We were kids inhabiting a planet that spun on a Louisville Slugger axis, and the cards were our reward for good drugstore behavior. My cousin Jeff and I followed our mothers silently down makeup and soap aisles awaiting our dollar pack of Topps baseball cards, complete with that glorious stick of balsa wood gum that crumbled in our mouths and required every liquid ounce of saliva we could muster just to get to a chewable consistency. Thirty minutes of torturous eight-year-old composure got us all that remuneration.

Ken Phelps was tucked into one of those wax-paper-wrapped packs. I remember the exact moment Jeff and I discovered him. We were flipping through our newest bundles of cards in the living room of my grandparents' house one afternoon, our excitement tempered by the trouble we would find ourselves in if we woke my napping grandfather. From a stack of action photos of anonymous bench sitters Phelps appeared to us, equal parts Charlie Chaplin and Rick Moranis; a wacky imposter in a baseball uniform. He dared us to interrupt the geriatric silence in the house and we accepted the challenge, rolling on the carpet, wallowing in the kind of laughter that can only engulf a child.

From that moment Ken Phelps became our symbol of the absurd. He was the band geek of baseball. He was the right fielder on our Little League team who stood with his back to the plate, gnawing on his glove and staring at passing trains while a batted ball rolled between his legs unnoticed. He was the kid in our Boy Scout troop who whipped up a souffl