Notes from the Shadows of Cooperstown
Observations From Outside the Lines |
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NOTES FROM THE SHADOWS OF COOPERSTOWN
Observations from Outside the Lines
By Two Finger Carney (carneya6@borg.com)
#303 AUGUST 20, 2003
WINDING DOWN
There is something I really don't like about Little Leaguers being put under the pressure that national TV imposes on people in the spotlight. Yet I find myself watching, not whole games, but innings here and there, or the end games. Then I get bothered by the pings of the bats, or the excessive glimpses of moms and dads. I go to check out the majors or the ESPN scoreboard, but then I'm back again. I think baseball was invented by kids -- it just looks right when it's played by youngsters. The adults in the dugouts, coaching, even in the stands -- seem out of place.
How about a LL World Series where the teams are just dropped off in Willamsport and let alone? I'd like to see the kids on the field by themselves, choosing up sides. Making up rules, deciding how long to play, when to take water breaks. I'd feel guilty, watching it on TV, but it would be fun, wouldn't it?
No matter how you feel about Williamsport -- which, to the Little Leaguer sounds a lot like "Cooperstown" -- the LL Series reminds us that the seasons of the pros are all winding down. That is the mood of this issue, as my research, too, winds down.
In here you'll find some more Notes from Milwaukee, some excerpts from an old issue of Notes, #111, which have never seen the light of the internet (?), and one more chapter from my pre-Notes era book, Dear Patrick.
Speaking of the internet, those of you who have become mildly hooked on the people and events that have gone down in history (so far) under the umbrella called "the Black Sox Scandal," might be interested to know that there is now a Yahoo group devoted to that topic. To subscribe, send an e-mail to 1919BlackSox-subscribe@yahoogroups.com or go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/1919BlackSox
If you join, you will not be bombarded with messages, and if traffic does get heavy, you can use the digest option and get one message per day. I thank Rod Nelson for setting this up with Yahoo. The group is not very old, just a few weeks. There is an archive where you can read what's gone on so far.
NOTES FROM MILWAUKEE
One of the most exciting events in my near-year of research on the 1919 Series, its Fix, Cover-Up, and its Un-Covering -- without any doubt -- was the two days I spent in Milwaukee last June, with the transcripts of the 1924 trial. (If you are just joining Notes, you might want to look up issue #298 in the Archives, to get your bearings.)
My 30 pages of handwritten notes, from reading the 1,696 pages of transcripts (they read fast, as they are in Q & A format, with the lawyers striving for short answers most of the time), ten or twelve depositions, and a variety of exhibits, have been distilled into about eleven pages of typed notes. By now, I have worked into my book manuscript, much (but not all) of that material.
The Milwaukee findings forced me to re-write a number of sections -- notably pitchers Cicotte's and Williams', who lost the five necessary games to deliver the 1919 Series to the Reds, but who may not have been as "crooked" as history has painted them. Then again, maybe they were.
Below are my notes on Shoeless Joe Jackson, the best-known of the Eight Sox Out (which is more accurate than Eight Men, since other players lost their careers, too). While the case to reinstate Buck Weaver is strongest, in my view, Jackson's is easily the most complicated of all. He is the only one of the eight who claimed that he tried to communicate with his team about the Fix -- before the Series, immediately after, and again (in writing) when Comiskey seemed to want information (well, he offered a reward).
So here, in no special order, are my notes on Jackson. Some of the statements are Jackson's, while others are from those testifying about Jackson. Some of the most striking testimony is not included here, because it already has appeared in Donald Gropman's revised 2nd Ed of Say It Ain't So, Joe! My own comments are included. If any of the notes below spark questions, I will do my best to answer them.
* * * * *
1. Jackson testified that there were two on when he hit his WS HR in Game 8. (He seemed to insist that it was a 3-run HR, for some reason.) Also there was mention of 18 chances. I believe he had 16 PO and 1 Assist. Not important.
