It's June 1st--baseball is here for me

Although the major league baseball season begins in April, I just can’t get interested in it until the beginning of June. The season is too long–the regular schedule runs from the first week of April through the end of September; then there are the divisional playoffs (which have grown longer as expansion teams have been added to the list) and then the World Series, which can go into November (the 2005 one, which was shorter than most because the Chicago White Sox won four straight, went through October 26th).

I remember snow falling in Baltimore on the opening day of the 1979 World Series when the Orioles took on the Pittsburgh Pirates at home for the first game.

So, on June 1st my antenna goes up and I start to keep up with what is going on. What has been going on with the Baltimore Orioles at the beginning of June hasn’t been a pretty sight: right now they are seven games out of first place in their American League division. This is such a contrast to their earlier days when they went to six World Series in the 18 years 1966-1983 (winning three and losing three), but haven’t been there in the 22 succeeding years through 2005. Much of my interest in sports comes from nostalgia. Some of my nostalgia musings about baseball:

–Pickup sand lot baseball games when I was a kid in the 1930's and early 1940's. There were no organized little league-type sports during that era in the small North Carolina town where I grew up. But we had lots of pickup games after school and on weekends–anywhere from five or six to ten or twelve kids would go to one of the several open spaces in town (sometimes someone’s side yard at a street corner house, with the outfield out in the street) and make up two teams, and the game would begin.

I am glad that there are organized little league sports for kids today–our daughter played softball in one and our son baseball in another; these leagues play an important role in kids’ development. However, something can also be said for the way we played our games in my youth: we did it on our own without any adults running things for us. It helped us realize that we could be independent and do things on our own.

–Going to major league exhibition games as a kid. When the east coast teams traveled by train from spring training in Florida back to their home cities, they would often stop off in Durham or Raleigh, N.C. to play each other. Going to those games was a big thrill because in the 1930's and early 1940's there was no TV and no radio broadcasts of regular season baseball games in North Carolina, thus these exhibition games were the closest most people there could get to see a major league game.

–My first regular season major league game. In July 1946, when I was home from college for the summer, I volunteered as an older boy to accompany (along with several adults) a group of young school safety patrol boys from my home town on a trip to Washington. While there, I went to two Washington Senators games (against the Detroit Tigers) in the old Griffith Stadium. It was the last year of all-white players (Jackie Robinson made his appearance with the Brooklyn Dodgers the following years to break the color line).

–Going to Cubs and White Sox games when I worked in Chicago on the Chicago Tribune newspaper the summer of 1948 before my senior year in college. I worked from 8 PM to 4 AM, so after work I could go to my rented room, get some sleep, have breakfast and get to nearby Wrigley Field by 1 o’clock to see the Cubs play (all of their games were day games then, lights only having been added many years later). I also went to a few White Sox games at Comiskey Park, which is on the south side of Chicago, a much longer trip for me.

–Going to Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers games in New York. My first job out of college was in New York, where I lived from 1949 through 1951. It was easy to take the subway to Yankee Stadium or the Polo Grounds to see the Yankees and the Giants play (I never went to Ebbets Field in Brooklyn but saw the Dodgers play the Giants many times at the Polo Grounds). Almost everyone in New York had one of those three teams as his favorite–mine was the Giants.

–Hearing the "shot heard around the world." That was the famous home run hit by the Giants’ Bobby Thomson to win the best two-of-three playoff against the Brooklyn Dodgers on October 3, 1951. The Giants had pulled themselves up from 13 1/2 games behind the Dodgers in the National League on August 11th to a tie just before the World Series was to start the first week of October, so there had to be the playoff to determine who would go against the Yankees of the American League in the World Series. With the Giants and the Dodgers having won one game each, the Giants were behind 4-2 in the final game with just two outs left in the bottom of the 9th inning; then Thomson came to bat and slammed the three-run homer that gave the Giants a 5-4 win and the sportswriters the event that they called the "shot heard around the world."

On that miraculous October 3rd I was working as a trainee in the Foreign Accounting Department of the oil company Texaco (now part of Chevron) at its home office in the Chrysler Building in New York. No work was being done that afternoon as every one of the 25 or 30 workers in that department was huddled around a radio listening to this crucial third game (there were no portable TV sets in those days). We were probably split right down the middle as to Giants fans and Dodgers fans. It being a mild day, the office windows were open (like most New York buildings at the time, the Chrysler Building wasn’t air conditioned), so that each time one or the other of the teams got a hit or scored a run loud cheering was heard, not only from our own department, but from those listening to the game in the tall buildings on all sides of the Chrysler Building.

I was standing with a group of three or four other fellows listening to the game through earphones on a small crystal set in a cigar box that one of the group had made (there were no transistor radios then). The earphones were passed around the group for each to listen for a few minutes. They were passed to me in the bottom of the ninth. THEN IT HAPPENED!Thomson hit the game-winning home run! I jumped up with the earphones still on and yanked them right out of the crystal set. This is certainly one of my two or three most enduring sports memories. (The Giants went on to lose the World Series to the Yankees by 4-2.)

–The New York Giants World series 4-0 win over the Cleveland Indians in 1954. I was then in Dakar, Senegal (at that time a French colony in west Africa) working for Texaco; we could get the games on short wave radio. I listened to them with several American expatriates, including a native of Cleveland who worked at the American consulate in Dakar and his wife, so there was much back-and-forth between us as the games were played.

–The only World Series game I ever attended. It was in October 1970, the Baltimore Orioles at home against the Cincinnati Reds (the only game the Orioles lost in their 4-1 sweep of the Reds). I had been in bed with the flu for several days before the game, but that particular day was sunny and mild so that I felt up to going to the game with my wife on two tickets that a business acquaintance had given me. My benefactor had also been equally generous to others in my company–including my boss, who was sitting right behind me. When I got there, he said, "I’m glad you’re feeling better." I explained that I had just gotten out of my sick bed for the occasion and was going right back to it. In fact, I stayed in bed several more days.

I'm ready. "Take me out to the ball game..."