Once upon a time in a universe far, far away, there was only radio to inform and amuse us. Television was an impossible folly, telephones hung clumsily on the wall or sat on a table wrapped in cords and noone dreamed of actually seeing the person they were speaking to.
Young boys ached for baseball…playing the game, discussing its various aspects, listening to it broadcast from faraway places like Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis and the despised home of Evil, Yankee Stadium.
The long dark days between the end of the World Series in October and that day in mid-February when pitchers and catchers led the parade to Spring Training was like a dreaded trek over hot sands which never ended. The Hot Stove League, a concoction of broadcasters and journalists, kept the home fires burning for the duration as rapt children discussed possible trades, incoming minor-league heroes and whether the Fenway Park temperature would make it to 35 degrees for opening day. Whether it did or not, you could be sure there would be just under 35,000 frigid fans in the crowded stands chomping down frankfurters, booing the umpires and stamping their feet to keep warm. It was a ritual, opening day, which often required hand-shoveling snow off the diamond to get the game in. The following day, the crowd would be cut in half, proving that even baseball fans will eventually rally to their senses.
When we were kids, there was no other game. There were pretenders, of course, like high-school football, the Boston Celtics and the moribund Bruins of the six-team National Hockey League, but those were afterthoughts, games we noticed in passing but rarely played ourselves. Baseball was the font from which all things sprung, a mountain where gods and giants lived, an eden to aspire to if we someday defied all odds and caught the Dreamland Express. It lives in our memories, this baseball, untarnished by the sinister changes wrought by time…greed, television and night games.
“Good afternoon, fans, this is Jerry O’Leary speaking to you from a jam-packed Fenway Park in Boston as the Red Sox prepare to take on the Philadelphia Athletics in the first game of a crucial series. Mel Parnell is on the mound for the Sox today and Ted Williams is back in left field. The sun is out, temperatures are in the mid-seventies with a five-mile-an-hour breeze blowing out, and it’s a bee-yoo-tee-ful day for the ballgame!”
“PLAY BALL!” The umpire’s command echoes through the park, through time, through our memory banks, bringing back visions of brilliant days when men were men and the fair sex got in for half-price on Ladies’ Day.
Pilgrimages To A Shrine
If you’re not a New Englander, you wouldn’t understand. After all, you’ve been to baseball games, you’ve had a favorite team, you’ve shared the highs and lows of the annual pennant races…what’s the big deal?
Growing up in Massachusetts is different, that’s all. Before you are an Irishman, a Catholic, an AFL member or a dockworker, you are a Red Sox fan. This began when you came home from the hospital in your little Sox bunting and moved into your room with the Red Sox pennant on the wall, as did your father before you and his father before that.
When you’re six years old and walking down Salisbury Beach in the dead of Summer, there’s no need to ask the score of the ball game. Every radio on every blanket is tuned in, you can follow the game as you mosey along collecting shells. Later, in the early television years, the conversation in local taverns ebbed and flowed with the direction of the game. Ebullience prevailed with every small success, the conversation stilled with grave concern as an opponent’s challenge heightened. Pity any rookie bartender not from these parts if he deigned to foolishly change the TV channel…Mississippi lynch mobs have been kinder.
The ultimate in Red Sox worship, of course, was an actual pilgrimage to the shrine, Fenway Park in Boston’s Back Bay. The first-time five year old visitor is unimpressed as he stands in front of a nondescript brick wall amidst a milling crowd of regulars, a hint of disappointment on his visage. Then they open the gates, he marches in, climbs the modest ramp toward his seat and stops on a dime, momentarily disabled by the sight. This looks a lot like what nuns describe when they talk about Heaven. More a painting than a ballfield, brilliant in green with white puffy clouds sitting in an azure sky, the home team uniforms as white as your soul in the catechisms before the first hint of sin.
The organ plays like only ballpark organs can, the hotdogs are embellished with rare and exotic garnish brought in from the mustard fields of Half Moon Bay, the fans are all aroar and any foe who walks into this den of lions is obviously in hot water. The early Red Sox fan is initiated into an avid street gang from which there is no escape but death, he is part of a rare and splendid coterie which handles adversity with grit and determination, and victory with over-the-top fervor.
When bad times arrive, the Sox fan does not despair, he has been there before. When the White Sox rally or the Tigers escape with a lucky hit or the Boston closer tosses an 0-2 pitch over the heart of the plate, only to watch it sail off to Lansdowne Street, he is prepared. He stands, surveys the crowd and stuffs the disappointment in his pocket. It’s another great day, four hours in Fenway, full of joy and angst, optimism and fear, a rollercoaster ride of action and emotion. As the old saw proclaims, a bad day in Fenway Park more than equals a great day anywhere else. “Let’s play two!”
