Rick Reichardt: Always Top Drawer

Like many people of our age and circumstance, my wife and I are waging a Battle of the Bulge.

Not the epic European WWII battle, or the fight against late-middle-aged spread – although we ARE working hard on mitigating the effects of the latter.

This is about our attack on the various spare rooms, closets and shelves that are bulging with, using the polite term here, stuff – tons of unnecessary items that have accumulated over the past 40 or so years.

We’ve begun an all-out effort to declutter. Outdated furniture, clothes, pictures, lamps and rugs have been the lowest-hanging fruit. They’ve been easy to eliminate, via a dispassionate review and a few trips to Goodwill.

Even quicker has been the purge of products that are long past their expiration date: insecticides, cleaning fluids, paint cans and the like from the garage. They go to the county hazmat drive.

Our current assault is on the numerous boxes and plastic tubs that have stacked up around the house.

We’ve been pretty good through the years about labeling those to make our downsizing decisions easier. Boxes marked “2017 taxes” and “family photos” stay. Those marked “old work training manuals” can’t find their way to the dumpster soon enough.

One box I came across a few weeks ago had me stumped.

About the size of a microwave oven, it was simply marked, “Top Drawer.” It was pretty dusty -- its contents probably not having seen the light of day in years.

What in the name of Hoarders was in this thing?

With equal portions of anticipation and inquisition, I pulled out my trusty pocketknife, sliced through the cellophane tape that entombed the contents, and flipped up the flaps.

And therein, the mystery was solved.

It was a box filled with relics of my youth – mementos of mostly nine -, 10- and 11-year-old me.

It was marked “Top Drawer” because that’s where I housed these keepsakes – in the top drawer of the nightstand next to my bed.

Now, every man who was ever an adolescent boy knows this – when you’re growing up, you have your collection of treasures -- things that wouldn’t make a dime’s worth of difference to anybody else, but still mean a lot to you.

In my case, my top-drawer souvenirs included an old, broken walkie-talkie, a few Mad magazines, and some seashells I’d collected from who-knows-where-and-when. My old Cub Scout neckerchief was tossed in there. And for some reason, I kept a 1971 Day Planner in this drawer. It allowed me to keep track of whatever daily calendar reminders a scrawny 11-year-old kid needed at the time.?

Most of its pages were blank.

Inside this box, atop the pile, was perhaps the most prized possession: a 1969 Topps baseball card, #205 in the series, featuring the likeness of outfielder Rick Reichardt of the California Angels.

To be sure, there were additional cards in the box, ranging from those of Indians catcher Joe Azcue, to Pirates outfielder Richie Zisk.

But the Reichardt card was special – a real thing of beauty, the very definition of what a baseball card should look like.

Broadcaster Joe Garagiola once said of Rick Reichardt, “The first time I saw him, I thought he fell off of a Wheaties box."

Joe must have been looking at my Topps card.

His bat perched on his right shoulder, his two-toned Angels batting helmet (with the awesome white halo slightly visible at the crown) atop his head, Reichardt, the beaming, grinning, fresh-faced 25-year-old kid from Wisconsin, just looked like a ballplayer!

Moreover, to me, he looked like California!

You’d swear if he didn’t have a game to play against the White Sox in Anaheim on a Saturday afternoon, he’d be hanging ten on the waves off San Onofre Beach.

Rick Reichardt was one of the reasons I fell in love with baseball at age nine, and among the reasons I fell head over heels for California as a kid.

My 1970’s growing-up summers were spent on the hot, steamy playgrounds and dusty ballfields of St. Louis. My hometown baseball heroes were named Brock, Gibson and Simmons.

While the Cardinals were my de facto team of choice, the Angels were a close second.

Maybe it’s because the Halos, as they were often called in sports headlines of the day, were such a mystery team to us Midwesterners.

During my formative years of the 1960’s, and then the decade of the 1970’s, the Angels enjoyed exactly six winning seasons. They often were a decent team, but not a great one, so they were seldom featured in the pages of Sports Illustrated. We never saw them on the Saturday Game of the Week – those spots always seemed to be reserved for the Red Sox or the Reds.

