I don’t like funerals, and I really don’t like wakes. Too much weeping and rending of garments. One day, however, the subject of music at funerals came up in a macabre discussion with a wilting friend. “What song would you like played at your ritual,” he asked.” I didn’t take five seconds to answer. “Take Me Out To The Ball Game,” I said. Considering where I would be at the time, that seemed like a brilliant alternative. He eyed me disapprovingly and indicated I should choose something more sacred and depressing. “Nope,” I said, “that’s it.” Aside from the inevitable Star Spangled Banner, “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” is the song I’ve heard most in my life. It’s a cheerful little ditty, evoking memories of the good old days at bustling Fenway Park, where everybody puts down their beer and sings along no matter the pending fate of the home team. Despite several changes to the game over the years, the song steadfastly hangs on, played by organists and sung by fans at every major and minor league park in the country and most college venues, usually before the home team bats in the bottom of the seventh. Not everyone sings the national anthem, but to a man the crowd belts out “Take Me Out To The Ball Game.” Anyone who abstains would be shunned and in some cases have lighted matches thrown at them.
I mentioned my predilection for the song in a column one day. My younger sister, Kathy, read it and said she’d remember when the time came. A little presumptuous, I thought, but her heart was in the right place. If you’re wondering, and I know you are, the lyrics to TMOTTBG were written by a guy named Jack Norworth in 1908. Jack was riding the NYC subway and was inspired by a sign which screamed “BASEBALL TODAY---POLO GROUNDS!” which is where the old New York Giants used to play. The words were put to music by Albert Von Tilzer. Neither of the two songwriters had ever seen a major league game and wouldn’t for decades. The song was first sung by Norworth’s then-wife Nora Bayes and popularized by many other vaudeville acts. It was played at a ballpark for the first time in 1934 at a high school game in Los Angeles and later that same year during the fourth game of the World Series. “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America as one of the 365 “Songs of the Century.” The first recorded version was sung by Edward Meeker and his recording was selected by the Library of Congress as a 2010 addition to the National Recording Registry, which selects recordings annually that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” So there. And while were at it, the correct lyrics are “take me out with the crowd, not “to the park,” so get with the program, you Philistines.
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| Ex-Gator David Eckstein, all 5-6, 170 pounds of him played ten years in the Major Leagues and won a World Series title with the St. Louis Cardinals. |
“Size Doesn’t Matter. No, Really.”
“No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined.”---Paul Gallico
When we were kids, baseball was The Game. There were no hoops in the neighborhood, not everyone could ice skate and football had yet to ascend to its later popularity. Skinny white kids could play baseball just fine even if they couldn’t run fast, jump or dribble between their legs. You could be a four-foot shrimp like Joey Pappalardo and still play a mean shortstop. You could be a blind fat kid like Paul Brooks and still roam unbothered in the mellow meadows of right field. Well-padded Walter Babish couldn’t hit a beach ball with a canoe paddle but he knew how to walk into a change-of-pace pitch when the occasion required. Eddie Ledwich was a lousy first basemen except for that one day a year he pulled off the hidden ball trick. Can’t afford your own bat or glove? Don’t worry, we got plenty.
You didn’t need a fancy venue or exotic equipment to play baseball. We had the ratty old B&M field at the end of Boxford Street, where a ground ball to the shortstop occasionally traveled off course after bouncing into an errant rock and some undisciplined hitter might occasionally take out old Grandma Middleton’s bathroom window with a misplaced line drive. But hey, everybody couldn’t fit into the four-team Little League, which was populated with the sons of doctors, lawyers and divorce attorneys. We could beat them, though.
We had neighborhood teams back in the day. We got on our bikes and traveled all over town to play kids from the other nabes. Once, on the Fourth of July, we were called in to replace a uniformed Junior League team at the neighboring town of North Andover’s big holiday whoop-de-doo picnic. As the old advertisements used to say, they laughed when we sat down to play the hometown heroes, we of no uniforms, half a dozen beat-up bats and a catcher with home made equipment. They laughed some more when the homies jumped on our pitcher, nervous little Joey Trepanier, for three runs in the first inning. That just pissed us off. Next time up, I smoked one off the gazebo’s roof, routing the mayor’s party and we went on to win the game 7-3. Nobody was laughing then. Just to rub it in, most of us ran in the ensuing mini-marathon and finished near the front of the pack. Just a bunch of average-sized, unmuscled ball-playing pack rats who didn’t need enhancements to play the game well. All things are possible with baseball, where size doesn’t matter. Ask Pee Wee Reese.
