My Grandfather, Earle Combs

Craig Combs gets batting tips from grandfather Earle, “the table setter” for Ruth and Gehrig with the New York Yankees. (Courtesy of Craig Combs)

 

The young boy ranged slightly to his left, and, with his left-gloved hand only partly extended, leaped and speared the line drive off the bat of his grandfather.

“Craig!” The older man exclaimed laughing, “We ought to start calling you Twinkletoes, because you looked just like George Selkirk! You didn’t have to jump for that ball at all!”

The boy’s two older brothers giggled, as brothers will, while the chagrined fielder pondered his explanation. They, of course, never made mistakes in these backyard pepper games.

“It didn’t go as high as I thought it would,” the boy mumbled lamely. He knew his grandfather was right, though.

“Yeah, old George really used to jump around,” the boy’s grandfather continued, preparing to hit again. “Here, Craig, try another one. Remember, don’t leave your feet unless you have to.”

Boys have been learning to love baseball through backyard pepper games with their father and grandfathers now for generations. My grandfather/teacher was a man who had patrolled center field for the New York Yankees for 12 years, and even at 10 I knew it was something special. whether it was listening to him discuss the fielding style of an old Yankee teammate or sitting on the front row (in front of Denny McLain) during his Hall of Fame induction ceremonies in 1970, being the grandson of Earle Combs had its advantages.

Of course, I really didn’t think of him as Earle Combs, ex-ballplayer and Baseball Hall of Fame member; he was simply “Pop” to me. He was never too busy to fool with my brothers and me, and when he could, he loved to come watch us play in our Little League games. As evidenced by his many years as a coach following his playing career, he was never critical of our play, even though we never attained his level of excellence. Many years later, when friends found out who my grandfather was, they would sometimes ask, politely, at what level my baseball career had stalled. I remember counting the sad fact that “my playing days ended when I graduated from high school, when the curve balls got a whole lot better!”

I grew up on a farm in central Kentucky, in southwestern Madison County to be exact. My father ran the farming operation for both our acreage as well as my grandparents’. Our property was separated from their land only by a long fence running along the lush ridges of our farm. From atop this fence I could look eastward and see the stately white-brick home of my grandparents, just a few hundred yards in the distance, among what seemed like fifty acres of manicured lawn surrounded by a white plank fence. Looking back to the west roughly the same distance I viewed the comforting sight of our own house and yard. If it was summertime, more often than not I could watch mom from a distance working on her peony bed or planting a new variety of tree which I’d never heard of. From this vantage point I might also see my father atop a tractor mowing or checking cattle.

When I was growing up I used to visit my grandparents’ house almost daily. Most of the time it was with my family, but sometimes I would just head off through the pastures and materialize unannounced at their back door. Like most grandparents, Pop and Mimi never minded my dropping in. Occasionally on these impromptu visits I’d notice an unfamiliar car in the driveway. This usually meant an old teammate or acquaintance from Pop’s days in baseball was in for a visit. If I promised not to be a bother, I sometimes got to sit and listen to the likes of Waite Hoyt or Joe Sewell talk about the old days with him.

In my grandparents’ house there was a back bedroom upstairs. When I would enter this room, it was if I had entered a holy place; there was a reverence I felt when I was there. It was the room that contained my grandfather’s baseball library and a good many of his scrapbooks and pictures. He even had an old Boston uniform he had worn as a coach for the Red Sox, stored in a white cardboard box bound with string. Pop told me the Red Sox were the only team he had been with that had ever given him anything like that. A narrow set of stairs off this back bedroom always drew me like a magnet towards the attic, where Pop had stored satchels and boxes containing old magazines and World Series programs. The attic of the old country home was well-suited for giving a youngster the creeps, what with the usual dark creakiness, cobwebs and all, but I never minded. I would lose myself in baseball’s Golden Age for hours up there.

In the summer of 1970 many of the baseball heroes I’d been reading about came to life for me. In February of that year Pop was notified that he would be enshrined in baseball’s Hall of Fame. I remember him saying at the time that he was as surprised by his being selected for the Hall as if he’d “been shot between the eyes.”