2. On 1/28/24, Charles W. Dunkley (Assoc Press, Chi-based) and James C. Hamilton (also AP, did features) testified. Dunkley recalled Jackson hitting 2 triples when asked by Cannon, [Jackson's lawyer in 1924]. (He hit none. That was corrected by Cannon later.) The only suspicious play Hamilton could recall was the Cicotte muff in Game 4.
3. JJ said he spoke with Williams the night the Series was over. (MT69)
4. Still on stand 1/30/24. After the 1919 WS, Miller Huggins offered JJ a 5-yr deal with Yankees @ $20,000/year. (This was later removed from the record at the request of the Sox.)
5. ELBERT M ALLEN (Secretaty at grand jury) MT 598 ff; Quotes from JJ GJ testimony: "I told Williams after the first day it was a crooked deal all the way through, Gandil was not on the square with us" (MT 634)
6. HARRY BRIGHAM (GJ foreman) JJ gave his best effort. Pressed by Shaw, Brigham says GJ did not pursue Commy investigation or lack of. Asked if the GJ nearly indicted Commy, "No he was liberal and cooperative" [with the GJ].
6A. BRIGHAM: (MT 652) "He didn't admit [to the GJ] that he threw the games ... or any game."
6B. BRIGHAM: (MT 655) "Did he [JJ] testify in substance that he was making his best effort all through the play? A: Yes."
6C. BRIGHAM verified (MT 655) that JJ mentioned to the grand jury his offer to come to Chicago in fall 1919. [JJ's lawyers got on Brigham & the GJ for not digging more into Comiskey's investigation. Brigham seemed a bit sorry, said he didn't know the GJ could have been more aggressive, they were letting others ask most of the questions.]
Jackson was deposed 9/4/23
7. "He [Williams] said the gamblers had crossed him. I don't remember [what I said] but he explained to me that he had used my name in order to wring money out of certain fellows supposed to be gamblers, and I said 'you fellows had a lot of nerve.'"
8. (MT 1374) "He [Williams] didn't want the damn stuff [the money], and I thought just this way, since that lousey so-called gambling outfit had used my name, I might as well have their money as for him [Wms?]."
Q: How did you know they had used your name?
A: I had Williams' word for it.
SKIPPING AHEAD
9. (MT 1374) Did you tell Grabiner why you wanted to see the old man? (after the Series) A: Why should I tell him? I told him it was important that I see Mr Comiskey. (Grabiner was apparently playing gate-keeper and was rude to Jackson, so rude that Jackson was still upset with him when they met months later in Savannah.) 10. JJ first realized that the ten-days clause was in his contract at the 1921 trial (a lawyer -- Ben Short? -- pointed it out.)
11. (MT 1378) "You got the $5000 right after the fourth game in Chicago, didn't you?" A: The day after the WS, to the best of my recollection."
12. (MT 1379) "I told [Wms] I didn't want any part of it [the $], it didn't belong to me at all, I didn't want it, knew nothing about it, and I went up to tell the boss." (It seems like he might be protesting too much, but he did go to Comiskey.)
13. (MT 1380) Acc to JJ, Grabiner said in Savannah: "'We have the goods on three fellows, Cicotte, Williams and Gandil,' and he [Grabiner] said, 'We know Williams gave you $5000, but your record speaks for itself. We know you play baseball to win." 14. HUDNALL (COMMY'S LAWYER) at the end: "Although he [JJ] may have taken no part in the conspracy, [he] knew of it, and joined in the fruits of it, he is still bound by the acts of his co-conspirators, and the defendant thereby had abundant reason to discharge him." (MT 1663)
* * * * *
I may have mentioned this in an earlier issue, but the impression I got from reading the transcripts, was that the defense (Comiskey's lawyers) early on simply gave up trying to prove that Jackson did anything during the Series to throw the games. They did produce the missing (stolen) grand jury testimony, their ace in the hole, which included some very damaging statements. But Jackson's lawyer offset that by producing the grand jury foreman (Harry Brigham; see #6 above), who denied Jackson confessed to crooked play. Comiskey himself pretty much said the same thing, that Jackson played every game he ever played in a White Sox uniform, to win.
