Maybe the game you play first is the one that memory coats with the richest patina.
For me it is baseball…and the wide, sandy alley that was at the end of our block of suburban rowhouses. There Mickey Gray would play endless catch and run-the-bases with the neighborhood kids. He was a World War Two veteran, quiet like so many, balding like so many, with a wife and two young kids in the house directly behind ours.
Mickey only played catch. It was obvious he had talent, but he never played even for our church softball team, although his father was the superintendent of the Sunday School and Mickey was a church usher.
When I was older, and setting pins at the local bowling alley, Mickey would come in and quietly hang, drinking Cokes, for hours. Once I was playing pinball and tilted the machine. “Motherfucker!” I yelled, and looked up to see Mickey standing by the machine. He never said anything to my parents.
Anyhow, he taught me how to catch and throw properly, mostly by imitation. Each throw was a quiet, accomplished joy for Mickey and catching a baseball for him was an elegant ritual. There was a deep, unspoken respect for these pure, simple acts that gave Mickey Gray in that sandy alley a contentment and patience that I never saw in him anywhere else.
We kids were baseball addicts. I knew the lineup of each of the sixteen big league teams and had the baseball cards of the entire Yankees and Philadelphia A’s – my favorites – pasted to my bedroom wall. And I was considered a trifling dilettante poseur by the truly addicted.
I would write to select ballplayers for autographed pictures and most responded. They were all, except one, second basemen, not that there were that many of them. They had to be on the small side – like me – and good at the game, like Bobby Avila and Nellie Fox. My crown jewel was a poster of Cincinnati Reds’ genius shortstop Roy “Bo” McMillan, straddling a clean white bag on which McMillan had signed his name – in gold ink! To me that was totally big league.
My first entrance into Shibe Park at 21st and Lehigh in North Philly was a transcendent experience. It was a night game and my father and I came out of the ramp a little to the right of home plate. There has never been grass as green as that outfield in its faint upward slope toward center field. I was stunned, transfixed. And my wonder was proper; the naked towering banks of dazzling lights put everything in high relief and each blade of grass seemed to be a green thread in a tight miraculous bright tapestry.
“Something, huh?” my father said. “It’s never as green as the first time, though.”
Andy Egan lived a few blocks away. He was a bartender at a country club and somehow had ended up with a bunch of old baseball uniforms made of heavy wool that itched and had a mothballed smell. He donated them to the neighborhood kids, and our next door neighbor, Fred Emery, a taciturn, mustached man who worked as a pipe fitter at the shipyard in Camden, became our coach and manager. His son Freddy was our catcher. I had never heard Fred senior say more than a few words, but the team transformed him. He actually talked his way into the Phillies’ clubhouse to get donations for the team, which didn’t even have a name,and came away with one of the two-toned bats used by Harry “The Hat” Walker, the National League batting champion. That sacred bat was never used and never left Fred Emery’s house.
He held team meetings in his living room, the kids all crowded in, the smell of old wool and mothballs mixed with the smoke of his endless cigarettes. Our practices were pleasantly chaotic. We never had any actual games, and the team trailed off into memory like Fred Emery’s cigarette smoke.
But my memories now are of the days and nights at Shibe Park and the rare and marvelous baseball sights I beheld there.
Let me insert here that those magnificent sights, no matter how wondrous to my fan-struck young eyes, were nothing when compared to my late friend Dinny’s one towering tale. His father took Dinny to a World Series game whenever possible and they were there at the Polo Grounds when Willie Mays made “the catch” off the bat of Cleveland’s Vic Wertz and the often-overlooked, equally magnificent throw afterwards. Willie Mays got his whole ass into that throw.
My first full memory is of a twi-night doubleheader, that anachronism so long lost and mourned, with the New York Yankees, the team of my young dreams. And it was Joe DiMaggio Night. It seemed all of Italian South Philly was there, and between games they presented the Yankee Clipper with all manner of treasures, topped by a giant television set so big you could skate on it.
