Baseball, Ray

                                                                                                                                             Jack Doppelt 

  March 21, 2021

[For Opening Day,  mark it with Lines n’ Lyrix. Name the songs that take you out to the ballgame. Who sang them. Click on the videos after you guess to appreciate the music and the crack of the bat. Stop each video and go to NEXT BASEBALL OPENING DAY SONG. Shoot for all 13, as if you’re watching a game, the bases are loaded and Casey’s at bat.]

This started out as an appreciative email to my friend Pat Reardon to let him know how much I love his piece - The Sights and Sounds of Baseball, Fans Optional. My note has mutated into a blog for reasons that will be apparent momentarily. 

First, read Pat’s essay. It’s a keeper for the annals of baseball writing. For those more inclined toward writing than baseball, some of the most evocative writing is about baseball. Or as Terrence Mann said in the 1989 movie version of W.P. Kinsella’s Field of Dreams, “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.” 

Expressed like a true Canadian, which Kinsella was almost 35 years before the first Canadian team was admitted into the major leagues in 1969, and 12 years before Jackie Robinson broke the major league color barrier on April 15, 1947. 

Pat’s essay inspired me to mark my time through baseball. What resonates most for me are the five phases of my baseball life: watching games in person, playing ball, playing catch with our kids, watching our son Noah play, and the love and marriage double play. As Pat captured, none of the phases come with sounds other than the ones from the action itself. 

Pat had me hooked from the start when he referred to the hand protector as a mitt, not a glove. We midwesterns, Chicagoans specifically, grow up in a galaxy all our own, with a vocabulary all our own. We stand in line, not on line; we drink pop, not soda; we say “roof” like a barking dog, not like it’s the noun form for rueful; and we recognize Chicago folksinger Steve Goodman as the preeminent troubadour of baseball. Pick your want: Go Cubs Go, Hey, Hey Holy Mackerel (which he popularized), A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request, or his killer version with Jethro Burns of Take Me Out to the Ballgame. 

I never wore a mitt to a major league game, as Pat did. Players on the field do that. If I’m going to snare a foul ball, it’s going to be bare-handed, preferably with my left hand only. Two hands are for rookies. At a game, until relatively recently, the fan experience came without play-by-play, color commentary or replays. If you missed a homer or a defensive gem, you missed it. Admittedly, being able to see it on a big screen replay at the park is a convenience, though a 21st century misconception nonetheless. As a kid, I was the kind of fan Chicagoans scorn. I liked both the Cubs and the Sox. I’m a North Sider but when I was a formative seven years old, the ’59 Sox of Aparicio and Fox wound up in the World Series against the Dodgers who were nurturing the maturing process of a young Sandy Koufax, who a few years later would become unhittable. The Sox teased Chicago into thinking the unthinkable by winning the first game 11-0. It didn’t last. The Sox lost the series. Koufax? He lost the one game he started 1-0 though he struck out seven White Sox. What more could a Jewish kid from Chicago want? 

Truth be told, though I do have some literary license, being the one writing this, I was not much of a little league ballplayer. A year or two at Henry Horner Park and the allure of baseballs peeking out from under the fence of a commercial batting cage that allowed balls to fly off into the distance rather than penting them up in the cage. 

My game was softball, the 16-inch kind. No mitts. When I got to college, I discovered that almost no one outside Chicago heard of 16-inch softball, much less played it. Arrogance being a New York virtue, my new New York friends, who were the most adept at correcting my pronunciations, favored the term “cabbageball,” I suspect from exposure to the only delis on the planet worth their time.

No, not a cabbageball, but a clincher, the official 16-inch softball,
hard at game time, squishier as the game went on

I was, and always will be a shortstop. If I knew Pat in those days, the avowed first baseman and I would have made for a veritable vacuum cleaner to ground balls. I fashioned a unique approach to the ground ball. If a grounder came within easy reach, the harder hit the more impressive, I would scoop it up while down on my left knee. If the runner was fast, I’d whip it over to first without getting off my knee. For slower runners, I’d get up to throw it. No need to be a hot dog. Sure, I might benefit from the boardinghouse reach of a Pat Reardon, but I had a pretty accurate arm. And as a shortstop I could go into the hole to my right with the best of ‘em. 