So the defense team tried its best to show Jackson was in the conspiracy (#14 above), and profited from it. Ray Cannon countered with the charges that although Jackson knew about it, by the time he was sure about it, Comiskey and Gleason (and half of Chicago) knew, too; Jackson was rebuffed when he tried to see Comiskey the day after the Series, and his letters offering to come and tell what he knew were ignored. If Jackson was telling the truth (and the jury believed that he was, 11-1), the villain here might be Harry Grabiner, who could have screened Comiskey, either on his own or at Commy's suggestion. What was great about this trial was that Grabiner was put on the stand, and so was Commy's lawyer, Alfred Austrian.
To repeat, I did not copy into my notes, the testimony by Jackson that Gropman included in his later books (six full pages in the appendices, and more in the text). Gropman also reproduced the correspondence between Comiskey and Jackson, exhibits at the trial. The appendices of Say It Ain't So, Joe! are fabulous.
COOLER NIGHTS
In its first seasons, I often referred here in Notes to my "baseball triptych" -- even though I always had to look up the spelling. And even though I usually follow the rule that if I have to look up a word, don't use it, because readers are not going to look it up. But I made an exception with triptych, because it fit so well. My summers were spent following baseball, and writing about it, on three different levels -- Little League, the majors, and the minors -- I was a regular customer at Murnane Field, where the Utica Blue Sox were Good Enough to Dream and really fun to watch.
When I had covered three or four seasons, and decided to see if I could carve up what I had accumulated in Notes into book chapters (if not books), I noticed that I could group a number of my essays about baseball into the phases each season has: spring, when everybody is in the chase ... the long hot summer, when my team at the top (the Pirates) wilted ... the stretch run ... and then October's Game, the Playoffs.
The two essays (and a poem) below appeared in Notes #111, around Labor Day 1995. The Blue Sox are gone, but I am reminded of those late August games, played when the sun set earlier each night and the lights came on sooner, and jackets made their first appearances since spring.
* * * * *
Summer is ending, the school year kneels in the on deck circle, the short-season NY-Penn League starts its playoffs, and MLB anticipates the climax of Cal's Streak -- before focusing on the stretch run (in the NL West, anyway) and the perplexing competition among also-rans for the first wild card spots in modern ML history. That's the mood of this issue -- a mixed roster of essays, articles and poems, a kind of old-fashioned Notes. Baseball '95 started with "Play ball!" being shouted not by an umpire, but a judge, and there's been a tinge of gloom at the top all summer, from where I sit -- not a fan's year, although I'm sure the feeling is quite upbeat in Cleveland and Colorado and other oases, where the excitement generated by success on the diamond has lit up the summer.
Despite the mood we get into when MLB '95 is the topic, baseball has continued to be baseball, providing moments of dazzle in most games, and events so totally unpredictable, that we can only shake our heads in wonder -- the near no-hitter by the out of it Pirate's Paul Wagner, plagued this summer with poor support and an erratic, losing arm, over the wild-card-chasing Rockies, who turn into Murderer's Row against the Bucs and many other teams.
We love baseball because it is such a slave to the law of averages, and we love it more when that law is shattered. When the team that has not rallied for a win in their last ups all season, suddenly erupts to salvage one, against a pen that had not leaked one away -- till now. When the easy-out infielder churns out a 4-4-4-4 for the boxscore, or the league's superstar novas into an 0-for-37 slump.
Or when a slugger hits three homers off the same pitcher -- twice. Or when an outfielder ends the game with a remarkable catch, lit up by a blast of lightning -- twice. Both those events are mentioned later in this issue [#111]. The list is endless, like a certain childhood summer ... that's in here, too!
THE END OF SUMMER [Also from NOTES #111]
What is more melancholy than the last games of summer, which start with the stadium lights on? Fans are now in long pants and carrying jackets, like we did last April. We've come full circle, another season winds down. The symmetry reminds me of how the footsteps of grandparents (or greats) slow to match those first footsteps of their toddler grandchildren.
