I know now that the word
avuncular means
with uncle-like affection, but for some time I based my understanding of the word solely on the sound of it, which shared both the soft and fevery V sound of
viral and the general quarantine-ward feel of
tubercular, e.g., "I'd stay clear of that guy. The chronic, rasping cough, the clammy skin, the bloodshot eyes. He's gotta be avuncular." The initial misconception never entirely disappeared, and to this day my perception of
avuncular contains traces of my original misunderstanding. I realized this when
avuncular was the first word that came to my mind when I looked at this 1978 baseball card depicting a friendly, uncle-like, faintly unseemly, and perhaps slightly contagious Stan Bahnsen.
Stan Bahnsen had a 133 and 135 won-loss record at the time of this strange photo, which seems to me, based on the slope of his shoulders and the unusually relaxed, familiar expression on his face, to have been taken by Stan Bahnsen, his unseen arms outstretched and pointing a camera back at himself. I can't explain the blurry and bizarrely uneven background in the picture, but perhaps it is a hurried doctoring job by Topps, commissioned at the very last minute to cover up the original backdrop of the picture, which I can only infer from the leering undercurrent in Stan Bahnsen's grin to be lowlit, illicit, boozy, malarial, the kind of faroff place where an aging avuncular hurler in a marshmallow-pale Expos cap might go to enjoy a stage show involving the ejection of ping pong balls from groin-related orifices.
Man, I wish I could find that SNL skit online.
Players wearing windbreakers under their jerseys.
That look is on SO many cards of my childhood (especially relief pitchers, for some reason.)
But somewhere along the line it went bye-bye, along with high-cut stirrup socks.
The game is the lesser for that.
6 : I'm sure my thoughts on Stan Bahnsen arise in part from my relatively new role as a (childless, aging, weird) uncle.
10 : Yeah, with Bahnsen and Wilbur Wood in their rotation during the early '70s, the White Sox hardly needed anybody else. Bahnsen was also A.L. Rookie of the Year during the year of the pitcher, 1968. He won 21 games (and lost 16) in 1972, but then as mentioned by The Mick he promptly lost 21 the next season. The card pictured here signals the approximate moment when Bahnsen shifted from rubber-armed starter to rubber-armed reliever. He performed decently in that role for a few years and with the ascendent Expos finally experienced what it was like to be on a good team (his brief time on the 1975 A's notwithstanding). Interestingly, the otherwise young Expos employed a wide variety of avunculars in their bullpen during the Bahnsen era, including Woodie Fryman, Fred Norman, Dale Murray, Bill Lee, and Rudy May.
Bahnsen's name always slightly troubled me. Something about it just sounded wrong, for some reason.
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