The World Series Makes Him Feel Like a Kid

A World Series always brings out the nostalgia in me. More than the graying of the hair, the dimming of the eyesight, the twinge in the knee or the annoying feeling that everybody is starting to whisper, it heralds the passing of time and the onrush of posterity.

Wasn’t it only yesterday that Koufax was trashing the Minnesota lineup in a three-hit shutout in a vital seventh game? Isn’t Kirk Gibson just limping up to home plate to knock one out of the park in the bottom of the ninth with Mike Davis on base? Can’t anybody throw Pepper Martin out? Where are the Yankees? Shouldn’t they be in these things every year? What’s a World Series without the Yankees?

What are they doing to the grand old game? Roofs on ballparks? Plastic instead of grass? Arc lights instead of sunlight?

Gimme a break!

And what’s this? A 10th man in the lineup? Whatever happened to “The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day.”? Casey wasn’t a DH, was he?

Ever think you’d live to see a ballplayer getting $5 million a year to perform every fourth day for six months? Ever think you’d see a Toronto franchise draw 4 million for the season? Before the war, the New York Yankees were the only franchise that ever drew a million.

It’s not the game we played and loved, I don’t care if the geometry is still the same, the bases 90 feet apart, the pitcher’s mound 60 1/2 feet and all that.

Remember when every empty lot in America had kids playing ball in it? No Little League, no Pony League, no structured play.

Look at these guys in the Series now. The ball is gleaming white, tightly sewn, not a mark on it. If it gets so much as a grass stain or a shoe polish fleck on it, they throw it out. The ball weighs five ounces, it’s perfectly round, and hand-sewn by experts.

You know what we played with? Well, we went down to Woolworth’s five-and-ten and, if we had the ten (and that was cents, not dollars), we bought a sawdust abomination called a “dime rocket.”

This was an indifferently wound and stitched approximation of a baseball on which the cover (which had never been the hide of a cow) quickly came apart as soon as you hit it and tore loose and let the ravels of strings hang out all over the place.

What you did then was, you wrapped that ball in rolls of heavy black electricians’ tape. The ball never was really round to begin with and the tape gave it about the feel and heft of a lopsided shotput. It broke bats or noses, whichever it hit first.

The bats, of course, were pre-broken. That is to say, you couldn’t afford a new bat. (These were the years when the guy making $12 a week was the neighborhood plutocrat).

So, what you did, you rescued broken bats from the semipro or pro teams of the town. They were broken so many times thereafter that the handle was just shards of wood and tape--adhesive tape, rubber tape, even gauze.

You couldn’t hit the ball very far. It was like hitting a cannonball with a broomstick--a broken broomstick. But you didn’t want to hit it far. Hitting it in the street was out.

The lots weren’t regulation. Sometimes the distance between first and second was longer than from second to third. There was no pitcher’s mound. The pitcher took a stance wherever he could find a piece of level ground.

The field wasn’t mowed and levelled. It had hip-high weeds in the outfield. There was no ground-rule double. If the ball got lost--tough.

You know how these guys have these nice anchored canvas bags for bases? They can slide into them, tap them with their toe, make the double play with them, stand on them to guard against the steal.

Our bases were not canvas. They were rocks. You didn’t slide into them. You didn’t tap them with your toe or anything else. Third base, as I remember it, was an old abandoned car. An Essex, as I recall. You could stand on the hood for pull hitters.

The base paths themselves were not artificial turf nor carefully sifted, raked and rolled infield dirt. They were strewn with boulders, potholes, and sometimes tin cans and broken glass. You didn’t get these nice true AstroTurf bounces, You got hit on the chin or eyeglasses. The balls weren’t the only things taped together at the end of the day. So were your glasses.

You know these guys have sliding gloves now? They have batting gloves, running gloves. I think they have gloves for taking showers.

They have shoes for every occasion, too. Shoes for grass, shoes for artificial surfaces, shoes for pinch-hitting, shoes for bunting. You name it. We had Keds. Sweat-stained, nonsupport high-cuts with soles like chewed gum. You’ll never catch me wearing any trendy jogging shoes. I say they’re sneakers and the hell with them. I vowed when I grew up I’d never again wear anything that didn’t have leather or suede on top of it.

We really didn’t have gloves of any kind. I mean, you ever get a look at the kind of gloves the fielders have these days? Let me tell you. They don’t need a hand in them to catch the ball. I mean, these things could catch line drives all by themselves. Baskets is what they are.

We never caught a ball one-handed in our lives. The kind of gloves we had, it was all you could do to catch two-handed. They were worn-out leather with no pocket, just bigger than street gloves and you had to put this big piece of sheepskin in them to protect your palm when you caught the ball. If you caught the ball. Try one-handing one of those. If you didn’t use two hands, it would pop out. Sometimes, even if you did use two hands.

We romanticized the game. Put a little pizazz into it. Imagination. You know that pitch they call the split-fingered fastball today? Well, we called that “the drop.” The screwball we called “the inshoot.” The slider wasn’t even invented yet but the half-curve, half-fastball we called “the fadeaway.”

If a guy had a fastball, he was known as “Smoky.” If he had a curve, he was “Hooks.” If he threw junk, he was “the Ragpicker.” Sidearmers were known as “Whip,” and guys who threw underhanded were known as “U-boat.”

We didn’t learn math in any classroom. We learned it figuring out batting averages, ERAs of our favorite players. We all had our favorites and we lived or died with them. If you saw your pal and he had a woebegone look, and he’d moan, “I went oh-fer-four yesterday,” he meant Joe DiMaggio did. Or Ted Williams.

Is the game the same? Oh, I think so. It has the Super Bowl, the Final Four, the Stanley Cup, the U. S. Open to buck but it’s still America’s game, the country’s first love. That’s what makes a World Series still so special. We’re all 11 years old again for a week.