Once upon a time, a summer was one-seventh or one-eighth of all the summers I knew, was so much of all the life I had. Maybe that's why it seemed endless, like the poem at right suggests. Next summer will be my fiftieth, a much tinier fraction, and yes, they do go faster these days. It seems like I just put the screens in our windows and doors. The chilly air that creeps in at the sixth or seventh innings, reminds me that I'll soon replace them with the storms. So it goes.
Last spring, the air was cool but crisp with hope. Our team was all potential, anything was possible, we were all good enough to dream of pennants. The last breezes of summer are sober, the season has almost played itself out now, we know where we'll finish. Out of it.
Any summer must be the best summer of all, for somebody, for fans of the teams that cross the finish line ahead, or for players for whom things all came together. In Utica, we see kids at the threshold. Stars all of their summers up til this one, in amateur leagues or college ball, they have been tested. Some will move up, some will be given another chance (back here again next spring, or elsewhere), while some will end their careers as ballplayers and move on with their lives. Gave it a shot.
The fans and players of any summer make memories, and the best ones ripen in the cool night air, like leaves finding their colors before they fall. Memories in or out of the scorecard, maybe not even connected to what we did or saw between the lines. They will serve to warm us some in the winters of our lives, to help us muddle through til the fields are green again, and our pencils are sharpened, and the jackets we wear in the late innings feel so good, because they are so light, like spring air.
ENDLESS SUMMERS
There were just a few of those summers,
Before puberty but after
Our falling in love
With the summer game.
Or maybe just one.
The days stretched beyond sunsets into dusk,
Darkness the only thing that stopped our playing.
Summer games at the field
Were all we wanted to do
And remember
And look forward to.
School would never resume,
Vacations out of town were interruptions,
Like rainy days.
Nothing could compete.
We were quite outside time,
Without knowing,
Those few summers --
Even if there was just one,
It was enough,
Because somewhere inside us,
It lingers on
And on.
[I found one other item in #111 that might be of interest. I'm not sure I'd write it exactly this way today. I was not yet over the Strike in late summer 1995, and because this has "Revisited" in the title, I must have compared the 1919 Scandal to the Strike in an earlier issue.]
BLACK SOX VS. "THE STRIKE" -- REVISITED
In the August The Diamond Angle, James Floto details the affect on attendance caused by the 1919 scandal of Careless Joe and the Gang of 8, concluding that while baseball fans did sour some in 1921, roughly 75% of the fans who stayed home did it in Chicago. (Or maybe the Black Sox scandal was not a factor, maybe it was Prohibition -- Chicago streets were not exactly safe in those years. And of course, no beer sold at the ballparks....)
Whatever the reason, baseball is fortunate that the national media then, was nothing like today's, in its scope, variety, and appetite for scandals. The Flow reminds us that many sportswriters were paid by the ballclubs, so they had every incentive to control the spin, rather than go for the jugular. Exposing America's heroes was considered "bad form" rather than a raison d'etre.
Who doubts that if something remotely like the Black Sox thing happened today, that it would be Simpsoned into a blot on baseball so large that the turnstiles would barely click? The Pete Rose case is the only modern event I can think of that had some potential for that, but Giamatti managed to keep the Dowd report out of the public eye and the tabloids.
It occurred to me recently that "the integrity of the game" is important to baseball not just to retain fan interest. The games must be played on level fields, without the influence of gamblers who seek to gain by affecting outcomes -- if not of particular games (as was the case in the alleged incident involving Cobb and Speaker), then of a series (like the one in October 1919) -- for the sake of gamblers! In other words, if it is suspected that the fix is in, then the sport no longer is worth betting on, and a whole segment of fans is lost. Ironic, that gamblers depend on the "integrity" of games, more than the casual fans who just want to be entertained!
[In issue #294, I began running DEAR PATRICK: HOT STOVE DELIVERIES FROM A FATHER TO A SON, a book I started writing in 1989 and continued for a few years, till I set it aside. Some of DEAR PATRICK has found its way into NOTES before, but never the whole thing, beginning to end -- until now. Here is Chapter 10.]