Of Fathers And Sons (reprinted from TFP, May 31, 2018 article, The Faithful)
“That’s one of the great gifts of this, the greatest of all games, baseball: it allows you still to lose yourself in a dream, to feel and remember a season of life when summer never seemed to die and the assault of cynicism hadn’t begun to batter optimism.”---Mike Barnicle.
My father promised me that when I was old enough to start grade school he would take me to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. I thought about this all the time. When you are a tiny child, iconic shrines like Fenway are like castles in the sky, fabled heavens where the gods live, where battles of incredible importance take place, where feverish radio announcers sit in rapt attention, delivering the blow-by-blow to the outside world. Like everyone else, I had seen pictures of the Red Sox palace but it still seemed like a place beyond the bounds of Earth, to which acceptable guests received invitations written on gilt-edged stationery.
Nonetheless, the day came and Tom Killeen led me down Winthrop Avenue to the Boston & Maine railroad station. The train ride was a little more than a half-hour, then on to the subway at the Boston Garden, one change at the Common and on to Kenmore Square. The imposing light towers were visible almost immediately as we made the short walk to the park. I don’t know what I expected but my first view of Fenway was disturbing, a mix of confusion and disappointment. I knew what baseball fields looked like and this red-brick facade wasn’t it. My father smiled and cautioned, “Wait….”
We handed the gatekeeper our tickets and walked inside, now part of a huge, milling throng traveling in all directions in the half-light of Fenway’s bowels, eventually reaching our entrance ramp directly in back of first base. I walked up the ramp until the entire field was visible and stopped dead in my tracks, paralyzed by the view. There was the enormous left field wall, the iconic little scoreboard, the greenest grass in the universe…just like in the pictures. The Red Sox uniforms were so impossibly white they must have been created in some alternate universe and delivered by mystical beings. My Father, of course, had seen all this before and merely guided me to our seats. “Wow!” I said. “This place is great.” My father looked back at me with the hint of a smile. “Billy,” he guaranteed, “this is the best baseball park in America.” Seventy two years later, just about everybody agrees with him.
The game with the Cleveland Indians was a mess. The Red Sox fell behind 12-1 and Tom Killeen developed a dour expression. “Looks like I picked the wrong time for your first game,” he lamented. “It’s only the fifth inning,” I told him. “We could catch up.” Tom’s resigned smile signaled otherwise, but he was wrong for once. Boston battled back and won 15-14 in a game for the ages, a contest in which the Indians used pitchers Bob Feller, Gene Bearden, Mike Garcia and Bob Lemon to stem the tide, all to no avail. Every so often, baseball offers up an unexplainable souffle, a completely illogical combination of ingredients and winds up with the perfect meal. “Don’t expect this to happen all the time,” my father warned me. “It’s one in a million.” I nodded my head, but I knew better.
On the way into the park, my father told me I could pick out one pennant to buy. I chose a white one with Red Sox scrawled in large red letters. He said we’d get it on the way out, avoiding the nuisance of carrying it around all afternoon. Alas and alack, on the way out there were no more. There were a million alternate choices but I sulkily turned all of them down. Tom Killeen was probably irritated but he was also a man of his word and come hell or high water he was going to find that damn pennant. When we got home, we trooped over a Merrimack River bridge, the opposite direction from going home, and all the way over to a novelty store on Broadway, a good two miles. The shop didn’t have pennant, but the proprietor promised to find it somewhere. Two weeks later, my father came marching home from work, evasive pennant in hand. You’d think it was the Hope Diamond by the reaction of my mother and me. We proudly hung the thing immediately in my small bedroom and it was still there 15 years later when I returned home from college. I wish I had it now.
Little more than ten years later my father was gone, but the memories lingered on, recollections of sitting on the floor by my dad’s chair listening to Red Sox-Yankee games, arguing the relative merits of Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, complaining about the shortcomings of various Sox managers, wondering if we’d ever win the pennant. We didn’t have much in common, me and my father, agreeing rarely, battling often. He was a difficult man to fathom, a hard one to please, cast in the ways of an earlier time. There are no stories of roughhousing in the clubhouse, frolicking on the lea, not a lot of hugging or pats on the back. But there was baseball. I could see the game through his eyes and he through mine. We had one common cause and that would have to do. I never wept at his funeral at the age of sixteen, merely went through the motions, comforted my mother, stiff upper lip. But when we got home, I went up to my room, sat on the bed and looked up at the fading white pennant with the team name emblazoned in red. Thanks, Dad, I said to myself. And finally, I cried.
That’s all, folks….
