor (to the point where Mom would refuse to keep giving us more sticks, since we’d want to throw out the old one and start chewing a new one as soon as that happened), nobody hated it when that pink abomination became flavorless.
But, while few of us chewed the baseball card gum, most of us chewed gum and did so a lot, especially when we were playing whiffle ball (a subject for another day). Because, we always wanted to be just like our big league heroes when we were playing, up to and including imitating their batting stances and quirks like Willie Stargell windmilling his bat. And, since most big leaguers chewed in those days, so did we, even though many of them, of course, were chewing tobacco. Since we were far too young for that, we stuck to gum. (A few of the gang did graduate to tobacco in their high school years. The rest of us, seeing just how gross that was, stuck to the gum. I, myself, went right on chewing gum until college…when I joined the radio station and realized you couldn’t chew gum and talk on the air at the same time. The gum habit left right then and never returned. But. I digress…)
No matter if it was the decent gum or the nasty baseball card gum, if we were chewing gum, we eventually got around to blowing bubbles. As you might expect, some of us were better at this than others. And, if you’ve read anything about the old gang, you’ll know that the folks who fell into the “others” category got ruthlessly abused for it. “Hey, look! ___ is trying to blow a bubble! Maybe you should go get some soap and a wand like a little kid!” “Give it up, ____ the only way you’re going to blow a bubble is to fart in the tub!” And, showing exactly the level of non-Nobel-winning genius you were dealing with here, more than one of us made those jokes about a guy who was holding a bat! But, again, I digress.
We blew bubbles. Some of us did it well. Some of us did it poorly. I did it poorly. Despite the fact that Dad, who tried to teach me more than once, was a pro at it. In fact, he was so good, he could have entered a contest. Yeah. I’m going somewhere with this. There was a contest and it involved our Major League Baseball heroes. Seriously.
It all happened back in 1975, when the best baseball team I’ve ever seen, the 1975-76 Cincinnati Reds, was dominating the Majors. And it involved that nasty gum we used to get in the baseball card packs. See the Bazooka Gum Company was a subsidiary of Topps, the guys who, in those days, dominated the trading card game. And, yes, it was stale, nasty Bazooka gum that sat in the middle of our packs of baseball cards. (To be fair, other versions of Bazooka gum were better…but not great, though they did come wrapped in little comic strips featuring Bazooka Joe, who, shall we say, was never going to rival Charlie Brown or anything.)
Bazooka, looking to sell more gum, approached Major League Baseball with a promotional opportunity…a bubble blowing contest. Enter Joe Garagiola, who, along with his play-by-play duties on NBC’s Major League Baseball Game of the Week, also handled the pre-game show, called “The Baseball World of Joe Garagiola”. As part of said pre-game show, Garagiola hosted “The Bubble Gum Blowing Championships of 1975.”
Players from 22 of the then-24 Major League teams took part, with each of said teams holding their own competition to select a team representative. Said representative then moved into the official “Championships”. And, just who graced Garagiola’s show demonstrating the fine art of bubble blowing? Rick Miller, Mickey Scott, Lee Richard, Eric Raich, Walt “No Neck” Williams, Kurt Bevacqua, Glenn Abbott, Joe Lovitto, Ed Goodson, Jerry Johnson, John Stearns, Mike Sadek, Johnny Oates, Bob Forsch, Rick Rhoden, Doug DeCinces, and Mike Cosgrove among others. Yeah. Not exactly household names. Oh, there were some big stars. Batting champ Bill Madlock, and a quartet of future Hall of Famers, George Brett, Burt Blyleven, Gary Carter, and Johnny Bench. But. None of the Hall of Famers were around when the contest reached its final stages.
The last six entrants were Rhoden, Raich, Cosgrove, Scott, Bevacqua, and Oates. As the contest and the season progressed, Oates won the National League Championship, while Bevacqua won the title of American League Champion. The two would then square off for the title as part of NBC’s pregame coverage of the World Series. Umpire Dick Stello served as the “judge” for the competition, but anyone off the street could have judged the winner of the faceoff. Oates managed a 13-inch bubble. And, yeah, that’s pretty impressive. Now, let’s swing back to the old neighborhood.
We never had a 13-inch bubble. But. It’s possible we might have. Again, lots of bubbles were blown and, if we weren’t in the middle of a game, if we were just sitting around between or after the games blowing bubbles, some of those got pretty big. But. There was a line. It could only get so big before you invited another gang member to reach over and pop it, leaving gum all over your face and, likely, in your hair as well. So, yeah. Nobody tried for 13-inches. Now, back to Johnny Oates.
Oates managed a 13-inch bubble. Bevacqua’s measured (and it was measured with calipers) 18-and-a-half inches! Yeah. Nobody in the neighborhood was getting near that, even if an “on penalty of death” moratorium on bubble popping had been put in place. (Bevacqua later said the key to blowing huge bubbles was not to blow into the bubble but to breathe into it, since the act of blowing uses much more force and weakens the walls of the bubble. Hey. He won the contest. He’s probably right.)
And, um, that was it. The year-long contest featuring 22 teams (Only the Tigers and Pirates did not participate. Rhoden, Madlock, Blyleven, and champion Bevacqua would all wear the black and gold, Bevacqua on two separate occasions, but none of the four was with the team in 1975), was won by a utility infielder most casual fans couldn’t have picked out of a line up. And, there was no “Bubble Blowing Championship of 1976.”
Well. That wasn’t quite it. In 1984, Bevacqua hit a pair of home runs for the San Diego Padres in a World Series the Padres would lose in five games to the Detroit Tigers. Two homers in five games. For a player who, in 972 other Major League games, managed 27. Those World Series homers rank as two of the four highlights of Bevacqua’s career. A third came in 1976, when the utility infielder appeared on Topps Card #564 labeled “Bubble Gum Champ Kurt Bevacqua” that showed him blowing the winning bubble. The fourth highlight, and my favorite, involved LA Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda.
While Bevacqua was in San Diego, where he played the last four seasons of a fifteen year career (and, by the by, it was his second stop in San Diego, the two stretches with the Padres broken up by his second run with the Pirates), Dodgers relief pitcher Tom Niedenfuer was fined for intentionally throwing at and hitting a Padres batter. Bevacqua, clearly referring to Lasorda, said, “They ought to fine that fat little Italian, too. He ordered it.” Prompting a classic Lasorda tirade. “F**ing Bevacqua couldn’t hit water if he fell out of a f***ing boat!” But. Man, could he blow a bubble.
Things Amic Thinks About 