My Conversation With The Author Who Beat Me To My Great Idea ... And Why His Books Are Must-Reads

To indulge my longstanding interest in sports trading card collecting, for a couple of years I hosted a Sports Card Traders Special Interest Group in my Williamsburg, VA, housing development. Being a career journalist, I often wondered whether that elusive idea for a best-selling book would ever occur to me -- and at one of our monthly club gatherings as I was looking at some 40-year-old baseball cards, a thought struck:

"You know what would be really interesting?" I asked out loud. "I should randomly select a card of a player who maybe played for a few years and then faded into obscurity, seek him out and write a book about the life he has led since playing major league baseball. I'll bet the story of his journey would be fascinating."

"There's a book out there that did that," one of the guys airily informed me, immediately sucking the creative wind from my journalistic sails, leaving them once again limp. A little research on Amazon.com revealed that the book is called "The Wax Pack: On The Open Road In Search Of Baseball's Afterlife," written by an entomologist (a scientist who studies insects) named Dr. Brad Balukjian. Sure: Doesn't every bug-studying scientist write books about no-name guys whose faces appeared on baseball cards 40 years ago?

To write this book, Dr. Balukjian began with one basic rule: He would open a random pack of 1986 Topps baseball cards, and then seek to find and tell the stories of every player in it. He planned an itinerary that took him throughout the U.S. on a more than 11,000-mile road trip during which he drank 123 cups of coffee (he kept meticulous records) to learn the human stories of these men beyond their photos on small pieces of cardboard.

It was a brilliant idea, and I was ticked that Dr. Balukjian thought of it first. But I didn't stay that way for long. Since my original idea was now gone, the journalist in me had a new one: What would possess a guy whose doctoral dissertation was about the 20 new species of bugs he identified in Tahiti to get into a 2002 Honda Accord and subject himself to an 11,000-mile road trip to find a bunch of obscure ballplayers? Inquiring minds (especially those that love baseball and baseball card collecting) had to know. I had to talk to this guy.

But first, I had to read "The Wax Pack" to see the stories I was planning to write. The pack of cards Brad opened contained 14 player cards (and one checklist), ranging from Hall of Famer Carlton Fisk to journeymen such as Lee Mazzilli, Don Carman, Gary Pettis, and a gentleman named Jamie Cocanower -- all names familiar to the true card-collecting aficionado, but not on the tip of a casual baseball fan's tongue. The first thing I had to do was to see if I had all 15 cards in my collection of 1986 Topps cards. Sure enough.

From page one, I was mesmerized by Brad's exquisite storytelling ability. He was able to track down all but one of the players who were still living (one had died), and get most of them to talk openly, honestly and compellingly about what their major league baseball experience was like for them, and what cards life had dealt them since they hung up their cleats. Fourteen lives that had achieved to some degree the dream of every young man who ever seriously played baseball. Fourteen lives Brad made you care about in each chapter.

And it turns out that baseball wasn't Brad's only sports-related obsession when he was a kid. He also was deeply, passionately into professional wrestling, worshipping the larger-than-life characters he fantasized he could be as someone who always described himself as a little different from the other boys in his circle. He followed up "The Wax Pack" with "The Six Pack: On The Open Road In Search Of WrestleMania," in which he similarly sought out six of his favorite wrestlers to learn as much as he could about them as human beings, as opposed to the caricatures they portrayed.

It was not difficult to find Dr. Balukjian's contact information on the website of Merritt College in Oakland, CA, where he is a biology professor and director of its Natural History and Sustainability Program. I wrote him an e-mail, chastised him for stealing my idea, and then told him my own baseball fandom and card-collecting experience, not at all sure he would care to read it. I then told him that, if I couldn't tell these stories, then the least I could do is help bring some attention to his. I asked if he might do a Zoom call with me. Not only did Brad read my story, but we had a nice dialogue about some of our experiences. He graciously agreed to schedule a Zoom call, where I reached him in his home state of Rhode Island.

After exchanging a few more personal baseball moments (he tells the story of a guy who liked his books who invited him to hang with Mike Schmidt), we get to the important stuff, writer to writer: Where did his idea come from? It turns out that the mini-rush that occurs before opening each fresh pack of trading cards, well known to all collectors, is precisely what inspired Brad to write "The Wax Pack."

"The randomness element, the excitement of going with whatever is in this pack, to me lent itself to a book kind of project," he says. "And I knew that most of the players in the pack would be non-stars, which are the guys I always liked the most." With detailed description and entertaining dialogue, Brad proceeds to make you care about what happened to guys like Rance Mulliniks. In the case of "The Six Pack," Brad had decided long ago that he wanted to write a biography in the same vein about his favorite wrestler as a kid, whose ring name was The Iron Sheik but whose real name is Hossein Khosrow Vaziri, a native of Iran. This eventually morphed into a book containing six mini-biographies of some of the characters Brad followed.

I have never taken professional wrestling seriously, and have only had a passing fascination with what could compel so many people to spend their hard-earned dollars to cheer and scream at what is so obviously carefully choreographed theater. And yet, once again Brad's meticulous attention to detail and the probing questions he asked the wrestlers resulted in stories I could not put down. What Brad's book taught me about the macabre world of professional wrestling was entertaining and riveting.

After reading and thoroughly enjoying both of Brad's books, I found myself ultimately grateful that it was he, and not me, who got the idea for and ended up writing "The Wax Pack." Early in his career, Brad says he made the conscious decision that any job he held would be part time only. "I know my own work ethic well enough to know that if I did a job fulltime, I would not have time for anything else," Brad says. "This way, I'm a part time biology teacher, and I get to write."

He's right. With all my fulltime jobs, I never could have done the 10,000-plus mile road trips he took to properly research these books. His work is definitely our gain, and I thank him for having the necessary passion -- and time -- to write two immensely creative and immersive books that must be read by any former kid who collected baseball cards, or wondered what that silly pro wrestling stuff is all about.

Click HERE for Brad's website, The Brad Pack.

Click HERE to order Brad's books on Amazon.com.