When college intramurals bastardized the game down to 12-inch baseball with mitts, for Pete (Rose’s?) sake, I adapted, seldom to return to 16-inch in young adulthood except for one memorable refuge. A group of we post-college misfits organized a team that played 16-inch for years at Loyola Park along the lakefront in Rogers Park. We went through 4-5 neighborhood sponsors without ever bringing home a championship. The same probably could be said for a winning season. Now that's the Chicago baseball we know, love and endure. I attribute the scarcity of 16-inch softball, even to most Chicagoans, to a phenomenon much like the vanquishing of neighborhood stores by strip malls. This is nothing less than the 12-inching of America at work. 

With adulthood came the ubiquitousness of little leagues. We didn’t turn over our kids to the professionals that easily. We kept very much alive the sacred tradition of playing catch and throwing a ball around. I separate the two because in addition to playing catch in front of the house or at our neighborhood park, we would have a ball with us as a family no matter where we were. On walks, on trips, or in the house. Nona, the kids’ grandmother, frowned on the home version. Grandpa Zayde didn’t. Tie goes to the tosser. We used it as a form of connectivity. The random tosses were sometimes well-signalled, sometimes blind. It taught our kids how to be alert for strangers who might attack them with a hacky sack. In front of the house was our default. Catch is a more versatile game than bridge, for instance. It can be played by one, two, three, or our family of four. We still needed the neighborhood park. How you gonna practice “divers” without enough grass to cushion the blow? Fear or even hesitance in diving for a grounder eliminates the element of surprise from the game and takes the oohs and ahhs out of baseball. I’m prepared to acquiesce to the “no crying in baseball” axiom. The scene with Tom Hanks and Bitty Schram is worth it. But what about Lou Gehrig’s iconic tear-jerking farewell in Yankee Stadium in 1939 on the 4th of July? 

Take the oohs and ahhs out and baseball is just cricket with bases. The most vivid surprise I ever experienced in baseball, and I’ve had plenty, was in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series between the Athletics and Dodgers. For baseball fans, I need say no more. For others, decide for yourself. Vin Scully, the poet of baseball announcing, guided us through it. Kirk Gibson, one of the Dodgers stars, couldn’t play. Both his legs were hobbled. He was not even listed on the team roster for the game. With two outs in the ninth inning and the Dodgers down by one run, Gibson was called on to pinch hit. The Dodgers stadium crowd erupted. Gibson’s at bat featured five foul balls and four throws over to first base to keep the runner close. Each throw produced boos from the crowd, signalling their disapproval of the delay tactics. The runner stole second anyway. With each foul ball, Gibson hobbled. As Scully put it, Gibson was “shaking his leg, making it quiver like a horse trying to get rid of a troublesome fly.” The count inched its way to a full 3-2. As Zayde often said, “now this is drama.” 

With the crowd on its feet all this time, Gibson yanked a pitch into the right field stands. The experience took 7 minutes, 14 seconds from the announcement that he was pinch hitting until he touched ‘em all and fell into the flailing arms of his teammates. A walk-off homer, as it’s called, though this was possibly the only limp off homer in the annals of baseball. Take in the experience if you want to appreciate the gold nugget of surprise in baseball. 

Click here for the full 7 minutes, 14 seconds 

I visited the Googles, wanting to give equal time to cricket, and to my pleasure, and surprise, you may want to check out the BEST Ever Catches in cricket. No wonder the rest of the world is beyond making fun of cricket. I sure feel sheepish. Enjoy. 

Click here for the top 40 catches in the rarified history of cricket 

Son Noah played baseball his entire childhood and youth. Skokie little leagues, Evanston little leagues, Evanston Township high school (ETHS), Wash U in St. Louis. He was a starting infielder at almost every turn - shortstop or second baseman. He also made time to play the piano. 

