This is an article I was asked to submit to USAToday weekly magazine for this week. It's about the return of baseball and what it means...enjoy.
Well another New Year has come and gone. Most of us have either already broken our resolutions or we forgot where we left the paper we wrote them on. The Holidays are over and the mid-winter doldrums have set in. Days are short, skies are dreary and the temperature is too cold for our liking.
When I was a boy, this was my least favorite time of the year. It seemed to linger like a cold and it almost seemed, at times, to be moving in reverse. Was summer ever going to get here? That stretch between the Holidays and spring seemed longer than all the other months combined. In fact it seemed directly proportionate to how short summer always felt.
Growing up in the Philadelphia suburb of Wilmington, DE was a bit more of a challenge. We don’t typically get enough snow to ever really enjoy true winter sports. If you want to ski, you have to go somewhere else. It wasn’t cold enough for a long enough period of time to have outdoor ice rinks. We had sleds but we only got 2 or 3 chances each winter to use them. Winter for us was definitely an “in between” season.
I grew up on a little dead-end street that ran parallel to a public park. The park had two baseball diamonds and a big open field between them. There was a good-sized hill in that field and it’s where we went sledding on those few times each winter when we got appreciable snowfall and we could break out the Flexible Flyers, snatch some canning wax from our mothers kitchen drawer, wax the runners and hit the hills.
Those days were few and far between because the snow never lingered and we never got it with regularity. The rest of the winter was marked with cold mornings…I delivered morning newspapers back then, in a time when a 12 year old boy could be on the streets at 5 AM and not be in peril…short days, and long nights. School seemed to drag, outdoor activities all but ceased.
Sometime in late January- just as my hopes for ever feeling a warm breeze on my face or smelling fresh-cut grass were waning to the point of disappearance- something would catch my attention and restore my hopes.
Being a sports fan even as long as I can remember, I watched the evening local news and especially the sports. In Philadelphia “Big Al” Meltzer, was the only sports anchor that mattered. Sometime around the end of January, “Big Al” would utter those magical words that signaled an end to those winter blues… “Pitchers and catchers report in two weeks”. It was more reliable than Punxatawney Phil, and more welcome. The start of baseball was really only two weeks away! Sure, for me, Little League was still a long way off. We didn’t start practicing until late March, but the “Big Leaguers” were already packing their bags and they would be heading to Phillies spring training in Clearwater Florida…which sounded as exotic as Bora Bora to a nine-year-old…and getting ready to play real baseball.
When I heard Big Al say those words I could close my eyes and almost feel that summer breeze blow across my face. I could imagine the smell of my ball glove or the inside of a wool baseball cap. (I am just old enough to have worn old-school wool caps for the first few years I played Little League and they do, in fact, take on a particularly comforting scent) I could hear the crack of the bat and feel the tingle in my left hand as a fastball popped my catcher’s mitt. No matter what the thermometer outside our kitchen window told me…winter was losing the fight for permanence yet again. Baseball was almost here.
It was time. Time to slide that shoebox full of baseball cards out from under my bed and go through each rubber-band-imprisoned pack. Team by team, player by player, just to make sure everything was right. Pitchers and catchers were reporting and I had to be ready. In a few more weeks Wassams, our local 5 and 10 store, would be bringing out the new season’s baseball cards and I had to take inventory.
I never missed reading the sports page so I always knew who got traded to where. Trades weren’t quite as common as they are now but they happened. The earliest trade I remember that really had me excited was in 1972 when my beloved Phillies traded Rick Wise for Steve Carlton. Later, in 1974 we traded Del Unser and John Stearns to the Mets for Tug McGraw. Knowing the trades was so important to proper baseball card collecting. I would methodically review each team’s stack of cards and remove those guys who were no longer with that particular team.