The news had a profound effect on me as well. I think I realized for perhaps the first time, that in addition to being a neat grandfather who fixed great chocolate sodas and had just happened to play major league baseball with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig — on perhaps the greatest team of all time — he was a real, live, honest-to-goodness hero too!  Just like the ones I’d read about. He received congratulatory notes from all over the country, even President Nixon. He was finally receiving the recognition which some thought was overdue. After all, he had finished his career with the same lifetime batting average, .325, as had his successor in the Yankee outfield, a fellow by the name of Joe DiMaggio. Pop and my dad had both always considered DiMaggio their definition of the perfect ball player, so this was a good enough yardstick for me as well.

To say I was a mighty excited 12 year old heading up to the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies in Cooperstown that summer was, as Groucho Marx would say, simply evidence of the poverty of my vocabulary. The sense of anticipation and wonder I felt could probably be compared to Armstrong and Aldrin preparing to survey the surface of the moon, or perhaps Dorothy wandering into Oz.

During induction week in July 1970 the Hotel Otesaga on the banks of the Otsego Lake in Cooperstown, New York was the center of the baseball universe. All of the honorees and their families, along with all the current Hall of Fame members present, would be staying at the Otesaga. On the advice of Pop and my dad, I decided that that massive lobby of the old hotel would be the best location to meet the ball players. Little did I know that for an entire week none of us would be able to get on an elevator or eat breakfast or go get a paper without running into someone like Frankie Frisch or Luke Appling or Bill Terry.

Sometimes Pop would introduce me to and old teammate or rival. I recall cautiously approaching the still-imposing Lefty Grove while Pop exclaimed ruefully, “He’s the only pitcher I ever faced who actually knocked the bat out of my hands one time.”  From the look of approval on Grove’s face it was clear he enjoyed the memory. Still a pitcher versus a hitter after all those years!

Sometimes I had trouble when I went solo, though. During breakfast one day I walked past the hotel dining room and noticed a serious-looking Bob Feller, who was sitting alone and appeared to have just begun eating. I stopped, and tried to pretend not to stare, but by now he had noticed me also. Now what could I do?  I felt I had probably already disturbed his breakfast and was about to turn away when he motioned for me to come over to his table. Now I’ve done it, I thought. I wondered what a ninety-mile-an-hour coffee cup in the stomach would feel like. As I timidly approached the table, Feller, noticing the ball clutched in my right hand, smiled broadly and said, “Would you like me to sign your ball?”

Whew!  I’ll always remember Bob Feller fondly for that moment.

And so it went the entire time we were in Cooperstown. I shot pool with Bowie Kuhn’s kids. Our family had a private guided tour of the Hall of Fame museum one evening. We took a boat ride on Otsego Lake, and I learned more about James Fenimore Cooper than I ever thought I would. I was even among a group of autograph-seeking kids shooed out of a Hall of Fame “members only” cocktail party by Casey Stengel!

Although there would be many other special honors and sporting events for my family to attend together, Pop only got to enjoy the annual Hall of Fame induction ceremonies for a couple more years. Our travels to many of the various events he was asked to attended ended when he suffered a stroke in 1972. After a long illness he died from the effects of the disease in July 1976. A heartfelt eulogy appeared in Sports Illustrated, where writer E.J. Kahn, Jr. called my grandfather the greatest center fielder in Yankee history.

Even though he’s been gone for two decades, Pop’s legacy as a ball player lives on. I’ll see footage of an old World Series game that mentions him, or he’ll be referred to in a newspaper article. I occasionally get phone calls from baseball history enthusiasts simply wanting to talk about him. On vacation golfing excursions along the Atlantic Coast, I’ve even run into elderly gentlemen from the northeast who remember seeing him play.

More often, though, I’ll sit with my own two young sons and talk to them about their great-grandfather. I might tell them about spending the night with my Pop and Mimi and how they always fixed me these huge, crusty, wonderful pancakes for breakfast. Or about living close enough to them to run see them anytime I wanted to; and what a magical place their home was to me then. We might even discuss a certain backyard pepper game when their dad got teased just because he caught line drives like George Selkirk.