Growing up in the biting cold of Northeastern Winter is serious business for small boys. There are earmuffs to locate, overshoes to snap on, perilous icicle spears to monitor, frozen snowballs to elude. The days are long and often arduous. There is snow to shovel, after all, and the weight of it seems extraordinary to tiny arms and shoulders. Will the job never get done? Ah, but come February there is a light at the end of the blizzard, a light called “baseball,” at first only a wee glimmer in the distance, but slowly, inevitably, coming closer each sunrise. Then, incredibly, the day arrives:
“This is Jim Britt, with Bump Hadley, from sunny Sarasota, Florida, where today the Boston Red Sox are taking on the Washington Senators in the first Grapefruit League game of the season. The fans are out in droves for the opener, which will be played under cloudless skies with temperatures residing in the mid-seventies.”
Then Jim, the play-by-play man, and Bump, who never told us how he got his odd name, described the scene right down to the colors of the teams’ uniforms, even though they were always the same, white for the home team, grey for the visitors, none of this multi-colored foolishness invented by latter-day fashion criminals. The out-of-towners, of course, would always carry the name of their cities across their chests, just in case anybody might forget the Yankees were from New York or the Browns lived in St Louis. The home team carried the franchise name, Red Sox or the like, assuming everybody knew where they were from.
The radio was our shrine in those days before television. On the weekends, we could listen to Jack Benny and Phil Harris and on weeknights Sky King, Jack Armstrong, The Green Hornet and The Lone Ranger. But more important, it was our conduit to baseball, presenting a colorful canvas that was painted daily by a succession of clever announcers we knew like family, characters memorialized in Ernest Thayer’s iconic opening to Casey at the Bat: “The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville Nine that day….”
Prior to the games came the comic relief in the form of a funnyman allegedly named Jerry O’Leary. Come rain, snow, hail or sleet, Jerry always started his show off the same way: “Good afternoon, folks, this is Jerry O’Leary at Fenway Park and it’s a BE-YOO-TI-FUL day for the ballgame!” Then Jerry would roam around the grandstand, interviewing “Eddie McCauley from Lynn” and kidding around with Eddie and several other fans for the balance of his half-hour. Little kids like us thought Jerry was hilarious, especially when he celebrated his beautiful day in a deluge.
Occasionally, the local game was cancelled, leaving a big gap in WBZ’s schedule and a lot of disappointed listeners. The station filled the gap by broadcasting a game from out of town. Lacking the budget or the technology to actually broadcast from the faraway park, the stations resorted to the telegraph, an operator transmitting information back to the studio from the game site. Even though listeners could clearly hear the tappity-tap of the telegraph in the background, the announcers tried to recreate the game as if they were on scene, marveling at deep fly balls, the speed of a strikeout pitch or the closeness of a pickoff play at first base. These games as well as the live ones were a feast for the imagination. The announcers provided you with a box of Crayolas, you got to color in the spaces. Everybody celebrated the Dawn of Television, where you could actually see the action, but a wistful few regretted the loss of mystery, the foregone opportunity to create your ballfield images in the grassy reaches of your own mind.
The Cerebral Game
If baseball is not as popular these days as it once was, perhaps it is because people today, unlike the children of earlier generations, have not taken the time to learn the game, a very sophisticated sport, ungoverned by time factors, free of ongoing violent contact, engaged in by participants of all shapes and sizes and races and abilities. The 5-6, 150-pound shortstop may be the hero of the day, while the 6-4, 250-pound first-baseman strikes out three times with the bases loaded. Baseball is a game of strategy as much as speed, of shrewdness as much as power. Pitchers of all physical descriptions control the action by virtue of the degree of development of their talents. An aging veteran, deprived by time of his blazing fastball, improves his other deliveries, constantly adjusts the speed of his pitches, spends more time studying the inclinations of the batters he faces, thus hanging around the sport decades longer than, say, the average National Football League running back (average playing time: 3 1/2 years).
