Baseball Reminiscences (1)

In recent years, I have associated the end of the baseball season with a type of sadness: maybe it’s the slow termination of a certain rhythm that the routine of 160 plus games imposes on the fan, maybe it’s the melancholy of autumn. I really don’t know the precise year that I first began following the sport.  When I was very young and living in Syracuse, my uncle Eddie would  visit and glorify the exploits of Mantle, Skowron and Ford.  When he died a couple of years ago, his family placed a Yankee flag near the altar at his funeral mass. That mass was the occasion for an amazing juxtaposition. The celebrant, a black immigrant priest, invoked Heidegger in the best reflection on life I have ever heard at a Catholic funeral.  At the end of the service a half hour later, the church organist played Take Me Out to the Ballgame.  It was almost enough to induce remorse for my classic anti-Yankee feelings.  After all, if the Catholic Church, Heidegger and my uncle were on the side of the NYY, what was wrong with me?

In elementary school, I had the usual collection of baseball cards and tried to invent baseball games of various sorts with my friend Gary Hamelin.  Our games could never match Paul Auster’s elaborate construction in Hand to Mouth. My cousin Leo Miller was the happy owner of a Coleco-Ellis All Star Baseball game and the occasional visits to his apartment in (what seemed at the time far away) Marcellus were opportunities for choosing teams and savoring the resulting competition.  This cousin was a much better athlete than I was (he even made all-county basketball in high school), so victories in All Star baseball were a sort of revenge.

As for actual playing, after I left my grandparents’ apartment to live with my parents in the Lyncourt area, I played after school games in the street behind Saint Daniel’s.  We weren’t elite players and I had a short and singularly unimpressive little league career.  It was in the days when there was often little help with learning fundamentals of the game and, although I could sometimes hit the ball decently, my lack of defensive skills and foot speed made it hard to find a position to play.  I ended up a very mediocre corner outfielder, in fact, a sort of DH before the time that role was officially introduced in the game.  I did get my name in the paper once or twice for hitting prowess, but it wasn’t against solid competition.

When I got to high school, my participation in sports was more or less restricted to pickup games with friends.  Baseball and basketball were the dominant sports in our group, but golf and bowling were also on the agenda.  There were periods when we took pleasure in playing a series of derivative games, for example, 2 against 2 baseball-like contests with a stick and a ball made of tape wound around aluminum foil (called a Butchie Borden ball for a reason I never knew) in a restricted space between garden and driveway.  The game demanded slick fielding to protect various flowers and tomato plants which belonged to Italian immigrants whose sympathy for any vegetation outweighed interest in strange games played by their sons. The Borden period didn’t last very long and was replaced by countless sessions of wiffle ball.  For me those evolved into one-on-one confrontations with my friend, (the poet) Bobby Lietz, whose father had actually pitched in the minor leagues.  Description of those games would be a subject for another day, better served by Bob’s poetic language even though no one could not trust the non- partisan character of his narrative (especially since he too is an incorrigible Yankee fan). The games were often played in his family’s driveway,  where the rules were strange and involved walls, trash cans and other obstacles.  It was virtually necessary to lift a fly over the house to get a real home run.  These wiffle ball games sometimes resembled (Samuel) Beckett-like plays laced with trash talking dialogue.  Some even included the occasional appearance by an elderly widow who did not appreciate foul balls hit in her yard and whose anger Bobby tried to deflect on me by claiming that it was in fact I who had killed her husband.  I’m happy that she never totally believed him. Thankfully Bob was always better suited for poetic hyperbole than for the rhetoric of persuasion.  We did not call balls and strikes and there was no pitch count but, despite occasional disagreements, good will prevailed.  Wiffle ball games later became pretexts for sporadic get-togethers when both Bob and I moved away from central New York.

Some of my friends eventually went out for our high school team.  I did not, but since I was considered an academic star (it was a small high school) who could play most sports at an adequate level, I was not ostracized for it.  When I was in 9th grade and unhappily adjusting to a new school, my team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, defeated the hated NY Yankees in the World Series and gave me a moment to savor.  I still meet the occasional Pirate fan who wants to reminisce by asking where I was at the time that Bill Mazeroski hit that famous home run.  I truly believe that my attitude toward the NYY was born from a sense of contrariness, but it was also fueled by having to endure Mel Allen broadcasts that were picked up by a local Syracuse station.  As we know, memories are not always trustworthy, but I am sure that I at one time had the impression that baseball was a seemingly infinite number of World Series involving the Yankees and the equally hated Dodgers.  I adopted the Giants as my second favorite NL team by simple elimination of the two other originally NY based teams.  I was not really an American League fan.  Of course, my friend the poet Lietz, the Yankee fan, was with me when we learned of the Yankees’ defeat at the hands of Mazeroski.  Partisan attitudes in baseball are often strange.  I first became a Pirate fan because the team was so awful at the time when I first became aware of baseball and I had the impression that Pittsburgh must be an interesting city.  My father was a Red Sox fan out of dislike for the NYY, a dislike born out of his reaction against their popularity in our native central New York (and his admiration for Ted Williams and later Carl Yazstremski).  My son,  who grew up in Montréal an Expos fan, also later became a Red Sox fan.  One of the reasons: a certain dislike for the NYY because of their popularity in the Albany area where he went to college and played baseball.

I only followed baseball peripherally in my college and grad school days.  In college, my interest shifted much more to basketball.  In grad school, I played a little softball.  It wasn’t a complete disconnect, but there were other preoccupations.  I only came back to the game in a more serious way after I moved to Montréal and after the Expos moved into the Stade Olympique.  I can still remember my first game in Montréal.  It was, in fact, the first Major League game I ever saw in person.  It was probably in July, 1977 when my friend the poet Lietz came to visit and suggested that we see the Expos.  The Pirates were in town and all I remember was the thunder of Rich Gossage’s fastballs closing out the game.  I believe that the Pirates won the game, but more importantly, I was hooked on baseball again.

Luckily, my wife also learned to like baseball.  We started listening to the French language broadcasts of games. (I could say that we didn’t listen in English because we were learning to live en français, but must also add that Duke Snider of the hated Dodgers did color commentary in English here.)  Then we started to go fairly frequently to see the Expos, either alone or with friends.  When our daughter (born in 1978) was old enough to accompany us to the Stade, we would take her along for afternoon games.  There was a lot of apple juice consumed and a certain number of diaper changes performed in the upper deck. Those were the days when the Expos had a sizable following.  The picture at the top of this blog entry is our daughter Andrée crossing the turf of the Stade Olympique on Photo day in 1979.  It was not my plan to influence her subconscious by having her attend these games at an early age.  On the other hand, I did have a plan to make her a jazz fan by listening to Thelonious Monk and dancing to Weather Report when she was very young.  She is neither a baseball nor a jazz fan now, but I’m still hoping that one morning she will wake up with a strange urge to listen to Stanley Turrentine and then catch a plane to San Francisco to see the Giants.

Happier Times for Baseball in Montréal