Baseball Takes the (A) Rod

At the instant of the crack he would glide along the deep green carpet looking up in the high blue sky picking out the orb that at its apex must have looked like a dancing white pea in the chill swirling winds above San Francisco’s Candlestick Park.  He moved surely as if guided by some mystic inner sense directing him right to the spot where the little orb would land.  And then he would position the glove just right, oftentimes just in front of his belt, opened and waiting like a leather basket. Plop the orb would drop into the glove and he’d step forward and throw a seed back to the infield.  I had the pleasure and yes, the honor of seeing Willie Mays, arguably baseball’s greatest player do that in person in many a game at the frigid and usually unfriendly confines of Candlestick Park.  I also watched Mays belt a fair amount of his 660 career home runs.  I didn't see the 660^th, which he hit in the uniform of the New York Mets in the twilight of his career.  It was 1973, the Vietnam War was still raging, Nixon was living his Watergate nightmare and I was just about to turn 20. 

Lance and Fair Play

“I’m deeply sorry for what I did.” ~ Lance Armstrong.

“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone..”  ~ Book of John; Chapter 8.

Let’s make one thing clear from the start; I loathe drug cheats in sports.  And that’s both ironic and understandable because three of my favorite sports, baseball, cycling and track and field, have made as many headlines about doping as they have about competition. 

Bamboozled at the Old Ball Game (A Fan's View)

“There is but one game and that game is baseball”  John McGraw

“When baseball is no longer fun, it's no longer a game.”  Joe DiMaggio

The cops just knocked on the door and told us to turn down the music; the bartender skipped last call and stopped serving; mom just told our friends to go home; and the lifeguard just hollered, “Everybody out of the pool.”  The party’s over. That’s how it felt for us Giants fans when it was announced that left fielder Melky Cabrera was suspended for 50 games (the remainder of the season) after he tested for excessive levels of testosterone; dirty.  What is it about left field at AT&T Park?  First it was drug cheat extraordinaire, Barry Bonds; now Cabrera.  

A Five Ring Sunday Circus

Alright, so I got sucked in.  I’ve taken to watching the games and in large measure it took track and field to hook me.  Well, it took track.  My cynical side, which as anyone who reads this regularly would know is dominant, tells me that the strength events are PED tainted.  I still feel burned over those two USA Track and Field Championships at Stanford a few years back.  A few years back can be translated to mean “the Balco years.”   I spent top dollar for good seats, hyped the events to Cora and then we found out after the Balco bubble burst that many of the results from both meets were frauds. 

My Old Baseball Friend

     Welcome back baseball.  Welcome back to the friend I knew and loved.  For a while there you were going through a rough patch. You fell in with a bad crowd, started messing with substance abuse and got addicted to some really bad stuff. Your personality changed, you lost your charm and became a big, brutish lout. You lost the respect that you had for your rich and storied ancestry, forsook your forefathers and got infatuated with a fake, fleeting here and now. When you lost your self-respect you got pretty sleazy and slept around with a bunch of self-absorbed phonies. You stopped being the baseball that I knew, that we all knew, a subtle, strategic game with all those nuances like double switches, the hit and run and the suicide squeeze. You started resembling a “D” level, beer league softball game.  And what about your caretakers, those guys who were supposed to look out for you? They just became a bunch of greedy enablers turning a blind eye, letting your addiction run rampant while they raked in their ill-gotten gains.

     The home nine is in first place and playing some exciting ball. No bombastic displays of tape measure home runs with footballesque final scores. The Giants are winning low scoring, one run affairs. They're doing it with pitching; a solid rotation and a stalwart bullpen. The offense is pure punch and judy, with an occasional long ball and some sort of smoke and mirrors magic woven by manager Bruce Bochy.  Last year we christened the season "torture" and the one run, walk off torment is back for a delicious second course. 

     In recent years I sat out that bastardization of baseball called “the steroid era.” I walked out on the freakish thing it had become, figuring I wouldn't return.  Sometime during the 2009 season my interest started piquing again.  Barry Bonds, the man who had so arrogantly soiled one of sport’s most hallowed records was not invited back for 2008 and when I was satisfied that his stink had left the yard I was ready to come back. While a recession driven belt tightening kept me away from the stadium last year, I watched on TV with renewed joy the game being played as it should.  And listening to the radio broadcast while working in the yard or tending the barbecue has brought back baseball memories of my childhood.

