“Well, a-beat the drum and hold the phone
The sun came out today
We’re born again, there’s new grass on the field
A-roundin’ third and headed for home
It’s a brown-eyed handsome man
Anyone can understand the way I feel”John Fogerty, “Centerfield”
They say you never forget your first love. My first love is, was, and forever will be baseball. How much do I love baseball? So much that I have been struck in the mouth with hardballs three times, and still I come back for more. It has been undocumented…until now. Some are annual front row regular season ticket holders. Some call the all-sports radio stations daily. Some debate 24/7 over social media. I have neither the money, time, nor patience to out-fandom, or out-purity these people. Sure, I play and have played multiple sports over time. I am a fan of many other sports that I have not partaken in yet. And I have a number of anecdotes for these sports as well. But I don’t believe those compare to those I have regarding the American national pastime.
One of the first baseball games I attended was the one in which Pete Rose broke the National League hitting streak. Later that year, I remember watching “The Buck Dent Game” on television with my dad, and not understanding why my dad was so excited over that particular home run.
Part 1: It’s not easy being a Mets fan
I grew up under the take off and landing path of LaGuardia Airport and shadow of Shea Stadium. And there were plenty of places to obtain free tickets to a Mets game. So it’s no surprise that became a Mets fan. I was four months old when the Mets lost Game 7 of the 1973 World Series to the Oakland A’s. I don’t remember the first Golden Age, when they had such great pitchers in their rotation and bullpen. Here are a series of conversations I had with my dad one week during the summer of 1980. And if you thought my dialogues about music were a doozy, get a load of this.
While watching the Mets playing in Cincinnati versus the Reds on TV
ME: The Mets’ pitchers stink!
DAD: Language!
ME: How come the Mets don’t have a good pitchers like this Reds pitcher, Tom Seaver.
DAD: Tom Seaver used to be on the Mets.
ME: He was? What happened?
DAD: (Does not want to have a long diatribe about the ownership situation, and a certain NY Daily News sportswriter.)
A few days later, when the Mets are at Houston playing the Astros.
ME: The Mets’ pitchers are bad! (See, learning, but words like “awful” or “terrible” are not in my vernacular yet).
DAD: Yes, you said that before.
ME: How come the Mets don’t have someone like this Astros pitcher, Nolan Ryan?
DAD: Nolan Ryan used to be on the Mets.
ME: He was? Why isn’t he on the Mets now?
DAD: (Does not want to get into a lecture about the Mets front office bad decision making that plagued the team the entire decade.)
The next day, the Mets are not on TV, so we are watching the Yankees instead. They are hosting the Minnesota Twins.
ME: Hey dad, I like the Twins pitcher.
DAD: That’s nice
ME: Yeah, the Mets should trade for this guy, Jerry Koosman.
DAD: Koosman used to be on the Mets.
ME: Really?
DAD: Yeah, he was traded to Minnesota?
Near the end of the season, my family go to Shea to see the Mets play the Philadelphia Phillies. Naturally, the Mets lost that game. During the end of the game, the Phils bring in their closer for the save.
ME: Hey dad, this Phillies pitcher is really good.
DAD: Yes he is David.
ME: The Mets should have a pitcher like him in their bullpen. Why don’t they have a Tug McGraw?
DAD: Tug McGraw used to be on the Mets?
ME: No way! Really?
DAD: (He would have said to ask anyone around us, but we were the only ones in the upper deck. Why we never tried to sneak into the field level seats at any time is a mystery to me to this day).
Part 2: Little League baseball – more like bush league
I don’t know what it’s like in the rest of the country, but I am positive that the NYC parks had some of the worst fields anywhere. Even after the Parks Department renovated these fields in the early 2000s, the upgrades merely raised their level from “shitty” to “below average” (and that’s on a good day where it hadn’t rained in the past 48 hours). Between the incredibly poor conditions, and some of the silly Little League rules, I’m not even sure if was baseball at all.
In my first year, when I was 7, we had the coaches act as the pitchers for obvious reasons. Too bad my opposing coaches sometimes pitched as well as a six-year-old. Two of the rules were: no walks, and a six pitch maximum per at bat. So you had to swing at that sixth pitch no matter what. Maybe it was stradegy, but most of the few outs I had were on the 6 pitch “strikeout.” I suppose that is why many little leagues switched to a T-ball setup now.
There were three parks with baseball fields in my neck of the woods. And I played in all three at one time or another. Each one had its own unique negatives. The first was in Fort Totten. The fort was active at the time, since it housed many soldiers and their families. But field upkeep apparently wasn’t in the budget. As you can see in the photo above, a few inches of weeds felt like I was playing in the cornfields of Iowa. And this was the best of the lot. The second was Crocheron Parks, which hosts several baseball fields. The one my league played on was the worst of the park. You know how Houston’s Minute Maid Park had Tal’s Hill, a steep incline in deep center field? Well, I played in Crocheron’s Ravine, a steep decline in left and center field. But the award for most hazardous baseball field goes to College Point Park, and it’s quarry / rock farm of an infield. This was where I got hit square in the mouth with a baseball the first time. I was playing the infield when a sharply hit grounder was heading my way. PLaying solid, fundamental defense, I was on one knee with my glove on touching the ground. the ball hit a rock that was a few feet in front of me, and the ball careemed up in the air like Evel Knievel rocketing off a ramp. That ball knocked the enamel out of my two front teeth, which you can still see to this day. And folks wonder why I don’t smile often enough. That particular season was a personal disaster overall as it was my worst overall performance as a baseball player.