DiMag rose to the occasion with a magnificent performance, homering twice and patrolling center field with an elegance and grace that was unforgettable. He threw out a runner trying to stretch a double and smiled shyly and tipped his hat at the ensuing pandemonium.
Ted Williams – Teddy Ballgame – never tipped his hat, even after homering in his last big league at-bat. Our YMCA group went to a Saturday afternoon game between the A’s and the Red Sox. We were sitting in the lower deck out toward left field, and at one point Ted Williams came over, chasing a foul ball, and he looked to me like an intelligent airedale, with his long, sloping face and sharp, quick eyes. He hit a pop-up so high that he was almost to second base when it was caught. It came down with ice on it.
Bob Feller threw aspirin tablets at almost 100 mph and walked off the mound like he was behind a plow. He kicked high and pitched blurs. He was America’s pitcher then, and it pained me later in life to find out that the retired Bob Feller insisted on having at least two women available to him after each speaking engagement. I guess he still had his fast ball.
When we were old enough, we made Sunday pilgrimages to Shibe Park for the doubleheaders, carrying the stalwart lunches our mothers had packed for the occasion. We took the bus into Philly, then the Broad Street Subway to Lehigh Avenue, and walked the seven blocks to 21st Street. We were religiously early enough to watch batting practice from the good grandstand seats that we’d saved up for.
Eddie Stanky – Stankiewicz – was from Philly and played second base for the New York Giants. He was a nasty little guy on the field, making up in hustle and wits what he lacked in pure athletic talent. It was Eddie Stanky who on one of our Sunday pilgrimages was personally responsible for getting four guys thrown out of the first game and creating a mini riot.
I had gone to the park with Richard Jackson and Bobby Kennedy. Both could become, shall we say, highly emotional over many things, baseball first among them.
Here’s what happened: the Phillies’ burly, mean-ass catcher, Andy Seminick is at bat. Stanky comes over and starts doing jumping-jacks on second base behind the pitcher to distract Seminick and pollute his field of vision. Seminick is yelling at Stanky. The umpires don’t know what to do. They yell at Stanky. He keeps doing it. Seminick walks. He is really pissed, and on the first pitch takes off for second base. Stanky comes over and takes the throw in plenty of time to tag the lumbering Seminick in the teeth. Seminick jumps up and he and Stanky go round and round, rolling on the ground. The Giants’ shortstop, Bill Rigney, a skinny little guy with glasses, who will later manage the Giants, runs over and gets into it with Seminick too. Then Hank Thompson, the third baseman, joins in. By this time Richie Ashburn, of all people, brandishing a bat, leads the charge out of the Phillies dugout and the Giants dugout empties and there is one of those pushing and shoving affairs, while the umps are quieting things down around second base and chasing the players back to the dugouts. Stanky, Seminick, Rigney, and Hank Thompson all are thrown out. All because of those jumping-jacks.
We were sitting in the upper deck and when Ashburn came charging out waving that bat, I thought Richard Jackson and Bobby Kennedy were going to run down and jump over the railing, committing their fates to the gods of baseball and becoming its first fan martyrs.
Eddie Stanky had been a great high school soccer player in Philly and was actually from the neighborhood near Shibe Park called Swampoodle. He went on to manage the Cardinals and the White Sox, but I’ll always remember those bratty calisthenics.
Another Yankee twi-nighter later on was a Mickey Mantle tour de force of power and speed. His legs were almost gone then, and New York used him in spots. He came up as a pinch-hitter batting right-handed with the bases loaded in the first game and hit the first pitch over the left field roof. It was still rising as it left the premises and the awed crowd didn’t regain its voice until he was almost to first base. He jake-legged around the bases, jogging with a slight limp.
There was no limp in the night game. Batting lefty, he drilled one off the scoreboard. He was just rounding third when the A’s shortstop, Joe DeMaestri, took the outfield throw. Mantle turned on the jets and didn’t even have to slide to beat the relay throw for an inside-the-park home run.
I can still see all that. I don’t care if I ever get back.