Baseball: It's all in the Cards
Roberta A. Mayer
The Seattle Mariners have some important questions to consider as their new sports stadium is about to open and the answers may lie in the cards. More precisely, the Mariners may want to consult with the Tarot de Cooperstown, the brainchild of Jim Markowich and Paul Kuhrman. This new twist on a very old deck was a natural for the two New York artists who are also avid baseball fans.
Over the past two decades, Markowich and Kuhrman have collaborated on numerous projects, including RollerGammon (1984, a strategically complex boardgame based on the "sport" of Rollerderby); Markowich's Nondenominational Church of St. Babe (1985) and the hosting of approximately twenty five baseball card defacing parties, where the featured activity has resulted in Kuhrman's personal collection of over 6,000 defaced baseball cards. St. Babe’s was included as part of the Smithsonian Institute Traveling Exhibition Service’s Diamonds Are Forever:Artists and Writers on Baseball, which toured the U.S., Latin America and Japan from 1987-1992. Over 3,000 of the defaced baseball cards occupied NYU’s Broadway Windows installation space in the spring of 1993, and the rules of Rollergammon are still only known to its creators. The two artists began to conceptualize the Tarot de Cooperstown in 1983, a few years after both had graduated from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in lower Manhattan. Their main premise was that baseball, like life, owed at least a little bit to fate.
As is well known, Tarot cards are typically read by fortune tellers and have long been connected with the occult. This, however, was not the original purpose. It is believed that the deck was created in Italy during the fourteenth century and was first used to play a game of numbers known as tarocchi. How this game of chance acquired its mystical associations is not clear. Yet, today, the Tarot is often purported to reveal life's many mysteries.
The Tarot consists of seventy-eight distinct cards that are divided into two categories: the minor and the major arcana. To Markowich and Kuhrman, these categories immediately suggested a parallel to the minor and major leagues. Within the minor arcana are 56 cards, which, in turn, are equally divided into four different suits: coins, cups, swords, and wands. These are very similar to a modern deck of playing cards, with one notable exception. Rather than having three picture cards, each suit of the minor arcana has four: the knave, the knight, the queen and the king. The 22 cards of the major arcana encompass courtly and Christian images, including some that are more infamously associated with fortune telling. The Hanged Man, the Hermit, the Fool, and Death, for example, are part of the major arcana. Markowich, who executed the project, found his inspiration in the Tarot de Marseille, which he had the opportunity to see at the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris. This version of the Tarot was printed in 1761 by Nicolas Conver, a master craftsman from Marseille. Although these were made in the eighteenth century at a time when European tastes were being shaped by the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, the simplified and linear style of Conver's cards harkens back to Medieval manuscripts. Markowich was fascinated by the Medieval character of the Tarot de Marseille and was especially intrigued by the fact that the messengers of fate appeared to be completely detached from their messages. He decided to preserve the blank, almost generic, facial expressions in the figures of his own series.
The project began with the preparation of drawings, wherein the major and minor arcana of the Tarot were transformed into the language of baseball. Coins, cups, swords, and wands were recast as balls, gloves, bases, and bats. That was easy, if inspired. Then knaves became rookies, knights became veterans and kings made up the all-stars. The four queens were assigned special significance, and, while retaining their suits, became emblematic of some of the more totemic occurrences in baseball: The Whiff, The Beanball, The Circus Catch and The Pickoff.
The greatest challenge, however, came with the major arcana. In some instances, the character of the Tarot card suggested certain aspects of the ball game. The Fool evoked the Fan. The Wheel of Fortune called to mind the unimpeded circling of the bases, and so became The Round Tripper. Judgment was the purview of the Umpire. Death implied that the pitcher was yanked from the mound and sent to The Showers. In other cases, the Tarot card suggested a clever opposite. In the language of the baseball tarot, Temperance could be none other than Beer. Still other cards conjured up the seasonal elements of the game. Spring Training, traditionally a honeymoon period, is imbued with hope and promise for a stellar season. The players, the coach, the owners, and the fans are as giddy as the young Lovers. The All-Star Break occurs in mid-summer and, as the fans endure the sweltering heat, they might look up to see Apollo riding the Chariot and pulling the sun across the heavens. The World Series is the ultimate measure of Strength. At the Winter Meetings, the owners emulate the Hermit, withdrawing from their teams in order to trade players as if they were only cards.
With the deck successfully reinvented, Markowich then stretched seventy-eight canvases, each one 14" x 26". Mixing and applying a parchment-shaded gesso that implied a few hundred years of exposure to oxygen, he used colored pencil and acrylic paints in working up the drawings that he and Kuhrman had drafted. He completed the project over the course of a year.
Although the paintings are the most important facet of the Tarot de Cooperstown, for some there is a lurking desire to use the deck to peer into the future. Hence, Markowich photographed his paintings and created a useable deck of Tarot cards. There are many ways to lay out the cards for a reading, and one of the simplest methods is to lay out a triadic spread. That is, nine cards are laid out in three columns, which relate to the past, present, and future, respectively. For Markowich, the idea of using nine cards for a reading made perfect sense. He modified the triadic spread to create the taking-the-field spread, which emulates the positions of the nine defensive players on the field, laid down in the same ordinal pattern used by coaches, fans and journalists when keeping the boxscore for a game (Figure 1). The six infield cards give a reading of a team’s current fortunes. The pitcher and catcher cards (1 and 2) give general indications for the season. The right side of the infield (cards 3 and 4, in the first and second base positions), deal with the first half of the season, while the left side (cards 5 and 6, at third base and short) refer to its latter half. Furthermore, the cards "up the middle" (4 and 6) refer specifically to defensive issues, while those "at the corners" (3 and 5), portend offensive production. The three outfield cards (7, 8 and 9) have meaning not for this season, but for next season and beyond. According to this scheme, the cards at different positions do not have relevance to specific players at those positions, but Markowich says that there are times when the reader’s judgment can overrule this.
So, while sitting on a park bench in Central Park, I asked him to do a reading for the Seattle Mariners. The result, shown in Figure 2, was interesting. The first card was laid down in a position that corresponded to the pitcher’s mound. It was The Pickoff. Was it a coincidence that the Mariner's superstar pitcher, Randy Johnson (whose nickname, The Big Unit, seems worthy of being a major arcana card itself), was recently picked off the team? Was this a reference to Johnson’s departure through free agency; to the fact that the club’s pitching roster had been depleted and that there was presently some weakness in this position? Perhaps this was something to think about. Looking up, I could not tell if the bulge in Markowich’s cheek was caused by a plug of chewing tobacco, or by the placement of his tongue.