Infielders, most of them physically unremarkable, succeed by dint of their dexterity, agility, ability to recognize the likely path of a hit ball and arm strength in getting the throw to first. As batters, many infielders without significant power succeed by developing superior hand-to-eye coordination, by recognizing the sometimes subtle differences between oncoming balls and strikes, by placing the ball where it’s less likely to be caught, by learning to bunt exceptionally well, by their cleverness and speed on the basepaths.
Management of the game requires considerable intelligence. Each opposing pitcher possesses different strengths—how many left-handed batters will be withdrawn from the lineup against a specific left-handed pitcher? How long will we leave a flagging starter in when the bullpen (relief pitchers) is suspect? The National League does not use a Designated Hitter for the pitcher, requiring the usually puny-hitting pitchers to bat for themselves. If you’re trailing 1-0 in the seventh inning of a game, do you pinch-hit for your pitcher when he’s been extremely effective? You need that run but your bullpen is scary. What to do? There are a thousand subtleties to the game, most learned by small boys in the playing fields of their youth. The average crowd at a Major League game is far more savvy than your median group at any other sport, even moreso in places like Boston and the Bronx and St. Louis where The Game has been sanctified. The latter innings often become chess games between rival managers as they manipulate pinch-hitters, relief pitchers and defensive substitutions. Look around the stands next time you’re at a Big League game. And listen. There are wise old men there avidly discussing the options. There are young boys heeding the explanations of fathers imparting lasting knowledge. There are considerable numbers of women of substance and intellect, deep in thought, never to be confused with NBA fans. Say what you will about popularity. Baseball is different. Baseball is lasting. Baseball will not go away.
Fenway Park In Days Of Yore
Fenway Park
In New England, when you reach a certain age (usually between five and eight), your father will be taking you to Boston for a ballgame. In my case, this was a matter of walking a half-mile or so to the Boston & Maine Railroad Station on Parker Street in Lawrence, hopping on a train and rolling past 26 miles of backyards until you arrive at Boston’s North station. If the voyage wasn’t reminiscent of the more picturesque journeys of such as the Super Chief or the storied City of New Orleans, it was nonetheless exciting to a little kid. The North Station, of course, was the exalted palace also cohabited by the legendary home of the Celtics and Bruins, the Boston Garden. In our case, it also housed the elevated subway stop which would begin our convoluted trip, screeching, rattling and lurching toward Fenway Park, via one transfer at Park Street Station. When I was not contemplating my eventual fate at the hands of the careening subway car, I made a point of memorizing all this in detail, preparing well in advance for the many future trips I was certain to be taking on my own.
A young boy’s first glimpse of the exterior of hallowed Fenway Park is unlikely to impress. The modest façade of the building is constructed of conservative red brick and reveals nothing of the vast arena inside. When a lad has visited a number of sprawling football venues with open grandstands, this baseball park seems a tad….um….little. Are we in the right place, Dad? Dad smiles.
If there is really a Heaven somewhere, it must be like a little boy’s first impression of the interior of Fenway Park. I walked up the ramp to where the field finally became visible and stopped dead in my tracks, almost forfeiting my hotdog. The vision was glorious. The grass was a perfect green, each blade undoubtedly hand-manicured. The famous left-field wall loomed imposingly in the distance, bereft of those foolish seats which rest there now. The baselines were perfectly drawn, with not so much as a tiny wobble, unlike lesser ball fields. And the Red Sox uniforms…. an impossible white, a storybook color, whiter than the driven snow, obviously laundered somewhere in the clouds and delivered to the clubhouse daily by Seraphim.
We moved to our seats in the lower grandstand, just behind the boxes on the first base line. When the Red Sox emerged from the dugout for fielding practice, a man of Italian extraction behind us rose from his seat, raised his beer cup and saluted the Sox’ center-fielder with a song, a local parody of a paean to his more famous brother:
“Who hits the ball and makes it go?
Dominic DiMaggio!
Who runs the bases fast, not slow?
Dominic DiMaggio!
Who’s better than his brother Joe?
Dominic DiMaggio!
But when it comes to gettin’ dough,
They give it all to brother Joe!”