     Yes, I love baseball and I’m not ashamed to say that I love it in a naïve way; in the tradition rich, storybook, peanuts and Cracker Jack, smell of the green, green grass, baseball cards, hotdogs and beer, all-American way.  I love it because unlike professional basketball and football, baseball unabashedly honors its past. It’s a game that’s spanned decades has gone through little change to the game itself yet continues to captivate its fans.

      Professional basketball has gone from a patient team game to an up and down the court race punctuated by in your face slam dunks tossed down by petulant, chest thumping, preening players who’ve physically outgrown their field of play.  For the most part I find NBA players to be dislikable. There is no reverence for the past in the NBA. Today’s players wouldn’t know Jerry West or Oscar Robertson if they smacked into them at the foul line and most fans probably don’t know of an NBA past that goes beyond MJ.

     And what can you say about the NFL? It’s the consummate sport become business. And while it keeps some tenuous ties to its past it has become something unrecognizable from what it was a mere 10 years ago. Never satisfied to be what it is, the NFL seems to be in an insatiable quest to get bigger, brasher and glitzier. There is no charm to its championship game. The Super Bowl is an event which every year has to outdo its predecessor.  It’s an uncharismatic happening of a game that falls victim every year to its own hype; a hype which it inevitably fails to live up to. With its ostentatious overpriced arenas and personal seat licenses it has become a Romanesque orgy for gamblers, rich guys and corporations that’s thrown the common fan to the curb. Unlike professional basketball and football, baseball has maintained some affordability.

How many of these did I lose?

     Baseball has always had an intimate connection with the fans.  The Brooklyn Dodgers not only played in that borough but lived there and mingled with their neighbors and fans, shopping in the local stores, going to the local barbershop, and playing with local kids.  In his book Bums, Peter Golenbock writes about the memory of a Brooklyn fan who said of Duke Snyder, “We would be playing stick ball and he would come home….and the kids knew who he was. ‘Hey Duke, want to take a few cuts?  It was like he was one of the boys. He’d take a few cuts."  When I was a kid, after games we would go to the player’s entrance and wait for our heroes to emerge, offering a glove, ball, baseball cards, or scraps of paper for them to autograph.  Most would graciously sign, while admonishing the kids to be patient and polite.  I recall Sandy Koufax taking my ball as he stepped onto the team bus.  I thought for a moment that he had stolen my baseball until he dropped it out a window to me with his autograph and those of some of his teammates.  I lost that ball.  In fact I must have got the great left hander’s autograph a half dozen times, losing all but the one I still treasure.  While the player’s entrance is now off limits, a ball player will still stop and sign some autographs before and during BP (batting practice).  I recall Dave Stewart kindly signing autographs for my son and his friend before a playoff game against Toronto.

     I can’t remember the first game that I went to. I know it was at windy, frigid, Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Probably in 1961 or 1962 (I would have been 8 or 9 years old), the details escape me , might have been against the Cards, but I clearly remember walking out of the concourse and into the seating area to stare in awe at that field; so vast and so green.  It seemed bigger than anything I’d ever seen.

Maury Wills steals third

      A rabid Giants booster, my mom was the head fan of the family.  I was, and for the life of me I don’t know why, a Los Angeles Dodgers fan.   I think that maybe I was just attracted to that Dodger blue color.   Now you have to understand that a Giants fan and a Dodgers fan under the same roof do not make for a peaceful household between the months of April and October.  There was plenty of yelling and screaming during the many great games that we watched and listened to while “hating” each other and each other’s teams.  Those Giants-Dodgers games of the sixties defined the game that I grew up with and love to this day.  The Dodgers were a punchless team with plenty of speed.  Maury Wills would bunt himself to first and then the drama began.  No secret he would steal.  In the first act of the drama he would take his lead, the pitcher would throw to first and Willie McCovey would smack a leaden glove onto the diving Wills.  Time and again this scene repeated itself with Wills extending that lead by mere inches each time.   Wills wore out the pitcher and McCovey’s heavy paw wore out Wills.  The first act would usually end with the Dodger shortstop dusting himself off, standing on a freshly robbed second base.  Act two had Wills, dancing off second, racking the pitcher’s nerves until he pilfered third.  Act three ended with Wills either crossing the plate or being stranded at third.  Mom hated Wills, I hated Willie Mac but we both reveled in the rivalry.

