I spent most of last Thursday afternoon March 27 listening to the radio, taking in the opening day of the baseball season. The Chicago Cubs were playing the Washington Nationals, and if you can’t remember the score, “Wait ‘til next year,” Cub fans have already started.
As soon as snow was off the grass at Longfellow Elementary, kids started bringing our gloves and bats to school. We played short pick-up “games” at recess and again after school. We all going to be star pitchers for a major league team, we just knew it.
The next year a T-ball team was formed, and I strutted to the school playground to start my career, which proved short-lived. I flunked out, which takes real effort achieve in T-ball. The Old in charge shouted loud and clear that I had no talent, so sit down. At least I didn’t fall off the bench.
Archibald “Midnight” Graham had a longer career, if barely. I looked him up in the books, per Yogi Berra, to the right-fielder played just one game for the New York Giants on June 29, 1905
His story was popularized by W.P. Kineslla’s novel “Shoeless Joe” and the subsequent 1989 move “Field of Dreams” starring Kevin Coster while featuring Burt Lancaster and Frank Whaley respectively, as Graham’s older and younger incarnations.
Baseball has something for everyone. For some fans, it’s all physics. A round ball is thrown in the zone of a player holding the rounded barrel of a bat, no mean feat in its own right, taking into consideration elevation, distance and wind resistance, involving understanding fascinating calculations and equations.
Plus being able to see and decide in less than a second if that pitch is going to sink, rise, be a strike or ball, then swing.
We have enjoyed the Great American Pastime for more than a century and a half, and that means it is well endowed with history and tradition. The lore and myth may mean more to us than the results of a game or even season.
During the offseason. what was called the Hot Stove League gave fans a chance to gather and talk baseball, originally when they sat around a wood stove, often as not as the local hardware or general store.
They’d swap yarns about when Philadelphia organist Wilbur Snapp was playing at aspring training game in Florida, thought the umpire made a boneheaded call and cut loose with “Three Blind Mice.” Kevin O’Connor, who made the call, ejected Snapp from the game, the only time in baseball’s long that ever happened. It’s in the books. You can look that one up too.
Or how in the worst of the 1930s Great Depression, Babe Ruth signed a $50,000 contract with the Yankees. “Do you think it is right for a ball player to make more money than the President?” are reporter asked him.
“I guess I had a better year than he (then President Herbert Hoover) had,” Ruth said.
What makes major league baseball come alive is the personal connection between players and fans. For many years, between New Years Day and spring training, teams sent their players out on what were called Rubber Chicken Tours. Even a long term third-string bench-warmer could be the star attraction at father-and-son banquets in church basements, signing autographs and handing out swag. That always made an impression and generated a lifetime of fan loyalty.
When it comes to connecting with fans, at the height of his career Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig still took the subway to and from home to Yankee Stadium. He made a point of talking to the young boys and encouraged them to be good sportsmen, often signing autographs.
When I was growing up in Rochester, Minn., we always had retired ballplayers in town visiting the Mayo Clinic. Whenever possible, advertising agent Walt Bruzek would arrange a dinner and conversation.
Father took me to listen to Burleigh Grimes, a nasty and bitter Yankees pitcher and the last to legally pitch a spitball. Every sentence was laced with profanity, which impressed no one.
In contrast was “Midnight” Graham, by then an elderly retiree known as Dr. Archibald Graham of Chisholm, Minn. but still true gentleman. He came to Rochester each year “just to see what the boys at Mayo are doing.”
I got to shake hands him, although it wasn’t until reading Kinsella’s novel and seeing the film “Field of Dreams” that I learned he was a genuine Big Deal. That and a few bucks will get me a cup of coffee, but it’s something I remember.
On opening day, we might recall our favorite broadcasters such as Red Barber, Vince Scully for the Dodgers, Mel Allen for the Yankees, Harry Caray and Jack Brickhouse for the Cubs and of course Ernie Harwell for the Tigers. They were true personalities and made the game come alive. If you listened to them, they are part of your DNA.
President Reagan started his career as an announcer for the Cubs on WHO, the station in Des Moines, Iowa. He was never at Wrigley Field but got the telegraph reports at his microphone. Reagan was such a success recreating the games that many people thought he truly was in Chicago.
One day when the wire was down, Reagan ad-libbed, telling of long wind-ups, yet another foul ball, a long-winded conference at the mound and an imaginary bird that landed on the infield and delayed the game. To his relief, the machine was soon clicking again. No one knew the truth till years later.
Another fellow who loved the game was the great Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko. His game was Windy City-style softball, but he wrote often in the Daily News and then Tribune about the Cubs and Sox with reverence at all the game meant to so many people.
The game has changed markedly over the last 150 years. Anyone who wants to see how it was played in the early days only needs to find a Vintage team, such as the nearby Douglas Dutchers. They continue a tradition of playing base ball (it was two words then) matches (now games) since before the Civil War, wore no gloves, played with what we would now call a “dead” ball … The now/then comparisons and contrasts are fun and striking.
There is one change that’s just plain wrong: too much emphasis on money. Some players won’t sign autographs unless they get paid. Few players still make free appearances at church basement circuits for family banquets. I know that few players have long careers and make astronomical salaries, but something about this trend just doesn’t seem right.
Money has always been an important component of pro baseball, which can lead to substantial betting that becomes corruption, two other popular U.S. pastimes.
Owners, players and fans have done their best to keep everything on the up and up, but have stiff competition from the scoundrels.
When Arnold Rothstein put in the “fix” for the Chicago White Sox to lose the World Series, the resulting Black Sox Scandal nearly killed the game. What saved it? A then Boston Red Sox pitcher named Babe Ruth.
Today, sports betting is far removed from The Olds wagering a whole buffalo nickel on which team would win a game. Now, it is not just the final score, but every minute detail in the game. I think the only one not considered is how many times a player scratches themselves, and where. Millions of dollars exchange hands in a matter of seconds. An estimated 1.3-percent of the bettors are making more than 90 percent of the money.
A lot of people are getting drawn into this racket and are getting hurt. These sports betting outfits, say critics, are built on scalping a lot of losers.
For the Great American Pastime to flourish despite online betting, we need to remember actor Humphrey Bogart’s line, “A hotdog at the ballpark is better than a steak at the Ritz,” putting the emphasis simple pleasures of sitting in the bleachers to enjoy a game.
