No. 728 – Cherub Rock

Performer: Smashing Pumpkins

Songwriter: Billy Corgan

Original Release: single, Siamese Dream

Year: 1993

Definitive Version: None

When Dave and I played in the church softball league in the fall of 1992, one day he brought his old first baseman’s claw mitt that he recently picked up at a card show. I played with it a bit during warm-ups and decided I had to have an old mitt, too. I wanted one of those classic stubby-finger mitts.

I looked around for a while at the Detroit-area shows, and none of them were any good. If it was cheap enough for me to consider purchasing, it was so dried out that it practically scratched your hand when you put it on and crunched whenever you tried to move it.

Fortunately, I had a golden opportunity to find what I was looking for at the biggest card show in the world. In 1993, the National Sports Collectors Convention, the National, was going to be in Chicago at the sprawling McCormick Place. Because Dave and I were now full-fledged card columnists, we figured there was no reason to not get credentials and cover the event—and all of the press conferences—on behalf of the Journal … for free.

My boss, also named Dave, who knew a good scam whenever we pitched him one, said OK, because, well, what could he say? It was a legitimate event, and we were legitimate journalists. As long as we took vacation time to cover it, he was fine with it.

That was the start of a bigger vacation for me, because I decided to take my summer vacation the next week. It was an elaborate scheme: Dave and I would drive separately to Chicago on Friday. We’d go to the show Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday, then Dave would drive home, and Scott would pick me up at McCormick Place.

The two of us then would drive to O’Hare to fly to Seattle, and in the final twist of planning confluence, Jin, who would be arriving that next week from visiting her boyfriend in L.A., would pick up Scott’s car and drive it back to her place.

The Seattle trip was cooked up by me and Scott during our epic 1992 Toronto vacation, and I’ll have a lot more to say about both those trips later. This is the story of a boy and his baseball equipment.

The previous biggest show I had been to at that point was Gibraltar, which had about 200 tables and took up roughly 15 percent of a gigantic flea market building—an airplane hangar, really. But the National made Gibraltar look like a grade-school-gym show by comparison. It took up the entire floor of McCormick Place, which at the time, consisted of just the one huge black building that’s on the lake off the Lake Shore. (There are now three buildings, and the other two put the original to shame in terms of size.)

The National consisted of 800 tables and included booths by all of the card companies—there were about a dozen back then—as well as the four big sports, as I’ve mentioned. And they were dealers from all over the country, not just the same guys that we’d grown used to seeing (and mocking) around Detroit. The chances of me finding what I wanted was very high.

I can’t remember whether it was on a Saturday or a Sunday—I’d guess Saturday—but after stopping at a few tables, I found what I was looking for: a sweet caramel-brown stubby-finger mitt that was soft and flexible and reasonably priced at $20. It fit my hand like a, well, glove, as soon as I put it on, and I knew I had what I was looking for. Yes Yes Yes!!

To this day, I couldn’t tell you one other thing that I bought at that inaugural National, like I can with others, but that’s where I got what became known in my family as The Mitt. In fact, it was such a prized possession that it accompanied me and Scott on our epic travels, with me wearing it proudly in all the photos whenever we stopped to document a milestone, like a new state or a national park.

And I took it with me to MESS later that summer when Siamese Dream was on constantly in my Walkman at the gym and at home. I tried a little infield practice with The Mitt.

If you ever played with an old-fashioned glove, you know that “two hands for beginners” isn’t something an old fogey says for no reason. You need two hands to keep the ball in the glove, because the tendency was for it to bounce out after it hit the pillowesque heel. Old gloves also didn’t automatically close on a hinge like modern mitts do, and they’re much smaller. It took some coordination to actually catch the ball—particularly a softball—but I started to get the hang of it.

I never used it in a game, however. Dave had enough dookie as it was anyway that year at MESS without me adding to the pile.