CHAPTER 10
SHORT STORIES
February 6, 1990
Dear Patrick:
Babe Ruth's birthday. I suppose it is best that it is not a national holiday. America elevated the peerless Bambino to its highest heroic rank, popularizing him beyond imagination -- and without the help of television! But our country has (so far, anyway) kept its common sense, and perhaps its sense of proportion, by concentrating its idolatry of baseball superstars in the newspaper sports section. A postage stamp tribute is about right for any sports figure, and maybe for any human being.
I grew up with the feeling that Babe Ruth was an "old-timer" from the days when the game was played for glory -- after all, his career did start in 1914. Yet he was still around when I was born in 1946, and for a couple years after! (That still boggles my mind -- as does the realization that baseball still practiced apartheid in '46, as blatantly as South Africa does today.) Of course I never got to shake Babe Ruth's hand -- but I did shake the hand of someone who did. Joseph "Pepy" Lekan was a Cleveland teenager in the twenties, and was in his sixties when he told me the story. I don't recall the details, but I can still see the twinkle in Pepy's eyes as he spoke, full of pride and honor and nostalgia. And youth: I've seen it time and again in eyes much older than mine: talking baseball can be like sipping from the fountain of youth.
You could probably fill a small library with the books written about Ruth -- and a large library if you included newspaper columns and magazine articles. We probably know more about him today than the readers of his own day. He's always been a fascinating person, a saint and sinner, a "non-conformist" that the crowds loved, who -- despite the media, the organization men, and the pressures to be someone else -- was simply himself.
So much for the birthday boy. Last time, I told you about Maz' homer -- one of my favorite stories, and a long one.
This time, just some short ones. A seventh-inning stretch.
The years immediately following Maz' home run were my high school days. They'll always be special for that reason alone, and I don't link much from those years with baseball. Studies took up more and more of my time. I made new friends, started dating.
Sometime, maybe midway through my freshman year at North, I had my one and only session with my guidance counselor, Mr. DiLallo. He was the school's head baseball coach and probably asked everyone if they played the game and if they were going to be trying out for the team, come spring. I'm sure I said I would, fancying myself as a centerfielder at the time, because I could ballhawk my father's long fungo fly balls at North Park -- the Tennis Court certainly discouraged infielding, and I hadn't yet learned that I'd enjoy pitching and playing catcher.
However, when spring came, the time for tryouts, I was in the hospital for a week, then out of school and on crutches for another three weeks, and that was that. The doctors had suspected polio. I wasn't in any pain -- I just couldn't lift my right foot, although I could press down with it fine -- it caused a limp that I finally couldn't hide.
My first hospital stay was made easier by the gifts of a number of books on baseball, including one that let me relive the '60 season again, and Joe Garagiola's Baseball Is A Funny Game. At first I was quarantined -- no visitors except family -- but once the doctors decided that I wasn't contagious, Bill brought in the APBA game, and the League was spared serious disruption. I think the medicine men are still working on my diagnosis. A few weeks in a cast and daily massages from my mother after that, brought the foot around.
The Pirates stumbled into sixth place that summer and didn't contend again for years. We had our memories of being at the top. And we'd be there again, someday.
The summer of 1961 will always be memorable for The Chase, as Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris pursued Babe Ruth's mystical mark of sixty home runs in a single season. Roger got the record and an eclipsing asterisk from Commissioner Ford Frick, which seemed to satisfy those who demanded that Number 60 come in 154 games (it didn't.) Today the eclipse is over, and Roger Maris' achievement is recognized, even by those who still begrudge it.
In school the next season, I wrote a short story for sophomore English, about a former ballplayer who is killed in a car accident while driving home from Cooperstown on the day he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. At the time, I never thought that I would ever visit Cooperstown myself. My family drove no farther than Lake Erie for vacations and Cooperstown was as far away as Disneyland, California, in my mind.
In my story, the hero, Joe Ravine, finds that he has been "called up," so to speak, to the league beyond the Majors. And just in time: the Angels, whose roster included names like Cobb, Ruth, Mathewson, Sisler and Ott, were about to begin a series against their rivals, who represented the opposite of all that was good and decent. They were the Devils, who had a good recruitment year ("the best since 1919"), and a challenge had been issued. At stake in the series was the fate of the world -- a true "World Series."
