Quick Take
- Narration: Brad Balukjian reads his own work with genuine warmth and self-aware humor, the author’s presence adding authenticity that a professional narrator might not have replicated
- Themes: Nostalgia and its limits, baseball’s afterlife, obsessive-compulsive disorder and identity
- Mood: Heartfelt and road-weary, funny in the right places and unexpectedly tender in others
- Verdict: A road trip memoir that uses a pack of 1986 baseball cards as its engine and ends up somewhere far more honest and strange than a sports nostalgia book has any right to go.
I was not a baseball card kid. I want to say that upfront so you understand why this book surprised me as much as it did. The premise, one man opens a thirty-year-old pack of Topps cards and then drives 11,341 miles across thirty states to track down every player in that pack, sounded like the kind of niche project that works as a magazine feature and overstays its welcome as a book. I was wrong about that. I listened to most of this on a long drive through the Pacific Northwest and found myself genuinely moved by the time I hit the final stretch, somewhere I had not expected to be at the outset.
Brad Balukjian reads his own audiobook, and this turns out to be an important detail. He is a college biology professor, not a professional narrator, and there are moments where that shows. His delivery can be uneven, and some of the more technically demanding passages lack the polish you get from a seasoned voice actor. But none of that matters very much, because what Balukjian has is something much harder to manufacture: sincerity. When he talks about chewing that ancient stick of gum, gagging, and deciding to drive across America anyway, you believe every word of it, because the voice reading those words is the same voice that made the decision.
The Cards as Premise and the Players as People
The book’s central conceit is genuinely original. Rather than choosing a roster of famous players or a historically significant team, Balukjian committed to randomness. Whoever was in that one pack was who he was going to find. The 1986 Topps pack that emerged from eBay gave him a wildly varied group: Rance Mulliniks, Garry Templeton, Don Carman, and others whose post-baseball lives had taken unexpected turns. Some were thriving. Some were struggling. Several were doing things that had nothing whatsoever to do with the sport that had defined their identities for years, and the contrast between what the cards promised and what the men had become is the book’s central source of both comedy and grief.
Reviewers consistently note that the book works because of how Balukjian actually engages with his subjects. He does not drive up, conduct a formal interview, and drive away. He takes a hitting lesson from Mulliniks, watches kung fu movies with Templeton, and visits the zoo with Carman. Those scenes, which could easily read as stunt journalism, instead become the heart of the book. They generate the kind of intimacy that purely interview-based reporting cannot produce, and they are where Balukjian’s personality as a narrator is most fully present.
The Road Trip That Turns Inward
Balukjian is honest about the fact that this project was as much about himself as it was about the players. He is in his mid-thirties, single, driving solo, and wrestling with his lifelong battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder. He reconnects with former partners along the route. He confronts his own patterns of attachment and avoidance. The baseball card pack becomes a frame for something broader: what do we do with the people and the passions that shaped us when we were young, and what does it mean when we go back and find that reality has eroded the myth?
This is where the book transcends its premise. The nostalgia it examines is never simple or comfortable. Reviewer James W. Page III notes the deep similarity between his own childhood relationship with baseball cards and Balukjian’s, and describes the grief of losing his hero Bob Gibson. That kind of resonance is not accidental. Balukjian has written a book about impermanence, and it earns that theme through accumulation rather than through declaration. The 48-day road trip structure, one encounter building on another, gives the meditation on loss its proper weight.
Where the Audio Format Serves the Material
Self-narrated memoirs and narrative nonfiction live or die by one question: does the author’s voice carry the text, or does it make you wish for a professional? In Balukjian’s case, the answer is genuinely complicated. His pacing is sometimes hesitant, and his emotional registers do not always land in audio the way they presumably read on the page. But the 48-day solo road trip energy comes through in ways that cannot be separated from the text itself. The tiredness, the strange intimacy of spending an afternoon with a former big leaguer who is now building furniture or raising chickens, the particular loneliness of a long highway at dusk: these things are in his voice because he lived them.
Reviewer Scott Duhamel describes the book’s mixture of personal story and baseball nostalgia as carrying a particular resonance during times of uncertainty. That reading is right. The book is asking questions about aftermath and what happens when the stories we tell about our lives lose their original architecture.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
You do not need to care about baseball. I am evidence of that. But you do need patience for self-referential memoir and a tolerance for a narrator who is emotionally present in his own material, sometimes uncomfortably so. If you want a clean sportswriting narrative with a triumphant arc, this is not that. If you are interested in a genuinely original American road trip book that uses sports as its entry point into something more complicated and more honest, this will reward the time. One caveat: if you are sensitive to unpolished narration, the print version may serve you better than the audio.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to know anything about baseball or the 1986 Topps card set to enjoy this?
Not really. The book uses baseball as a lens to examine nostalgia, identity, and impermanence. Listeners with no particular attachment to the sport have responded strongly to it for the same reasons sports fans do.
Does Balukjian find all of the players in the pack?
He tracks down all but one. The search for the missing player, and the decision about how to handle that gap, is handled with real narrative honesty rather than a tidy resolution.
How much of the book is about Balukjian’s own life versus the players he visits?
The two strands are genuinely interwoven. His own history with OCD, his past relationships, and his reckoning with nostalgia get roughly equal space alongside the players’ stories. Some reviewers felt it tipped too far toward the personal; others found it the book’s greatest strength.
Is the audiobook narrated professionally or does the author read it himself?
Balukjian reads his own book. The narration is warm and authentic but uneven in places. If polished narration matters to you, the print edition may be a better choice.
