Baseball
Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2012 11:30 am
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'.
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'.