The story is chock full of names of real baseball greats (APBA had introduced me to a host of old-timers), and of invented statistics or "stats" (Ravine hit .388, with 54 HRs and 176 RBIs in his first of four MVP years on earth.) Of course, the Series went down to the last game. I won't tell you the ending, but I'll give you a clue: when it is over, a congratulatory message read, "Who says nice guys finish last?"
My sister Sue, a secretary at the time, offered to type my story at work on her lunch hours. I had picked the title, One Heck Of A Series. As a joke, Sue had retitled it, One Hell Of A Series -- which would have been better, I can now admit -- but I was very upset with her at the time, until she showed me the second cover page, with "Heck."
Oh, yes -- I got an A+ on the paper and lots of encourage- ment from Mr. Flaherty, but I never wrote another fiction story about baseball.
Life is full of "should'ves" -- things we never get around to do. I remember a "should've" of mine from high school -- my junior year, I think. I'd signed up for the Math Honor Society, and needed to do a project for an evening program they were sponsoring. It may be hard for you to believe that although I am a nut for baseball statistics at times, I'm really not much of a math nut. But I did have a good idea for a project.
This is what it was. I was going to try to measure how caring affected the Law of Averages (or Probability), and I would do this by analyzing my APBA game results. I was coming off a season of managing the St Louis Cardinals, and had two players who were performing 'way over their heads -- one was a pitcher named Ray Sadecki, a Grade C with a "W" (meaning he was wild); the other, outfielder Carl Warwick. Sadecki should have won maybe ten or twelve games, tops, yet for me he flirted with twenty. Warwick was not even supposed to be good enough to play every day, yet when I started him, he was a slugging fool: I "rolled for him" in defiance of that famous Average Law.
There could be just one explanation. My caring about the performances of these two guys somehow tilted things in their direction. At least that was my theory. I never figured out how to prove it. I should've.
Sometime about then, I wrote a long baseball poem. Not for a school assignment, just for fun. It was titled The World's Greatest Game and was probably inspired by Thayer's 1888 classic Casey at the Bat. My poem, like Casey, revolved around a single game, with the pressure building and the focus narrowing, inning by inning, until the final pitch of the game would spell the outcome. That, I left to the reader's imagination, using as the final line, "And that is why baseball's the world's greatest game."
I'd do it that way again. There is no need for me to defend the sport. From Little League and the sandlots, to the major leagues, baseball simply reveals itself. A French proverb applies, perhaps: to those who believe, no explanation is necessary; to those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.
Recently your Aunt Sue entrusted me with our family's collection of Pirate yearbooks. When I page through them now, it is like I'm looking at family photo albums. (Actually, it's better in one way -- I know all the names, because the pictures are captioned!) I feel closest to those Buc teams from 1956 through 1960 -- my first heroes, I guess.
Those yearbooks, like my high school yearbooks, are mostly photographs. While I as a writer have always objected to the saying, that a picture is worth a thousand words, I must admit that collections of pictures of old Pirates and old schoolmates bring a thousand and more words to mind. Not to mention the feelings!
How I wish there was a way you could share those feelings! But, of course, you'll have your own school yearbooks soon enough and I bet in a couple of years you'll start collecting Yankee or Athletic yearbooks.
We bought our Buc yearbooks at the first game attended at Forbes Field each spring. It's especially fun to check out the section toward the end of each, where minor league prospects were highlighted as "Pittsburgh Pirate Possibilities." Some rose not just to the big leagues, but went on to have long and successful careers in baseball. And some, like Rosey's Aunt Minnie, never made it.
We gradually outgrew the Tennis Court and now looked forward to shagging flies, in the long fields of North Park. My father, as I mentioned before, hit to us with a fungo bat -- a long, thin-barreled stick that is especially suited for hitting fly balls. Usually the Carney kids were joined by one or two neighbors. We'd shag until dark, then stop for ice cream on the way home at North Hills Dairy, or maybe for hamburgers at a new place on McKnight Road with golden arches. This fellow McDonald must be a ball fan -- keeps score of the burgers he sells!
