The Fine Print

When Nolan Ryan retired late in the 1993 season, the people at the Topps baseball-card company breathed a sigh of relief. Topps prides itself on including a statistical breakdown of every season of a player's major league career, and Ryan's lengthy tenure was starting to pose a problem. Topps's 1994 Ryan commemorative card required an unprecedentedly small type size to fit all the stats from Ryan's record 27 seasons onto the back of the standard 2�"-by-3�" card.

We wondered if Ryan, who at 47 might be expected to be ready for bifocals, could read his own card. We sent it to him and got the following response: "I'm not sure there was another way to put all that [the stats] on there," said Ryan, who owns banks in Alvin and Danbury, Texas. "If I'd played another year or two, it would've been tough to read."

For some of us, it's tough enough already.