Rowe's Royals - circa 1964
Vallejo Babe Ruth League (Ages 13 - 15)
I'm in there, somewhere. -- Me.
Somewhere, lost in all of the turmoil that life tends to inherit once you get into your mid-60's, is my complete love of baseball/softball/OTL or other forms of the "American Pastime". I'll even watch Cricket, if it's on, although I really don't understand it yet, it's roughly the same -- a man throws a ball, a man tries to hit the thrown ball -- whether it can hit the ground, or not, is irrelevant. That interest in the British game comes only late in life, and is immeasurably better than watching NBA Summer League Basketball (Yes, I will be relentless on this waste of airtime. No one shows the MLB Winter Leagues, or televises off-season scrimmages between NFL teams. The NBA has the longest season anyway, and then this?)
My apologies to my nephew Brian Gardner for a Facebook rant about flag burning. You've heard of "Push-button" issues? That's one of mine. People desecrate the Flag of the USA because they can't burn freedom. The group that took the US to court over the First Amendment Rights of people to do so, and did it with straight faces, mind you, never seeing the irony. Only in a truly free country can you have a right to desecrate the acknowledged world-wide symbol of Freedom (the ideal). Even when the Supreme Court ruled in their favor, no one got the joke. Of course, I didn't laugh, either... I commend you for your choice of venues for your social commentary, but wonder how many Facebook users are capable of getting the humor... "Keep on Trucking," is what we'd say "back in the day."
Baseball... I guess one of the things that makes the game so important to me is the fact that it is a True American Sport; bred, born, and nurtured in the USA, and adopted by many countries in the Western Hemisphere, and a number of island nations in the Pacific, predominately Japan. I've actually gone to a Japanese-league game in Tokyo. I don't know why the Japanese-language channels don't broadcast the games from home on US cable, compared to MLB coverage here, it's pretty funny. I know, and I don't mean any disrespect to the people of Japan, for one who neither speaks, nor understands the Japanese Language, the broadcast is a series of Japanese sentences, punctuated by totally American terms such as "Ball-o one," "Strike-e two," and "Hombrun," which of course is "Home Run," but I am trying to show that un-similarities aside, such as the dirt infield, and rooting sections that actually root for their teams, and even local pronunciations of American English, Baseball lives on. To be honest, my first reaction to the game on Japanese TV in Misawa, I laughed. I'd never heard baseball broadcast in anything but English, and occasional trips to the SAP for Spanish Language Broadcasts. Those I didn't find as humorous, probably because I know a little about the language, and the fact that the SLB took the time to translate-out the American phraseology.
This is me before my first Babe Ruth League game.
1964 - Age 13
Cute, huh? Sometimes I wish I could go back and tell him a few things, but then it wouldn't be fair. The house behind me belonged to our neighbor, a Miss Mina McKnight, who worked as a Nurse in the local schools. Notice, in the upper left corner, the top of the fence that went across the back of her yard. She had a small flat spot for a teeny yard, and an uphill slope worthy of the talents of a mountain goat. I mention that, because going to the left from there, that fence would have been atop a ridge that decreased in height, flattening out on the left corner of a 1/2 acre of open land that was sold to my dad when he bought the house next door to Mina's. I always thought it was big enough to put a Little League-sized baseball diamond on, and it would have, but for one small problem... the field sloped up the side of the hill that was topped by the fence in the upper left corner. If I'd have had access to a backhoe, or skip loader, or some such thing, there might have actually been a small baseball diamond behind our house. We moved in when I was six, and I got the big idea that it could be dug out by hand. That was doomed from the start.
To be honest, I wasn't ever that good. I played, usually in places that I couldn't do much damage in, mostly because of the fact that I could usually get a hit, occasionally a double, rarely a triple, and two, over the fence, home runs, one in Little League, and one in Babe Ruth League. Both were "Big Boy" homers, as the Giant's announcers would call them, both deep, and both with bases loaded. In that regard, my timing was pretty good. The one in Little League was a fastball, meant to impress me, and the other was a curve that hung out there like a piñata... both were hit with the "meat" of the bat, and both were absolutely crushed. I wrote about it at Chico State once, and I don't know what happened to it. I tried to write it from the perspective of a 10 year-old, and the professor thought that I pretty much nailed it. I don't know if I've tried to do it for a blog, but that's an idea.
I have been a baseball fan for most of my life. I once liked the Dodgers of Walter Alston, guys like Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax, John Roseborough, Maury Wills, and Duke Snyder. We were in San Diego, then, and only got Dodger games on the radio, unless the games in San Francisco ran late, and we could pick them up due to a thing called "the Skip". At certain times of the evening, some radio stations would reduce their output, leaving some stations more space for their broadcasts to travel. The Skip had a weather element to it, and I can't remember how that supposedly worked, but the fact that after about 8pm, I could get stations from Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and a host of places that were normally way beyond the range of AM radio. As FM is a line-of-sight medium that doesn't "bounce" well, most people have given up on trying to get reception from distant places.
In 1961, my dad took me to a Giants game at Candlestick Park, the stadium's second year of operation. I was pretty much a Giants fan by then, mostly because of my dad's rants about "the n-----s in Frisco." I knew then that damning a person because of his/her race was wrong back before the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. King, and the whole deal. I'm not trying to brag, or cover for any racist tendencies; my dad had enough to go around, but he didn't pass them to his only son. I became a kind of "closet" Giants fan, afraid of how my dad would react if I told him how much I admired the abilities of Willie Mays and Willie McCovey. Looking back, he might have had his first heart attack at age 38. That night, in 1961, for some reason, my dad bought me a Pittsburgh Pirates pennant and cap. I decided that I would become a Giants fan, just to spite him. To get to be the Champs three times in the last five years is best expressed by lyrics in two songs. The first by SF natives Grateful Dead in the song Truckin', "What a long strange trip it's been." And a Frank Zappa song of the same name as the lyric, The Torture Never Stops.
I am blessed, however, to a woman who has learned (sometimes the hard way) to understand and appreciate some of the complexities of the game. Blessed... OK, to be truthful, I've created a monster. We have two TV's in our living room, ostensibly because of our differing tastes in programming, but mostly so she can watch (keep track of the score of) the games. She hasn't gotten to the point of knowing batting averages, or even how they compute batting averages, or how to answer questions like "Who played Short Stop for Cleveland in 1946?" (the correct answer is, "Who gives a %$#@?"). I love baseball, but I look like some kind of piker next to my Mary.
As always, thanks for letting me ramble.
