Patrick J. Caraher

Remember when the most exciting moment of your childhood was opening a fresh pack of baseball cards? How you gazed lovingly at the pictures of your heroes, pored over their statistics, thrilled to their exploits and identified with their lives? We all know someone whose baseball card collection was the most significant touchstone of his childhood. Baseball card collector Patrick Caraher has turned his lifelong passion into a spiritual odyssey in Lessons in Life I Learned from Baseball Cards. Selecting some prize items from his collection, Caraher has reflected on their larger resonance and produced this little gem of a book, the sports equivalent of Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. With deft cameos of stars whose admirable lives and careers characterized such virtues as fortitude, humility, determination, honesty, and decency, Caraher has breathed life into the statistics behind baseball's role models and produced a collection of miniature portraits that illuminates the national pastime as few other books have.