The Angels were an American League team and I lived in a National League city, and this was long before the concept of interleague play. Based in the Pacific time zone, nighttime Angel home games began just about the time I was going to bed each night, and following them via the box score in the early morning newspaper?

Forget about it.

Their games usually were summarized the next day as, “CLE at CAL, late.”

But sometimes, lack of data can be a good thing, and imagination is all you need.

With my Reichardt card in hand, I conjured up images of games being played on cool Southern California evenings – with fans wearing light jackets in July, something unheard of in St. Louis.

I imagined players taking the field in their crisp white uniforms in the new and beautiful Anaheim Stadium, the fragrance of the nearby orange groves wafting across the outfield, and that iconic, glorious, 200-foot, halo-topped letter “A” rising from beyond the left field wall.

I imagined a place nearly as magical as Disneyland, which was located just a long home run away.

All of this inspired by my Rick Reichardt baseball card.

These images prompted me to press my parents to take us on a family vacation to Southern California, but by the time we got there – the summer of 1970 – alas Rick Reichardt was gone, traded three months earlier to ANOTHER American League team, the Washington Senators.

And my mom booked our flight to Los Angeles apparently not knowing the Angels also played road games, so by the time we touched down at LAX to start our vacation, the Angels were in the midst of a ten-game road trip to New York and Boston.

The closest I came to seeing my Angels that trip was a quick drive-by of their ballpark, and the securing of an Angels team placemat from IHOP, on which breakfast was served one morning.

I kept it in my top drawer too -- and I still have it; boysenberry pancake syrup stain and all.

While I didn’t get to see the Angels in action, I did get to immerse in California culture on that trip: paying homage to Disneyland, the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Knott’s Berry Farm, Laguna Beach, San Juan Capistrano and a host of other places that held endless fascination and made a pre-teen Midwestern kid feel SoCal cool.

All inspired by my Rick Reichardt baseball card.

Numerous trips to the Golden State followed over the years, both for work and for pleasure, and each time, something new was added to my resume of Southern California sights to be seen: driving through Beverly Hills, a trip to Pasadena, a picnic in Griffith Park, a hike to the Hollywood sign, kayaking in the Pacific Ocean off Catalina Island and yes – eventually an Angels game among them.

One year, my wife and I and another couple drove up the coast from Los Angeles to San Simeon to visit the Hearst Castle.

I once even tracked down and forced my family to take my picture outside the Brady Bunch home in Studio City. ?

All of this began years earlier, with that baseball card.

California has lost a lot of its luster over the years – it’s no longer the mystical place it was when I was a kid. But with a daughter living in Los Angeles, we try our best to visit at least once a year, these days looking for the kitschy, offbeat, out-of-the-way attractions that take visitors to a level above and beyond the usual tourist spots.

And of course, there’s always the beach.

As for Rick Reichardt, after he left California, his baseball career took him not only to Washington but to the south side of Chicago and Kansas City before he retired in 1974.

Again, all American League towns. Drat!

Rick lives in Florida now and thanks to the magic of the Internet, we’re connected via Facebook, albeit by a rather slender thread. A few years ago he sent me a Facebook birthday greeting, probably because my birth date, March 15, precedes his by one day on the calendar each year.?

And that was pretty cool. ?

Students of the game know of Rick Reichardt’s special place in baseball history.?His talents prompted a bidding war for his services in the early 1960’s – earning him a $200,000 signing bonus and ultimately leading Major League Baseball to institute an amateur draft.

Over the course of his 11-year major league career, Rick played in 997 games, hitting 116 big-league homers and driving in 445 runs, which is exactly 997/116 and 445 more than most of the rest of us.

None of the above accomplishments will earn him a spot in baseball’s Hall of Fame.

But he’ll always be a part of mine.

For helping open the eyes of an impressionable kid from St. Louis to a new and exciting world, and for setting the foundation for some of my best life experiences in sunny Southern California, he’ll always be Top Drawer to me.

As always, thanks for reading.

And happy birthday Rick.

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