We had our own ritual for the offseason. I oiled my glove with linseed oil and stuck a baseball in the pocket and tied it shut with old shoe strings. I slept on it, uncomfortably, or pounded my fist into the pocket a thousand times while watching “Wide World of Sports” hosted by the great Jim McKay on cold Saturday afternoons.
The real exercise here, of course, was just biding time until I could play baseball. Because playing is what really mattered. Sometimes, when the waiting seemed too interminably long, I would go back to that park behind our street and crouch behind the plate and imagine throwing out runners at second base. I was untouchable back there. I was the field general and in control. I was Carlton Fisk…the greatest catcher to ever play the game. (I know he played for Boston, but I adored Fisk growing up and allowed myself this one vice by reason of him playing in the American League. As he was no threat to our Bob Boone, I felt like it was okay).
I felt, at times, like Charlie Brown in one Peanuts installment where he goes out to his frozen pitchers mound in mid winter, the snow is piled high and the field is under there somewhere…covered in white. He is imagining a brutal line-up as he goes into his windup with a snowball, ready to mow them all down, maybe the only time he doesn’t get reduced to his underwear by a liner up the middle.
Somewhere under that snow was dirt and grass. The grass was brown now but soon enough it would be a wondrous green again. It would be sweet and it would feel cool on my feet on July evenings. The dirt was frozen and hard but in a matter of a couple of months it would be soft and enticing, and anxious for my slide. Home plate was under there too, waiting for me to take up residence and set up my target for guys like Todd White, Finney Kureton, Nick Caputo, and Mary Degennaro, the first girl to play in our league.
They were ball-yard legends and not even out of elementary school yet. They were my friends. We saw each other all year at school and we were team mates in the summers. We played in places like Chelsea Park, George Reed Junior High fields, Airbase field, and Coventry Park. Each year we got the chance to play at Stahl Field, which was owned by Suburban Little League (the league I played in). It had real dugouts and a 210 foot fence and foul poles and when I was 9 they installed lights and we actually played nights games…just like Big Leaguers. I once saw Sherman Johnson, who was already mythical by the time he was 10 years old, foul a pitch off his hands and it cleared that 210 foot fence. I was in awe.
That park was special. We held our opening day ceremonies there and we would parade onto the field and put our caps over our hearts and stand like statues while they played a scratchy version of the National Anthem over an intercom system that sounded like Radar O’Reilly calling “Incoming Choppers!” on Mash. But we never minded because we were playing baseball. My friends and I were maybe the last generation to really, deeply, madly love this game at so young an age.
There was a code to the way we played the game. You had to bend the bill of your cap just right. You blocked the front with baseball cards…but only the cards of players you considered “not very good”. If a guy was known as a “utility man” his card usually wound up inside the blocking of your ball cap, or clothes pinned to the spokes of your “Spider bike” to make it sound like a Harley. We stretched our stirrups on our bedposts until they reached almost to our knees. I would buy some elastic from the 5 and 10 and sew it into my stirrups for even more length.
Nobody would have dreamed of baggy pants on a ball player. We wore knee high white sanitary socks and Puma cleats. (When you got to the senior division and in High School you were allowed to wear metal spikes and you wore Spot-Bilt or you weren’t cool…period. But as a young kid we wore rubber cleats).
The first team I played for was Our Lady of Fatima’s “Green Team”. O.L.F. sponsored two teams, “Green and White”. My first coach was Jack Kinsella. We still had wooden bats in our bat bag along with some very prehistoric Aluminum models. All my friends played. Mark Weidick and Gary Parosky and Nick Caputo and Tim and Tom Hassler. We played for our Little League teams and we played in our neighborhoods on the sandlots and public parks. We couldn’t get enough baseball back then.
We all got that same antsy itch around the end of January each year…when was baseball returning? We all felt the same thrill when the rumor swirled it’s way through school…”Did you hear? Big Al said pitchers and catchers report in two weeks!” We all caught the same excited vibe and the same faint whiff of pine tar and mown outfield grass.