Good Times In The Nabe
In days of yore, there was no Little League, no organized sports short of high school. There was just The Neighborhood, and that was plenty. The kids spilled out of every house and three-tenement apartment building, you had merely to summon them by approaching their home and screaming bloody murder until somebody came out. This was the daily routine on Summer mornings, getting the gang together and heading for the ballfield the Boston & Maine Railroad provided at the end of the block.
The “B&M,” we called it, a hardscrabble field at the end of Boxford Street in South Lawrence, consisting of a little grass, a lot of dirt and a gravel road running across the outfield. Beyond the road, there was a large blue-grey building filled with the sort of things railroaders find necessary to keep the trains on schedule; to us it was the left-field wall. One day some genius had the epiphany that the wall should be painted with numerals delineating the distance from home plate, as were so many major-league walls, so we rummaged through a few basements and came up with some less than glamorous black paint and a couple of ladders and marched down to the B&M to vandalize their building.
“What the hell are you kids doing?” roared the railroad dick, discovering our crimes. To qualify for the RR Detective position, a person had to grow up grouchy, deprived of the finer things in life and taking the world to task for it. The dicks never smiled, ate only baloney sandwiches for lunch and smoked like chimneys. They traveled in groups of no less than two for safety’s sake since some of the hobos they encountered were more than handy with tire irons and bottle-openers. For Christmas, they gave each other a hard time.
“We’re painting the distance from home plate to the wall,” I told them. “Like at Fenway. We’re not hurting anything.” The lead dog grunted. “And what if you fall off a ladder and split your head open? Who pays the bills for that?” I wasn’t sure but I think he almost smiled as he turned, shook his head and muttered to his pal, “Friggen kids. McCauley, you’re going to have to wash that paint off.” But McCauley never did. We went back to the old B&M thirty years later and at the top of the building a fading black 167 peeked back at us. If it was the Mona Lisa herself, the painting couldn’t have brought a bigger smile.
Putting On The Uniform
When we were kids, the Spiegel company mailed out its annual catalogue to half the homes in America. It was a gigantic thing, like several phone books squashed together and it contained all the marvels of the universe printed in full color. To buy something, you merely had to send in your order with a nice check and it would appear as if by magic in a couple of weeks. In all my days of looking at the Spiegel catalogue, however, I only saw two things I was absolutely required to have—a Lone Ranger suit and a Red Sox uniform. I drove my Mother crazy until she yielded and bought them for me two years apart.
The cowboy suit was a bit of a disappointment. Not the suit, itself, which was more than beautiful, but the result of wearing it. The day it came, I whipped open the package, donned the hat, mask, shirt and pants and pranced over to the next-door neighbor’s house to mystify Gloria Kennedy as to who was this masked man.
“Hi, Billy!” Gloria chirped, as if I had arrived in my grade-school outfit. I was crestfallen. How did she know? And since she did, how did the Lone Ranger get away with this business? I turned around and sulked home, stuffed the gear in a box and rarely wore it again. On a positive note, I did wear the mask to school once in the first grade. A second-grade bully named Eddie Mellucci came jogging over to take my mask off and I grabbed his arm and threw him over my back. Nobody was more surprised than I was except possibly for Mellucci. I wondered if perhaps the mask instilled secret powers which enabled the wearer to overcome evil opponents up to no good. I decided to leave it home in the future and not find out.
The Red Sox uniform, though, I wore endlessly. I probably would have worn it to church if they let me. Unaccountably, it was a grey road uniform that spelled “Boston” across the front rather than the traditional snow-white Red Sox home gear, but it made me feel like a serious customer, a cut above the unadorned rabble, the very model of a modern major-league ballplayer.
Now and then, alas, my Mother (a notorious “clean freak’) insisted on confiscating the uniform and washing it without any advance warning. The information that we had a game on laundry day was a fact she didn’t find compelling, even when I explained I ran slower without it and made more errors.
Despite sliding through suspect B&M substances, playing in downpours and sweating a lot, the tiny garments held together with aplomb and lasted beyond the time it took me to grow out of them. I was hoping I might earn a real Red Sox uniform some day but genes and a lack of sufficient devotion took care of that fantasy. I was a good enough first baseman, adept with the stretch and scoop, quick to a bunt, but not a sophisticate with the bat.
Throw me a fastball, I’d rope it a mile. Toss me a changeup, I’d laugh my way around the bases. Keep it off the plate, I’d gladly take the walk. It was those boomerang pitches that got me, the ones that started out in Quincy and came streaking across the plate at the last second. I had no doubt about how The Mighty Casey felt in defeat, tricked, irked and forlorn.
Thank the stars in my subsequent life I finally learned to hit the curve.
That’s all, folks….
