Baseball

[DOUGHBOYS]

Almost every picture of me as a toddler involved a ball. So, my parents were not surprised that my first utterance was not 'Mom' or 'Dad', but 'ball'. There is one picture of my older brother trying to fish in a pond, while I'm throwing a ball up in the air behind him.
My introduction to baseball was backwards. I was six years old and shared a bedroom with my older brother, four years my senior. For him, being older carried privileges, including control of the radio and which station. He was an avid outdoors man, ball sports were secondary for him. But, he did like to keep up with the San Francisco Giants because baseball was a topical subject among his friends.
After hearing these games on radio, I was hooked. I'd never seen a baseball game, even on the school grounds. I only knew it from the radio.
I imagined a big grass field surrounded by fences and people. I imagined about how large that hole was between third base and shortstop and how fielders avoided falling in. The 'bases' were the same bases we used for hide and seek, tree stumps.I imagined 'alleys' in the outfield and wondered how they were bordered.
At school, I told a friend about the game that had captured my imagination. He showed me baseball cards of the very names I had been listening about!
My allowances started going towards baseball cards. Soon, I had all the Giants cards and would align them in the same order as the starting lineup for the day.
I saw pictures of real baseball fields.
Mostly, I remember a postcard in a five and dime of an aerial view of Candlestick Park. It looked like a cathedral!
Realization came that baseball was played like kick ball only with bats and gloves.
At the time, we lived in a town of 200 people with one channel on our tv. We lived off of a gravel road. I would take broom sticks or preferably ax handles and go out on the road and started batting rocks. I went through the Giants lineup in my head with each rock hit. I'd swing the wood a little harder when Mays and McCovey came up in my head.Then, when the other team would come up, I would purposely miss the rock a few times and think that Marichal blew the ball by them.

We moved to a Metropolis later. The skill of hitting a baseball came easy to me. That ball was a lot larger than the stones from the gravel road. In the Metropolis, I got to watch the Giants on television and discovered that newspapers carried stories and daily stats about them as well. My math teacher was impressed by numerish skills in figuring out E.R.A.'s while at such a young age. My other teachers, perplexed that I had little interest in their subjects.

In junior high school, I was introduced to APBA and Strat-o-matic. This was a time before printers and copiers, so I would buy 500 sheets of paper and pay my little sister a penny for each score sheet she could produce. Some times I would stay up all night pitting games between All Stars and 'Old Timers'. The Old Timers cards were so good that I thought it a treat when the modern all stars would win.

I quit playing APBA and Strat-o-matic when fantasy baseball was introduced. So, instead of tossing dice, I'm studying both older player stats and modern stats. My brother kids me that I should have plastic surgery, not to improve my features, but to put red stitches in a circular motion to make my head look like a baseball, since that's all that's inside. My wife had no love forthe tossing of dice in the APBA and Strat-o-matic games and enjoys traveling to NFBC live sites, so fantasy baseball is alright with her.
She still wonders how I could be doing so much studying in January. Studying of a game who lays dormant during winter.
She knows though, that baseball will always be the mistress in our marriage. And that while it is played seven months of the year on the field, in my head, it's a year round game.

My grandson is 10 now. His interest in baseball is minimal, but he knows about my compulsion, affliction, or love of baseball( depending on who you talk to) very well. Coming home from Church last Sunday, he asked why I didn't go. I told him I went as a kid, and didn't hear one story about baseball, so my interest waned.
I told him that when the 'David and Goliath' story was talked about, I imagined Goliath as a huge pitcher and David a bench warming, singles hitter who goes to bat and takes him deep.
Probably made the mistake of throwing a weak hitter a change up.
The 10 commandments was a game in extra innings.
Jonas, not a whale, but the Yankees. The gates of heaven were the turnstiles at a baseball game.
He looked at me, smiled, shook his head a little, and just said, "ok". A 10 year old finds it easier to absorb than an adult.
For adults, the last words to Jim Bouton's 'Ball Four' says it best.
'We spend a good deal of our lives gripping a baseball, only to find out later, that it was the other way around all the time'.

[Captain Hook]

AWESOME Dan
Really wonderful and it invoked so many memories

My younger brother (18 months) and I moved with my mother and step-father to a wonderful home in Benedict Canyon in LALAland high above Beverly Hills. As we got to little league age, of course we wanted to play. Beverly Hills had a wonderful collection of fields that was several city blocks wide....BUT they also had a really weird rule that two brothers could not play on the same team. First year I played, Rod was too young and there were no problems (in my opinion). The following year he started playing and now we were on different teams. So my step-fathers weekend would be down the hill taking one of us to a game; back up the hill; then either down the hill again to pick up that one or to deliver the other one; down the hill; up the hill; down the hill......you get the point. Right after the season finished, my step-father disappeared for an entire Saturday - gone long before we got up in the morning and I guess arrived home long after we were asleep. The next day he piles the entire family into his wonderful (latertobemine) 1953 Pontiac Convertible and takes us on a long ride. As we drive along a very hilly Sunset Blvd we emerge from seeing nothing but trees and occasionally houses we finally see some signs of a town as the car turns left at a corner of movie theater/restaurant/gas station/gas station and then another left. As we get to a stop sign he points to the left and says "there is the church and school" (my mother raised us a Catholics and wanted us to be in a Catholic school). We drive a few blocks further, turned left and more than halfway down the block of very nice houses stop in front of a single story white house with a large picture window and a real estate sign on the lawn. "This" my step-father says "is OUR new house." My mother gasps. He continues to the end of the street, turns right, turns right at the next street and at the end of the block crosses a street going down what seemed like a driveway but as soon as we started down I could see a backstop and then tennis courts on the right across a small parking lot. He gets us all out and walks us up a short hill where I gasp as we see FOUR baseball fields to the left and then to the right open grass and then an outdoor gym area and a large brick gymnasium to the right. "This" the old man says "is where you can play baseball every single day at any hour you want (it had lights on the biggest field) with that short WALK home."

This was the summer of 1958, I was eleven and my brother nine, and that was our introduction to Pacific Palisades and a recreation center we would spend most non school moments on for the next five or six years and then visit for some reasons for years beyond that. Rod and I played little league there and then much later American Legion ball there. We also played a lot of basketball in that gym.

Great memories........