We all dreamed of going to the ballpark with our dads. Some went and some didn’t. Those of us who didn’t go with our dad, went instead with the great Harry Kalas as we’d listen to him calling those games on steamy summer nights on tiny transistor radios hidden under our pillows. Whether it was Harry, or Vin Scully or Jack Buck, or Ernie Harwell or any of the dozens of wonderful announcers of another era, we were transported and transfixed.
We all went to sleep at night with a magical voice describing the action as if we were there ourselves, and dreaming of one day hearing him calling out our name as we came to bat. “Whitey” I would imagine Harry saying to his partner Richey Ashburn, “Here comes the new kid Craig Daliessio. It’s his first time at bat since the Phils called him up to take over behind the plate for Booney. The Phils have High Hopes for this young man. He has some pop in his bat and a real gun for an arm…”
After games we’d all meet at Parker’s Dairy Palace for the best ice cream in town and to brag about the night’s achievement. It was a tradition and we were all like family, even though we played on different teams and lived in different neighborhoods. We all loved playing at Stahl field at night, we all wanted those cool white Puma cleats, we all loved Hank Aaron and we all dreaded facing Craig Willard, a pitcher who was already hitting 80 MPH by the time he was ten and who would develop a 93 MPH fastball by high school.
Baseball was the timekeeper for each year and the thread that wove itself through all four seasons. In summer it was time to play ball and be out of school. In fall it was my birthday and the playoffs. In winter we had the Holidays and then the hot stove league and in spring it was the return of new life and warm weather and spring training for the pros and little league for us.
Spring time would finally arrive and we’d begin with practicing again. It would still be so cold sometimes and we’d feel batting practice in our fingers for days at a time…tingling and painful but that was the only way we’d have it.
Meanwhile in Clearwater, our Phillies were building the core of a great team. Throughout the early seventies they were really bad, but with each spring, the thawing ground gave the promise of a better team until finally, in 1980, we won it all. I was a junior in High School when we won that World Series. It was worth the wait. It was worth every long cold winter and every gloriously exciting summer. It was the culmination of a thousand packs of baseball cards and a thousand pieces of stale gum.
As we all do, I grew up and grew away from my childhood passion with the game. My love for the sport lay dormant for years, occasionally reviving for a week or two but usually returning to that cocoon of adulthood and responsibility and a world that seems to spin a thousand times faster than it did when I was a little boy. But baseball never really changed. The game is still nine innings. Grass is still green. An out is still three strikes and the pop of a catcher’s mitt still has a distinct ring.
When I needed baseball the most, it was still there to greet me like an old friend. In 2008 while my life had disintegrated and the economy stole my home, my career, my dreams and my hope, baseball was standing there, in the shadows of the long dark winter of my broken heart, to pick me up and give me hope yet again.
By the time the World Series of 2008 rolled around, I was homeless and living in my car, a broken and battered man. My industry had collapsed and only my love for my daughter kept me in Nashville TN where I now lived. I was hopeless and I had no more dreams left to dream. But baseball would have none of that.
On October 29th of that year, my beloved Phillies won their 2nd World Series in team history and in my cold little car, hidden behind a church in a bed of high grass, on my car radio on a rainy night, I heard the magical call from the great Harry Kalas. Something in Harry’s call reminded me of all the great times that had revolved around baseball in the past. It unhooked that train of hopelessness and sadness I was pulling around and it reminded me that I had been a winner and would surely be again.
Baseball had once again rescued me from the bleakness of my personal winter, just as it had so many times before. The grass was still green, the outfield sun still falls warm on your face, the infield is still dusty and the lines are still white. Hope springs eternal…yet again.
I am grown now and have responsibilities and worries. Harry Kalas is gone but beloved and not forgotten. I need this game now more than ever.
Welcome back baseball…my old friend. It’s been a long winter, and I’ve missed you. Stay awhile…I have the feeling this is going to be a great summer.
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