Section VI
2022
How a Kid from the East Coast Became a Diamondbacks Fan neil miller
W
hen I was a kid growing up in Kingston, New York, in the 1950s, I chose my favorite sports teams by consulting a world atlas. My father didn’t have any strong allegiances—he cared more about golf than any team sport. My friends were all rooting for the Yankees, Giants, and Knicks, headquartered just ninety miles down the newly- constructed New York State Thruway. I was determined to be different, and loved maps and geography and reading The Sporting News, which I bought every week at O’Reilly’s stationery store uptown. As my basketball team, I chose the Fort Wayne (Indiana) Pistons. Fort Wayne sounded exotic to me; who had ever heard of the place, let alone root for its team, which actually made it to the 1955 NBA finals before losing the last game by one point? What I didn’t know at the time was that the Fort Wayne players allegedly conspired with gamblers to shave points and throw various games during the 1953–54 and 1954–55 seasons, including that championship game. In hockey, I made a shrewder choice—the Montreal Canadiens. Canada and Quebec seemed far away and very French. Their players had great names: Jean Beliveau, Maurice Richard (M-O-R-E-E-S R-E-E-C-H-A-R-D, accent on the last syllable). The Canadiens were a solid, reliable team coming in first or second in the NHL throughout the 1950s. No one ever accused them of cheating. But baseball was my true love, and here my choice mattered the most. The team I settled on was the Cleveland Indians; Cleveland was not the most thrilling place on the map but it was far away enough from my Hudson River town to count as exotic. And the team was good—very good. In 1954, when I was nine and in the fourth grade, the Indians won the American League Pennant with an eye-popping 111-43 record. They had starting pitchers who were truly great–Bob Lemon, Early Wynn, Bob Feller and Mike Garcia, all twenty-game winners. Feller, who Ted Williams called “the fastest and best pitcher I ever faced” was a particular hero of mine. I read a kids’ biography of him and years later visited the Bob Feller Museum in the pitcher’s hometown of Van Meter, Iowa (pop. 1,484), where I stared star-struck at a teenage Feller’s original contract with the Cleveland organization—a $500 signing bonus. In 1955, Herb Score came along, a twenty-three-year old left-hander, a strikeout whiz like Feller, and who was rookie of the year that year. An additional Indians’ attraction was Al Rosen at third base, who was Jewish, like me. Rosen batted .300 in that fabled 1954 season, with twenty-four home runs. All in all, it was a dazzling team, who I was sure could give the Yankees a run for their money for years. I was proud of my baseball acumen.
The Lowell Review
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