Part 3: 1986, A Year to Remember
Back to the Mets. I can’t remember what I had for lunch two days ago, and I can’t remember much from any other past season of my favorite team, but boy howdy can I recall particular dates and details of the 1986 championship season. Maybe it’s because I watched the VHS highlight tape dozens of times that winter. For the Mets, it was a year to remember; for me, it was one I can’t afford to forget.
If you have been keeping score, you realized that I’d turned 13 in the summer of ’86. Like many others, 13 was a critical age for me. At that time, I was in a dark place, psychologically speaking. This period lasted throughout my entire teens – a little over ten years, with minor respites here and there. This was not a mere respite. This seaason was a beacon of light in the darkness of the abyss of despair. Although I later learned how it is actually unhealthy to place your entire happiness in just one thing, the 1986 Mets was the only happiness I had. The following year, there was an episode of The Real Ghostbusters, in which the plot involved the forces of good and evil fighting in a game of baseball for the prize of one soul. (Because the ancient battleground has now become a baseball field for a fictional third expansion ball club in the city, the Jaguars.) I completely related to that episode, and I sometimes wonder if the 10th inning of Game 6 of the World Series was a spiritual battle for my soul between between Death and Life in Death.
The overall lesson I learned that autumn was to never give up hope. Even after I learned to hardly ever say “never,” one should never give in. I’ll go into more details in my next and final(?) part of my semi-autobiographical series,. But you should know that I was mercilessly bullied by multiple people during my Junior High School years. The “miracle” that the Mets delivered that year was providing me a raison d’être. I’m sorry Boston fans, but I believe there was someone from the New England area that was born in 1991 that had a similar crisis of faith and was equally rewarded with his or her own miracle to balance the scales.
Part 4: Rotisserie and Electronic Baseball
Just when I was too old for Little League, I discovered another type of baseball. Nowadays, we call it “fantasy,” but when it started in the 1980s, it was called “Rotisserie Baseball.” I had two rotisserie card games back then. The first is the more famous, and still going strong today is Strat-O-Matic. The other is the lesser known Pursue the Pennant. The biggest difference is that the former used 6 six-sided dice (6d6), and the latter used 3 ten sided dice instead (3d10). Their other selling point was that the box could be converted to every current (at the time, which was 1987) Major League Baseball stadium. This was done with providing panoramic pictures of all the outfield walls and warning tracks for those with unique, really non-symmetric dimensions. Both games had cards for all the teams’ rosters.
Other outlet for virtual baseball was via the arcade game, and the home console. One of the most popular baseball arcade game was Atari RBI Baseball. While it wasn’t my game of choice, it was for several of my classmates. One nice, spring day during my senior year of high school, I snuck out during my lunch period, and drove to the arcade. There was a collective stunned looks amongst us all when I say some of my classmates (and fellow teammates) already there in the middle of a game of RBI. I played many baseball arcade games, but I never liked any of them. My favorite of the bunch was World Series 99. It was flawed and terrible as the rest of the lot; probably on the lower end of the spectrum, but the reason I enjoyed was because I was able to maximize those exploits and flaws to my benefit.
On the other hand, the home video game systems had baseball games before the arcades by years. Technically, hand-held electronic games was even earlier, but as you could imagine, those were incredibly crappy. In regards to the consoles, many of the second generation systems had a version of baseball. They were only slightly better than their battery operated rivals. The Atari 2600, Intellivision, and Channel F(airchild) all had stick figures to represent the players, and the entire defense moved in sync; you controlled all eight players in the field at the same time. (The catcher remained stationary). The gameplay took and giant leap forward during the third generation. And I’m going to include the Commodore 64 in here as well, because that it what my friends and I played during this era. The best looking game of this time was Hardball! by Accolade. However, this too was imperfect, and suffered the same flaw most other video baseball games had at that time. My good friend dubbed it “The Slot Theory.” The premise is that there were only 2 or 3 players in any lineup that could hit a Home Run (HR), regardless of the listed “stats” on screen. Usually it was the third, fourth, and/or fifth batter in the order capable of going yard, while the other 6 or 7 hitters had warning track power at best. You could tell this was case every time you used a pinch hitter. Even if you had a power hitter on your bench, he would never hit a HR unless he was replacing one of the other power hitters. My friend proved this to me in a game of Hardball!. He changed the batting orders so that the powers hitters were placed at the bottom of the order, and placed the weakest hitters in the middle. And when the game started, the players with low batting averages, and zero or one HRs listed in their stats started to hit HRs just because they were batting in the middle of the order, And the projected power hitters now batting eighth or ninth could barely hit the ball past the infield.