Russ Hodges, Lon Simmons, Bill Thompson

     The sounds of spring, summer and fall were the voices of Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons calling the games while my mom worked in the garden or did her housework.   It seemed that everywhere you went there was a radio tuned to KSFO; “And there’s the pitch. Mays swings. And you can tell it BYE, BYE, BABY!”   Radio was king and baseball was the game of great voices; Hodges, Simmons, Vin Scully, Mel Allen, Jack Buck, Ernie Harwell and Harry Caray.   For a kid a transistor radio was an indispensible piece of equipment.   It was the only way you could you catch the last few innings of a night game, under the covers with the radio just loud enough to hear the game and just low enough that mom and dad wouldn’t hear.  How else could you catch bits of a weekday World Series game, trying to tune out the teacher yet keep an eye and half an ear on her so as not to get caught.   And every now and then there was that rare, cool teacher who would let us watch some of the game on TV.

     Baseball was the game that we could always play even if we didn’t have a team.  Any kid with a tennis ball and the side of house could play a ball game all by himself.   I was that kid and many were the afternoons when I would throw a tennis ball at the house and as shortstop field the grounders coming off the wall, throw it back against the wall and as first baseman field the rebound always just nipping the phantom runner.  On warm evenings dads in the neighborhood would go out with us kids to a local field and hit us some flies.  Even into my twenties and thirties I would go out to a local ball field with my friend Scott and we would take turns hitting and shagging grounders.  Now nearing 60, I do miss hearing that crack, ranging over and snagging a backhander right in the sweet spot.  I even miss that sting of the ball when it smacks into the palm.

     Baseball is a game for the senses. It’s the green of the field, the blue of the sky, chatter of the players, crack of the bat, ball skittering on grass and the pop of the glove.  It’s the smell of a dog and a beer, oil on a leather glove and a sweaty old cap.

     Baseball is nicknames on the back of a card (does anybody really collect football and basketball cards?).  It’s The Mick, Jocko, The Say Hey Kid, The  Baby Bull, Big D, Slick, Biscuit Pants, Willie Mac, Rube, Smokey, The Splendid Splinter, Buck, The Kid, Killer and Stan the Man.  Baseball is kids tearing open the wrapper on a pack of cards, shoving a stick of stale bubble gum in the mouth, thumbing through the cards and negotiating multiple “humpties” for a star.  

     Baseball is a colorful language of its own.  Its a can o’ corn, hard cheese, gopher ball, around the horn, chin music, tools of ignorance, bases juiced, fungo, heater, hot corner, on deck, on the screws, seeing eye single, skip, southpaw, small ball, scroogie, slider, slurve and of course, the Mendoza line.  C'mon, who needs the Romance Languages when you have baseball lingo.

      So welcome back baseball.  You’ve gone through some changes over the years and I haven’t been a fan of many of them.  I like interleague play about as much as I like eating liver.  And do you really need another level of playoffs, as if a 162 game season can’t decide the best teams?  I can’t say that I like the uniform changes.  How come you got rid of the stirrups and long socks and started sporting those pajama bottoms?  You know, I didn’t like the DH when you first introduced him to me and I don’t like him now.  If he’s fat, slow, out of shape and not able to play in the field anymore maybe he should just retire to the coach’s box or the broadcast booth.   And did you really have to silence the chin music? I miss those days when some of the game’s toughest hitters would come nervously to the plate to face an angry Bob Gibson.  Some Drysdale heat to the ribs kept that batter out of the pitcher's office.  And where did the jawboning between managers and umpires go?  It was always great fun to see two paunchy guys go nose to nose and belly to belly screaming whatever it was they were screaming with the crowd in full boo, ending with the umpire heaving his fist in the air and the manager out of the game.   

     But, you do have a problem.  How are you going to deal with the guys who cheated you; who cheated us and who stole from the greats of the past?  Those guys who arrogantly thought they were bigger than the game.  They screwed up all of your record books and they did it with no regard to the forefathers they disrespected.   Barry Bonds says that when it comes to the record books and the hall of fame there are no asterisks.   Well that’s fine with me; just keep him and his injected ass-terisk out of both the books and the hall.  And while you’re at it keep the sniveler McGwire and the arrogant Clemens out too.

     There are some fans who aren’t thrilled that you’ve gone back to your old self. They liked the barrage of long range shells, travelling implausible distances, launched by chiseled fakes.  They’re bored by the bunt, the butcher boy, a drawn in outfield and the sac. fly.  My feeling is you should tell those fans that if they’re looking for an exhibition generated by muscle bound fakery there is a “sport” just for them. It’s called the WWE.  

Baseball is a game of memories. I hope those who read this will share some of their memories, either as players or as fans.