By the fifth inning, the Cleveland Indians had bolted to a shocking 12-1 lead on the home team. My father looked down at me sadly. “It looks like we picked the wrong day to come to your first game,” he said.
“But Dad,” protested the unshaken Bill, ever the optimist in the darkest of days, a quality which suited him well for later pursuits in the horse business, “it’s only the fifth inning….we can catch up.” Tom Killeen managed a rueful smile at his son’s foolish notions.
But for once, to the wonderment of all, especially Cleveland, little Billy was right. The Red Sox, laden with a powerful hitting lineup, blasted Indian pitching for 14 runs in the last four innings and won the game, 15-14. Leaving the ballpark, I was the only fan who wasn’t stunned. It all seemed perfectly logical to me. My Father looked at me and said, “Don’t expect that to happen every day.”
Well, I don’t know why not. It’s baseball.
This Almost Never Happens In Lacrosse
Over its long and distinguished history, baseball has undoubtedly given rise to characters and incidents not matched in other sports. In 2007, a Texas Ranger player named Jerry Hairston arranged for two “police officers” to show up in the clubhouse with a warrant for catcher Ron Laird’s arrest on charges of unpaid child support. Laird went nuts as the phony cops handcuffed him, removed him from the clubhouse and tossed him into the back of a “squad car” before revealing the prank.
A new player’s arrival is always cause for shenanigans. When Kirk Gibson arrived to play for the L.A. Dodgers in 1988, pitcher Jesse Orosco smeared eye-black all around the inside of Gibson’s batting helmet. As Gibson began to sweat in the hot sun, ugly black drops began to run down his face uncontrollably. The new guy was furious. “No wonder you idiots finished fourth last year!” he yelled as he stormed off the field.
Yogi Berra is as famous for his misuse of the English language as he is for his exploits on the field. Apparently, he doesn’t understand it too well, either. An interviewer once asked Yogi about his two hits from the previous night. Berra, affronted, protested that he had three hits. The interviewer checked his records and apologized. “I checked the paper and the box score said you had two hits. The third must have been a typographical error.” Yogi was bumfuzzled. “That’s dead WRONG!” he wailed. “It was a clean single to left!”
Yankee Phil Rizzuto got a letter in 1950, threatening him, Hank Bauer, Yogi Berra and Johnny Mize. The missive stated that if any of them showed up in uniform to play against Boston, they’d be shot. Rizzuto turned the letter over to the FBI and told his manager, Casey Stengel, about it. Casey pondered the situation for a moment and gave Rizzuto a different uniform, handing Rizzuto’s to Billy Martin to wear. Nobody told Billy about the letter, of course, and fortunately nobody got shot. As far as Casey was concerned, well, a manager had to have his priorities.
Over his many years in the game, Casey had a lot of celebrated incidents. Once, during his tenure as manager of the Mets, Marvelous Marv Throneberry, a magnet for weird happenstance, blasted a two-run triple against the Cubs. While Marv was reposing on third base, Chicago first baseman Ernie Banks called for the ball and appealed that Marv had missed first base. The appeal was upheld and Throneberry was called out. Casey ran from the dugout, waving his hat at umpire Dusty Boggess in protest. “Forget it, Casey!” the umpire said, “He didn’t touch second, either.”
The Pittsburgh Pirates once had a well-known first-baseman named Dick Stuart, who earned his nickname, “Dr. Strangeglove,” with his propensity for errors. On one particularly trying day, Stuart had missed or muffed the first three ground balls hit to him but perfectly speared the fourth. In his haste to wave off the pitcher, however, Stuart slung the ball down the right field line, allowing the batter, Gene Freese, to reach second base. “I’d have been on third,” said Freese, ‘but I was laughing too hard.”
Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh couldn’t help it. After the public address announcer announced to fans that “Anyone who interferes with a ball in play will be ejected from the ballpark!” he looked at his first-base coach and said, “I hope Stuart doesn’t think that means him.”
Dr. Strangeglove
That’s all, folks….
