The baseball season is here. Spring training games are already being played. So a few things have been on my mind about baseball.
Stories in the paper about baseball trades and drug scandals are sad to me. It seems to me that when I was a kid, all my heroes spent their whole careers with one team, and there weren’t any stories about steroids or performance-enhancing drugs.
I was a Cubs fan back then (I didn’t know any better!), and I thought Roy Smalley, Wayne Terwilliger and Hank Sauer had always been Cubs and would always be. And then in 1953, the Braves came to Milwaukee, and I had to adopt a whole new set of heroes: Bob Buhl, Lew Burdette, Warren Spahn, Del Crandall, Joe Adcock, Johnny Logan, Eddie Mathews, Billy Bruton, Andy Pafko. And it seemed like they played there forever. The Braves were the Braves!
Mathews was No. 41, Burdette was 43, and Spahn was 21, and they always would be, and there were no scandals and very few trades.
I didn’t play baseball when I was a kid. I played a little softball in 4-H, and I played a lot of catch off the barn wall, but when I was a senior in high school, I decided to try to play baseball. The sport was new at our school, only in its second year, and I wanted to try it. I wasn’t very good.
I’d seen only one Major League game in my life. I’d won a trip to County Stadium as a prize in a contest sponsored by Morning Glory Dairy, and I went with a busload of other farm kids to see the Braves play the Dodgers. Jackie Robinson, Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, Carl Furillo, Duke Snider and Preacher Roe. Wow!
Those guys made the game look so easy. The pitchers would rear back and fire BBs at the chins of Mathews and Adcock and Snider and Robinson, and those guys would stand in there just as relaxed and easy as if they playing slow-pitch softball. In the outfield, Pafko and Bruton would circle under towering fly balls and fire rockets back into the infield. It looked so easy!
But when I got on the field, there was no place to hide. It wasn’t easy! I tried to be a second baseman, but there was grass and dirt and deadly hops that missed my glove and skittered between my feet, and I found out I didn’t have an arm. I found out I was a little scared of line drives that came like bullets at my head.
Luckily, Scrap Johnson was a pretty good second baseman, so I was comfortable on the bench a lot of the time. If we were way ahead or way behind, I’d sometimes get in the game.
But at the plate, I couldn’t judge a curve, and I couldn’t get the bat around fast enough to hit the fastball. I wasn’t very good, or did I already say that? I resorted to taking walks whenever I could. It taught me humility and how to accept failure, but it didn’t lessen my enthusiasm for the game.
I followed the Braves religiously, listening to games whenever I could, reading about them in the Green Bay Press Gazette, and wearing the Braves cap I’d bought at County Stadium in my one and only game. The players were so familiar they were almost like family or friends.
But nowadays, it’s hard to keep track. The players move from team to team. And teams move to other cities! Nothing stays the same.
I remember Jerry Seinfeld saying one time that because of the way players constantly change teams and teams occasionally change cities, sports fans are actually rooting for clothes. “You are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city,” he said. “Fans will be so in love with a player, but if he goes to another team, they boo him. This is the same human being in a different shirt, but they hate him now.”
That didn’t happen in the old days!
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