Shortly after Noah got to high school, ETHS engineered a fundraising campaign to erect a blue monster as the left field wall. It was a crowning achievement for the athletic department. Understandably, they may have oversold it a bit. At the community meeting for parents, the coach and athletic director painted a vivid picture of an Evanston kid, like Noah, standing at the plate and gazing admiringly at the Blue Monster. Everyone knows if you’re up at the plate, your eyes are trained on the pitcher and his every motion, not at a far off wall, no matter how impressive. 

The games, home and often away, were a family affair. Nona, Zayde and I seldom missed a game. Wife Margie and daughter Sylvie came as often as they could. Sylvie, when she wasn’t at gymnastics or playing team tennis. Margie when she left work early. Shhh. Zayde was an equal opportunity razzer. He expressed his inner maven to umps; innocent, impressionable opposing players; innocent, impressionable teammates of Noah; everyone except Noah. Periodically, he’d yell out after a good defensive play by Noah, “who is that kid at second base?” Toward the end of Noah’s high school run, the team honored Zayde by allowing him a stint at the mike in the booth. Only Bill Murray had a better time of it as guest Cubs announcer. 

On the high school team, each player got to pick his walk up song that would be played over the loudspeaker as the kid walked from the on deck circle to the plate. I defy baseball fans to come up with a more inspiring walk up song than Noah’s. John Fogerty’s Centerfield was a common choice, and a good tune, but come on, it’s about center field. Picture yourself in the stands and you hear This for 25 seconds. Noah is a country music fan and Darius Rucker is now ingrained in family lore. 

One fateful day - April 12, 2011 - Noah was up at the plate with his eyes trained on the pitcher and the pitcher’s every motion, and he jacked one, marking the first home run in his young career, over the wall just to the right of the blue monster. The dad of one of Noah’s teammates took off immediately and came back minutes later with a memento. For all I know, he had to pay a neighborhood kid a pretty penny for the ball. 

As any fan of baseball movies knows, there has to be a love interest. Field of Dreams has Amy Madigan as Ray’s feisty wife; Bull Durham has hometown seductress Susan Sarandon; Trouble with the Curve has Amy Adams, a baseball loving pool hustler to hook up with Justin Timberlake; Bad News Bears has Tatum O’ Neal and her wicked curveball; A League of their Own has Marla Hooch fall for a guy in a bar. 

For me, my love interest is now me wife Margie and mother to our children. After college, she helped organize a weekly 12-inch softball game called “SoFummerTBall” at Elks Park in South Evanston. The game got its name from the T-shirts Margie’s dad made. The t-shirts had the words Summer Softball in a circle so to the casual observer, it read something like this: 

The teams were divided into professional allegiances. Health professionals were the Hatfields, I guess, and journalists were the (Real) McCoys. By the time I got into the game, a few years had elapsed. Margie had secured her position as pitcher for the Healthies. Whether I was awaiting a turn at bat or batting, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her, being true to the adage of training your eyes on the pitcher and the pitcher’s every motion. 

Some time passed, and I was at the Major League All-Star game at White Sox Park on July 6, 1983, with David Orr and 43,799 other fans. A lot of people -  though admittedly the smallest crowd for an all-star game in ten years. Not long after Harold Washington was re-elected Chicago Mayor, Orr was re-elected to his second term as 49th ward alderman. Still of all the beer joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into the same game. She’s with her dad. David and I stroll around the park and pass them. We walk back. David is gallant enough to return to our seats, as Margie took David’s place in my walk around the park. It’s announced over the loudspeaker that George Burns, the comedian who was 87 years old, would be performing soon in a venue around Chicago. Margie and I declared our mutual admiration for him and decide to arrange a date to see him. The rest would have been history, but for our decision to not see George Burns. Instead, our first date was to SummerFest in Milwaukee to see Steve Goodman. Now, the rest is a history that comes full circle. 

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