In the Key of Gold and Green – A Fugue for Vida Blue

In the Key of Gold and Green – A Fugue for Vida Blue

By Steve Brightman

I am fifty-three years old and I honestly don’t remember a time when baseball cards weren’t a part of my life. Put simply, I was a high-strung kid. My brother, younger by two and a half years, was less high-strung but was keen on following his older brother’s lead. Since me and candy were a potent combination for my mother and since me and candy and a younger brother were even worse, she was forced to come up with a solution pretty early on. One inspired and fateful Easter—instead of loading our baskets up with chocolate—she loaded them up with baseball cards. On one condition: that we turn over all of the gum from the packs once we’d opened them.

She was a bookkeeper by occupation and was deliberate in tracking how many packs she gave us and she knew how many rectangles of chalky, powdered goodness she’d better get back. Despite butting heads with the futility of mathematics and exchange of goods, there was no turning back. I was hooked. That was spring, 1975. I’ve been collecting ever since. Through no small coincidence, my favorite card comes from the Topps set issued that year.

Obviously, for those familiar with what are now considered “vintage” trading cards, the 1975 design stands alone throughout baseball card history and elicits very strong responses in both the “LOVE THEM” and “HATE THEM” camps. I don’t know that any set conjures such strong feelings on both sides of the emotional spectrum. But card 510 from that 1975 set was the perfect gateway card for me as a child.

Team name: two letters, one syllable – A’s.

Player name: eight letters, three syllables – Vida Blue. 

The forced perspective of the card makes Blue seem like a literal giant against the brilliant blue sky. He could have been six feet tall. He could have been sixty feet tall. He made the small patch of clouds behind him seem puny by comparison. The yellow of his sleeves is offset by the incandescent yellow of the bottom of the card.

The greens of Blue’s jersey, the yellows of Blue’s three-quarter length sleeves, even Blue’s Black face against the blue sky were multiforms in a photographic sense, rather than as oils laid upon a canvas. Blue seems to, at once, be a physical impossibility: an actual part of the sky, hovering in the sky, and eclipsing the sky.

Additionally, blue sky in the photo, which seems so miniscule behind the man unironically named Blue, is offset by the electric blue lettering across the top of the card. This unintentional symmetry was weighty and profound to me in ways I can still not fully verbalize almost five decades later. Vida—in green and gold—against that blue sky, his simple and static majesty, stayed with me through my life as I grew older. I left my small town in northeast Ohio and joined the navy. I served the full four years of my enlistment and decided I needed to return home to go to college. The same college my brother was attending. The same brother who kept our card collections intact while I served. The same card collections we spent hours sorting on the carpeted floor during our childhood.

While engaged in what I will loosely call “studying” at this small liberal arts school, I was fortunate enough to have the time and energy to intermittently expand my attention away from the small cardboard rectangles of my youth in order to fine-tune my ability to be emotionally impacted by art on a much larger scale and became a fan of Mark Rothko for reasons I didn’t quite understand; until I was paging back through my 1975 card set and the Vida Blue card, in particular.

It gradually dawned on me what I found so fascinating about Rothko’s work. His rectangles reminded me of the way my baseball cards floated on the carpet in my childhood home. His rectangles jumped off the canvas and begged me to organize them. The more I stared at Rothko’s work, the more I realized that his rectangles even minimized the backgrounds the same way Blue did in his 1975 card!

Rothko’s piece numbered 24 (which given any remotely karmic justice would have been numbered 35, Blue’s jersey number) was a virtual abstract interpretation of the 1975 card. Sure, it was painted more than a quarter-century before the 1975 Vida Blue card, but since I didn’t see Rothko’s 24 until almost a quarter-century after I saw the Vida Blue card, this made sense in my head.

I sit here, writing this, a couple decades removed from this oddly rectangular lightning bolt of a realization, and little has changed. I still spend hours sorting cards. I still marvel at the brilliance (of color and scope) of that card. The year before the pandemic I spent nine months unemployed. Looking through and sorting cards, searching for Vida Blue 1975 Topps card #510, helped me decompress. It got to the point where my wife not-very-jokingly called it my cardboard therapy.

Now, collecting—and my search for Vida Blue—in a (nearly) post-pandemic world has taken on new weight. My mother, who started this seemingly endless pursuit, has Alzheimer’s. She remembers little of what has happened in the last five or ten years. Her timelines are easily confused, she often forgets how to use her cellphone, and she now needs me to balance her checkbook for her, but when she sees me texting or talking to my brother about cards, she gently elbows my wife and apologizes: I’m sorry I started all of this. I had no idea it would last this long. We all laugh, for now.

Steve Brightman lives in Akron, OH with his wife and their green parrot who rules the roost. His latest book of poetry, The Circus of His Bones, was released during the pandemic by Kung Fu Treachery Press. He firmly believes there are only two seasons: winter and baseball.