McKnight in those days was broken up by few traffic lights and no malls. It took just minutes to travel between home and the park. Along the way were several "500 feet ahead til ---" signs, and I would imagine Mickey Mantle or Dick Stuart, the local Home Run Derby star, standing at the marker, smacking one that distance: so that's five hundred feet. Impressive!
When I picture those evenings in the open fields, I most remember my father's unique way of fungo-ing. He'd carefully remove his wallet, watch, car keys and cigarettes, and tuck them safely aside. Adjusting his wire-rim glasses, he'd tug his trousers up with his free hand, while balancing a ball and the fungo in the other.
He batted righty, but he'd hold the ball in his right hand, and start swinging his left, like a pendulum.
Then his right arm would get in sync, for three or four short swings, and then the ball would be released, looping up, maybe six feet over his head. While it fell back toward the grass, at a spot about five feet in front of where my father stood, he'd quickly grasp the bat with his right hand, stride forward, and cut mightily into the ball, sending it off (most of the time anyway) in wonderful parabolas, to where we were waiting.
"Mine!"
"I got it!"
As we all gauged the trajectory, and converged, we screamed for the chance for the putout.
"You got the last one!"
"Take it! TAKE it!"
We'd dare Dad to hit it over our heads, "into the pines" and every so often he would, making me feel proud. Doesn't everyone want to think their father is strong and powerful, even though he's not a professional slugger?
Around the house, simple games of catch were always in style. I caught with Mick, Sue, my father, or friends. Sue had the best knuckle-ball of any of us. I could never manage it. Sue had grown up playing ball in the Alley, and was an athlete through high school, excelling in basketball. After graduation, she played for Allis-Chalmers' softball team and we watched a few of those evening games. I mean this as a tribute -- Sue didn't throw like a girl. Mary Ellen, your sister, does.
In all my years of rooting for the Pirates, before I left Pittsburgh, only once did I ever go to Forbes Field with a date. I don't think it had anything to do with not wanting to mix business with pleasure -- I was not that serious about baseball. I just didn't date much, outside the school- or parish-sponsored dances and excursions.
Bill Lerach had four box seat tickets, upper-deck along third, his own Volkswagen Beetle, and a date. Would I like to make it a double? Of course! But my "steady" girl friend was unable to go. This demanded some negotiating. First I had to get an OK from Blanche to ask someone else, although we were not officially steadies. That strangely proved to be no problem, so I did, and Bonnie and I had a great time.
The males of our foursome found that we had to explain everything, and in this case, no explanation was possible. But as anyone who has tried it knows, the effort to enlighten others about baseball can be hilarious. Bill and I were both familiar with comedian Bob Newhart's classic routine on this subject -- we could both recite it verbatim, along with many other comedy album pieces.
It's still fun to try to define balls and strikes, fair and foul, and to guess why it's three strikes but four balls for a walk! In other words, Garagiola was right on the mark: baseball was not just funny, but hilarious! (By the way, it took the game a decade or so of experimenting to settle on "three strikes, you're out" and four balls for a walk.)
Later, I learned that Blanche wasn't going steady with me nearly as much as I was with her, and we broke up. Relationships and loyalties in life wax and wane, come and go.
Baseball had given me a feel for life's heartbreaks in 1959, when Harvey lost his perfect game. And a feel for life's boundless joy the following year.
However, nothing could have prepared me for one event, in my senior year at North. President Kennedy, still young and strong and hopeful, was cut down by an assassin, and that event opened a floodgate of violence in America that changed the country fundamentally. Maz' Homer and John Kennedy's death are like bookends around my high school days, one unforgettable peak and a cheerless valley, and in between, the encyclopedia of emotions that mark adolescence.
Baseball is a simple contest, with plain rules. Under the surface is plenty of stuff -- strategy, momentum, history, statistics -- but nothing menacing. It is, after all, a game, and not war. So it can also be a place to go while life's wounds heal, an arena where problems with people or your job gain no admittance, a place to forget and forgive.