A baseball spring

Sport changed, but not memories

Saturday, April 5, 2014

In the spring, a young man’s fancy turns not to love, but to baseball. That’s the way life unfolded for me in the early 1950s growing up outside of New York City.

Over 50 years later, some of my most enduring memories center around baseball.

My dad owned a small diner just 15 miles from the Polo Grounds, Yankee Stadium and Ebbets Field. As an immigrant from Greece in the second decade of the 20th Century, he learned English, married a girl from Rhode Island, opened a small restaurant, and fell in love with baseball, at that time one of the most significant socializing agents of American life.

Dad worked a 16-hour day six days a week, with Sundays usually devoted to going in the afternoon to clean the place for Monday. Once in a while he found time to take me to a ball game.

I remember that first big-league image of baseball as if it were today. The ticket for a reserved right field seat cost three dollars. Walking from a covered entrance to the field, I could not believe the expanse of green that appeared.

Playing right field for the Yankees was Gene Woodling, and while I remember his number as 8, it was actually 14. I soon realized, however, that the Yankees won the pennant and the World Series virtually all that time. My sense of fairness and resident social status led me to become a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team that was frequently tormented by the Yankees.

The Dodgers were the bums. They were unpretentious in an era when many of them lived among those who came out to watch them. Salaries for players were only three or four times the salaries of ordinary people like my dad. Some players had to have a second job during the off-season. Don Newcombe operated a liquor store and Carl Furillo, who often threw out runners on sharply hit balls to right field, worked construction.

But when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, followed by the Giants to Frisco, I knew the game would never be the same for me, and I never rooted for the Dodgers since. My dad retired and we moved to Rhode Island. I became a Red Sox fan.

While I did not follow them closely at first, they seemed to be the right fit for me: They were family owned, played in a jewel of a ballpark, and lost frequently to the Yankees. It was perfect. One late September day I found myself in a two-thirds-full Fenway when Ted Williams hit a home run just to the right of me in, as I recall, the Sox bullpen. It was his last major league at-bat.

Taking a teaching job in Arkansas in the spring of ’76 was front-line culture shock, but Ray Winder field softened the blow and led a blind man to the wonders of Arkansas. The ballpark had great character. More than that, it was full of characters: Captain Dynamite, midget wrestlers, the irascible Bill Valentine, and clunker-car night, of which I won one in the last inning of the last home game of the 1999 season.

My job cut into my baseball attentiveness, such as when Tom Seaver got his 3,000th strikeout. My colleague and I happened to be in Cincinnati presenting a paper, and we did not have a clue while 45,000 were roaring on every strike. My son and I were present when Mark McGwire hit his 60th (a sacred number for my generation), and tragically I was present when Tulsa Drillers first-base coach Mike Coolbaugh was cut down by an impossible line drive at Dickey-Stephens. It is a memory I wish never was.

The game has changed, of course. The ’50s are long-gone and pro and college football, among other sports, are more popular. Players, at least pretty good ones, can command multimillion-dollar salaries, and ticket prices have eviscerated low- and middle-income attendance. My dad could not afford a big-league ticket now, but he could afford to see a Traveler, UALR, UCA or UAPB game. That game will endure, but a kid’s memory of the big leagues will have less of a chance.

And really perhaps the only thing that matters is 60 feet from the mound and 90 feet between the bases.

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Art English is professor emeritus in the fields of American government, Arkansas politics and constitutional law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Editorial, Pages 19 on 04/05/2014