It was then we went to electronic rotisserie baseball. By the mid 80s, video game publishers got the lisences to use real MLB players. The game we played on the C64 was Micro League Baseball. Since it was a simulation game, there was no Slot Theory issue. The flaw that this game had was it’s predictability. You could tell the outcome of any at-bat right away if you pay attention to the pixels. The best feature was that you could save and compile the stats from every game for any team. I was able to exploit this feature in a Micro League league I was in during the spring and summer of 1991. There were six of us, and we each had one Major League franchise’s 1990 roster. Since we were all New Yorkers, we agreed to omit the Yankees and Mets. I chose the Boston Red Sox. The other teams in this league were: the White Sox, Pirates, Dodgers, the Reds, and the A’s (Athletics). Trades were allowed, and I immediately traded with the White Sox’s owner for their rookie first baseman, Frank Thomas. I was mocked because they only saw his 7 HR tally. They didn’t realize that Thomas only played 60 games that year, and the game gave a lot of weight toward his slash line of .330/.454/.529. (That’s Batting Average, On Base, and Slugging Percentage). His .983 OPS would have been 2nd in the league, had he qualified. So I rectified the real franchise’s blunder of trading a young Jeff Bagwell that season. Since I already had the best pitcher of 1990 (Roger Clemens), adding the second best hitter made my rivals became very salty, very quickly. We never finished the season. I wasn’t upset since I was going to head off to college at the summer anyway.
Part 5: Majoring In Baseball
You read that right, I majored in baseball. Technically, my diploma says “American Studies.” Thanks to the liberal rules of this liberal arts university, I was able to customize my curriculum in a rather unique way that I highly doubt any undergrad has ever duplicated before or after. While my fellow co-eds were deconstructing film, literature, history, feminism, race relations, and every other social and economic policy under the sun, I was deconstructing the curveball, artificial turf, and the Designated Hitter.
I argued why the adaptation of W. P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe into the film Field of Dreams is overrated and a failure. I wrote a paper about the pending player’s strike of 1994. I wrote a term paper about the prehistory and early history of the Mets (1957 – 1964) – starting with the Dodgers and Giants going to California to find a woman who’s never, never, never been born, and ending with the opening of Shea Stadium and eighty dolls singing small world after all. (tr;dl: blame Robert Moses for trying to lowball “Dem Bums” to move from Brooklyn to Queens.) The only baseball related activity that I did not receive academic credit was being a member of the first (and still only) team from that school to reach the (Division III) College World Series. And as much as I love reading about baseball, I learned so much more practicing, playing, and travelling with my teammates. I mean, going on road trips via bus or plane, AND getting paid for it via a meal money stipend? I enjoyed it so much more than my on-campus job at the main library’s Reserve Room. After spending the previous 10 years in a severely depression malaise, the spring of ’94 was a natural high and the best season of my life.
I had a tendency to write my college papers in the form of a rebuttal, and my senior term paper was no exception. It was a counterpoint to the 1991 documentary, When It Was A Game (not the one directed by Ken Burns). Many men in the media were gushing over it at the time, lamenting how players from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s loved playing baseball much more than the modern day athletes. My title was “When It Was a Business.” My thesis was that professional baseball is AND was first and foremost always a business. My topics included: the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal; the ownership style of Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s (spoiler: they beat the Marlins’ style of fire-selling talent after World Series victories by 80 years); the backstory of the creation of the Baseball Hall of Fame; the aforementioned exodus of the Dodgers and Giants to the west coast; the birth of free agency. The strike ended just about the time my paper was due. Therefore I briefly mentioned how the owners were about to use “scab” players for the 1995 season before (future Supreme Court) Judge Sonia Sotomayor issued an injunction against the owners. Naturally, I was pro-players / anti-owners. The game has a long history of scumbag owners, and when it came to the few exceptions to that generalization… well to paraphrase a quote attributed to (the at the time recently elected) Hall of Fame manager Leo Durocher, “Nice owners finish last.”
Epilogue
I’m still playing baseball. All right, at the time as I’m writing this, no one is playing baseball. My point is that I am currently in a recreational baseball league. You may have heard of it if you listen and follow a certain on-air radio sports talk show personality. Even though we meet once a week for roughly 3 to 4 hours, the chemistry between my teammates and I has never been equaled by the co-workers that I’ve partnered with five days a week for about 40 hours (in any of my jobs).
My athletic powers peaked long ago. My trivia mastery of the topic was certainly waned and also part of the past. But putting the cleats back on again, fielding grounder at first base, and stepping into the batter’s box with a wooden bat in my hands has rekindled the romance I have with the game. Having the Mets being a contender once again has also helped. That is why I can say with certainty that baseball has been, and shall remain my first true blue (and orange) love.
I, Omnibus 