Baseball Memories                                                

Watching Ken Burns’ superlative documentary, Baseball, these past few weeks has transported this octogenarian back to my wonder years in the post-war 40’s.  On any summer day but Sunday, unless it rained, kids from all over Peacock Park in Fairmont, West Virginia would scramble down the dirt path to the holler below my Aunt Alice’s house where someone had laid out a scruffily defined baseball diamond.  The bases, including home plate, were defined by an X dug by someone’s shoe heel.  Most days we played until lunch and often returned in the afternoon.

My playing prospects were generally uncertain. I was a scrawny first grader when I initially descended to that holler. And worse, I was a girl, the last to be chosen and only then if my cousin John Freeman or one of his friends picked me in a show of sympathy or if there weren’t enough kids to fill out a team. Either way, I was quickly banished to the outfield - my throwing skills being imprecise, my catching skills even more lacking.  But I could hit.  And I could run. 

Money being scarce in those days, baseball gloves were shared.  So were bats and balls.

When we got home after a day in the holler Aunt Alice would be sitting on her wooden stool in the kitchen.  I can still see her there as if it were only yesterday, kneading bread dough or stirring whatever was cooking for the evening meal.  A radio would be blaring out the play-by-play whenever the Pittsburgh Pirates took the field.  It was from her I learned to love the game.  For that I will always be grateful.

In 1956, the summer between my junior and senior year in high school, we returned to Kansas City, where, for a buck and a quarter I would sit along the first base line in the old Blues Stadium and see the likes of Mickey Mantle, Billy Martin, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto come to bat when the Yankees were in town. Defending in right field was Harry “Suitcase” Simpson, a tall, gangly alumni of the fabled Negro League who became my favorite on the old KC Athletics.  Sadly, he is the only A’s player I can even recall.  In those days, the Athletics were mostly a major league farm team for the perennial pennant winning Yankees.

While a sophomore at the University of Tulsa trying hard to win a place on the school newspaper’s roster, I covered an appearance by St. Louis Cardinal veterans Enos Slaughter and Pepper Martin.  Martin was once a charter member of Dizzy Dean’s “Gashouse Gang.”  Enthralled and regaled by their twangy accounts of baseball past only deepened my love of the game.

Moving to Texas in 1960, I switched my allegiance from the Pirates to the Cardinals, a move forced by practicality, since St. Louis was the only team broadcast I could find on my transistor radio.  While the ballplayers played, I would take the sprinkled starched shirts from the refrigerator to iron while being treated to the best baseball play-by-play team ever – Harry Caray and Jack Buck, and for a couple of those years, the gregarious and funny Joe Garagiola. Years later I met Garagiola when I was fortunate enough to be seated between him and astronaut John Young at a ceremony honoring Gus Grissom at Spring Hill State Park in Indiana. He was even funnier in person.  And Garagiola came with an appetite that rivaled his sense of humor.  At his insistence we both went for seconds in the buffet line.  I could finish only a small portion of my second serving.  Garagiola pointed to my plate and asked, “You want any more of that.” When I nodded no, he reached for my plate and quickly cleared it.  Then made another pass at the buffet line returning with yet another heaping plate.  Despite that hearty appetite, Garagiola maintained his playing days weight well into his later years.  Oh, to be endowed with such a compassionate metabolism!  

The last time I played baseball I was 65.  It was on a makeshift ball diamond at my son’s home in Indiana during a family reunion.  Armed with a new bat, fresh off a rack from Walmart, I approached the plate and with shouted encouragement from my teammates, mostly grandkids, I hit the second ball thrown.  Up, up and away it went.  Outfielders scurried after the ball while I lumbered around the bases, slowed by bad knees, a couple dozen extra pounds and a regrettable abhorrence for exercising regularly.  I jubilantly crossed home plate thanks more to the benevolent slowness of the rival players than my baserunning skills.  But it remains among my greatest moments close behind the birth of my children and grandchildren.

My fondest baseball memory though, takes me back to an early spring morning in Joplin, Missouri when I was nine.  For Christmas I had received a baseball bat and ball.  No gifts were more welcomed.  As I tossed the ball in the air to take a swing as it descended my mother walked over.  She started pitching the ball to me and went darting after it if I managed to connect bat to ball.  She was tall and lithe.  I had never seen her run, or throw a ball, or catch a ball.  From my earliest memory she had gray hair and always seemed older than mothers of my friends. It was only after she passed away that I learned she had been a star basketball player in high school in rural West Virginia and for a time, played women’s semi-pro basketball.  She had simply never mentioned it. Katherine Mary (my mom) is the reason I feel such a connection with Kevin Costner playing catch with his on-screen dad in Field of Dreams.  It’s a scene that never fails to summon tears.

It’s been half a century since I last attended a major league baseball game.  To sit in the stands today would require mortgaging the house and maxing out the credit card just to buy a hot dog and soda.  So, I’m content to remember sitting on the first baseline in the old Blues Stadium for a buck and a quarter and watching Mickey Mantle hit a towering ball to right field and Suitcase Simpson stretching out his long arm in hopes of turning a sure double into an out.