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Baseball and Proust Kendric W. Taylor
Baseball and Proust: Memories of Games Past
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By Kendric W. Taylor
Marcel Proust bit into a French pastry and all his childhood memories came rushing back. Probably not a baseball fan, for Proust, the crack of a bat against ball in spring signified nothing beyond annoyance, as he hated loud noises, but for my red-blooded American youth, that sound meant two immediate things: baseball, and cutting school for Opening Day.
However, it turns out, unlike Proust, who seemed to have total recall, memories of those wonderful mileposts sometimes turn out not exactly as remembered, sort of an “Uncertain Remembrance of Things Past. ” We all know memory takes on shades with age, and to delve into even more high-toned references, instead of retaining the sharpness of a Leonardo drawing, they become unfocused and misty like a Turner seascape. But they are no less cherished, not so much how accurate they are, but
because of what they represent, a happy time of shared discovery. We run into trouble when we start double-checking those memories on that cerebral cortex of the ether -- the internet -- and find that nostalgia doesn’t always stand up to the reality of fact checking.
It’s family custom for fathers to take their sons (and daughters) to their first major league game, and mine was no different. It was right after World War Two, and his newspaper had a field box at Yankee Stadium. This also entitled us to have lunch at the famous Stadium Club under the stands in the ballpark – probably the predecessor of today’s private suites and fancy in-stadium dining concessions. “We’ll put you right behind home plate, ” the maître d’ said genially, and he did: a table where home plate would be in the huge panoramic photograph of the stadium behind it. There we sat with the left and right field stands stretching out on either side of us, while we dined on roast beef fit for Babe Ruth himself. It was amazing, and I hadn’t even seen the field yet. We finished, walked through a long tunnel toward daylight, and there in front of us as we emerged, the once-in-a-lifetime sight for every kid at their first game – that wondrous green expanse of a big league playing field. The rest of that day has faded from memory – too bad, as the Yankees that year had all their players back from the war, and that included Joe DiMaggio and all the great pre-war Yankee stars that were in the World Series seemingly every October.
My father once told me about his most memorable game: his father had owned a riding stable near Central Park, and being a tradition-clad Englishman, might have enjoyed cricket, but probably had no time for our national sport. My father hated the stable, but liked baseball, and often hiked himself over to the Polo Grounds, where the fabled NY Giants under John McGraw dominated the National League at the beginning of the 20th century. As such on that day, in September 1908, both he and McGraw watched as the Giant’s Fred Merkle commit a colossal base-running mistake that cost the Giant’s the game and the pennant, Quickly known as “Merkle’s Boner” (the word had a different connotation then), when, with the score tied in the ninth, Merkle, a 19-year-old, failed to touch second base on what should have been the game-winning hit, instead resulted in a force out at second and a tie game. The Cub’s won the next game and the pennant. Five baseball immortals were on hand that day, McGraw, and Christy Matheson for New York, Three-Finger Brown and no less than Tinker, Evers and Chance for the Cubs. The Giants also had a pitcher on their roster named Bull Durham. Quite a day.
For myself, my second big league game and first Opening Day was in April of 1947 (dates are important, as we shall see), when my friends and I made the journey down from our suburban homes to Polo Grounds (same name, newer ballpark). New York boasted of having three teams in those days: the Yankees, Giants, and over in Brooklyn, the Dodgers; our group of friends had adherents of each. Although in our early teens, we already considered ourselves Broadway regulars from our trips to Manhattan, sophisticated habitués of Hubert’s Flea circus and other venues in Times Square famous for luring in the innocent.
Our town had no baseball stars, except for the owner of a local bar who had pitched for the Chicago Cubs during the war. We did get to watch a self-proclaimed local hot prospect with the wonderful name of Babe Narr, who strutted around the grass outside our 8th grade class windows, exercising in a full New York Yankee
pinstripe uniform he had somehow obtained from an open workout they had held. We also had a Class D minor league team in the next town, playing in a small ballpark atop a hill leading up from the Boston Post Road. At the front of the hill was a weathered two-story mansion from the area’s glory days, nicknamed “Rosebud Manor,“ as it was thought to be a brothel. From the stands on a summer’s night, we wondered idly which of us might have the nerve to climb the long flight of wooden stairs leading up from the Post Road (where George Washington had once passed on his way to Boston), and knock on the weathered front door.
Memories of Giants and a Babe
For years I had very firm memories of that day. The Polo Grounds was shaped like a horse shoe, with home plate at the closed end and the club house upstairs in dead center at the open end, a long, long 482 feet away. The foul lines were 259 feet in right and 279 in left, meaning a pull hitter could make a living hitting pop flies down the line for endless home runs (which a lifetime Giant hitter named Mel Ott did, riding them into the Hall of Fame).
The Giants also featured that year one of the original “phenoms,” Clint Hartung, the Hondo (TX) Hurricane. Just out of the Army, without having played a single major league game, it was a question of whether he would hit 50+ homeruns as a batter, or win 25 games as a pitcher (a player could never do both, it was said, even the mighty Babe Ruth. Never Happen). One image of the day stuck in my mind: the Giant center fielder making a magnificent throw from deep center to catch pitcher Schoolboy Rowe sliding into home. The Giants lost.
What really happened, I find, was that it wasn’t opening day, it was a Sunday a week later, so we never cut school. Schoolboy Rowe did pitch, but wasn’t thrown out at the plate, it was a guy named Jim Tabor. Clint Hartung played, but went 0-4, and the giants still lost. Hartung went on to obscurity; but I was there with my friends, and I still miss them.
Next year was a game with a scene that I couldn’t possibly forget: Babe Ruth in an expensive camel’s hair topcoat and matching peaked cap, standing near home plate, while his voice, sounding like his throat was filled with broken glass, echoed through massive Yankee Stadium. There were 58,339 fans there that day in 1947 were there because my girlfriend had a crush on Bob Feller, the great Hall of Fame pitcher for Cleveland. So she got her father to spring for a field box right next to the visitor’s dugout, and invited my great friend Doug and myself – Yankee fans -- to the game.
We had no idea the Babe would be there, but there he was, walking slowly toward the pitching mound, surrounded by dignitaries and Yankee greats, including a young catcher who called himself Larry Berra, and who got into the game later as pinch hitter. Ruth had recently undergone a terrible operation, the reason for that voice, and I watched him -- sitting almost exactly across from me next to the Yankee dugout -eating a hot dog and sipping a beer he kept under his seat. I felt so bad for him. It was a sad day, really. Moreover, it didn’t happen that way.
The game we went to was in April, Babe did appear, did make his brave speech, did have his hot dog and beer, and left around the 6th inning. Only it wasn’t Cleveland, Bob Feller didn’t pitch because it was the Washington Senators. Sid Hudson pitched
for them, and the Yankees lost. It was confusion, because there were two occasions when Babe came back to Yankee Stadium for his final farewell. The second was when that iconic picture of him was taken, the old man leaning on his bat, thin and feeble in his pinstripes. It wasCleveland and Feller didpitch and lost. Obviously, my memory conflated both events, but again, I have memories of a lovely girl, and Doug and I stayed friends for the rest of his life.
He and I actually did get to a real opening day a year later at Yankee Stadium, and we actually cut school to do it; we sat high in the right field stands and Ted Williams hit a home run. Doug wore his Yankees baseball cap: teams hadn’t yet discovered large scale merchandising, selling items of every description to rake in the money. But Doug was ahead of his time, with the only Yankee cap in existence: dark blue with the white interlocking NY in front, which his mother had cut and sewed for him. It looked as real as the real thing, which you couldn’t buy anywhere. That was a Mom!
At the stadium that day, we both took pictures of the action on the far away field on our primitive Brownie cameras, and for years afterward we had fun trying to identify various specks far below on the field: “Wait, is that bug DiMaggio, or Williams?” A few months later the Yankees held the above mentioned second “Day” for Babe, and he passed away shortly after.
One last vignette: in a show of solidarity a year-or-so later, our bi-partisan group of New York team fans all went together to the Polo Grounds for a Giant-Dodger double-header. We all wanted to see Jackie Robinson play, and the great man didn’t disappoint. My lasting memory was seeing him get four straight hits, and steal second four straight times. I’m not looking that one up on the internet or anyway, as this is exactly the way I want to remember him.
While the mind’s eye is usually an endless album of pictures, for some reason it’s hard to remember scenes with players from the past I had seen play. Ted Williams for some reason is the exception. I got to see him play a lot while at college in the late 50’s. ’ I would walk over to Fenway Park in the afternoon after class and sit in the right field bleachers. He was at the end of his career and still hitting over .300. Fenway still had the original bleachers, where we sat on long benches, not yet replaced with the modern individual seats. I’d loll in the sun, waiting for each Williams at-bat, listening to the conversations of students from the other schools discussing the best way to tan, between shouting at Jimmy Piersall playing center field, hoping to incite him to some madness. (I also remember the engineering students from MIT, who insisted on referring to their arms and legs as “pistons”).
And while I loved Williams, if only for his reluctant service in Korea, I remained a Yankee fan.
A few years ago, my then 11-year-old granddaughter came over after a camp outing at Yankee Stadium.
“Who’s Lou Gehrig,” she asked? He died of something, right?”
“Are you ready for a story,” I replied.
“Sure, Grandad.”
After explaining who Gehrig was, and how great a player he was, and what he represented, I explained that Gehrig getting married was big news, especially in the
local newspaper, and in the same edition, many pages away in very small type, under “Births,” was the announcement of my arrival a week earlier at the local hospital. Thus, with this connection, it was only logical that Lou was always my favorite player.
“I have the actual newspaper,” I told her. “Not a clipping, but the whole newspaper, if you want to see it.”
“Grandad, I never doubted you for a minute.”
Wall Art Photo by Chris Taylor
