The Essence of the Game: Connections

He was building a coffin. Thirty-one years old, the third youngest of seven children born of immigrant parents, barely five feet five inches tall and very stockily built, he was using the wooden slats from old vegetable crates to prepare a proper resting place for the symbolic remains of the New York Giants, stealing some time from his bosses at the small Brooklyn grocery store in which he worked as the delivery man.

It was October 3, 1951. In the last inning of the last game of the playoff series made necessary because the Giants ended the season tied with the Dodgers for first place in the National League, the Dodgers had managed to build a 4-1 lead. The team that won today would face the New York Yankees in the World Series. But that was tomorrow’s work. Today the Dodgers would beat the Giants and Dad would not be able to suppress his smile or his good-natured needling of Giant fans who had to walk past their heroes’ coffin as it sat on the Bay Ridge sidewalk in front of the store in the very neighborhood in which Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Carl Erskine, and Preacher Roe lived.

But after the Giants scored their second run of the game in the bottom of the ninth, Russ Hodges, the Giants announcer on WMCA, screamed, “There’s a long drive … It’s gonna be … I believe … The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! … I don’t believe it! … The Giants win the pennant!” Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard ’round the world,” a three-run homer, gave the Giants the National League pennant and stopped Dad in his tracks as he carried his work of heart up the cellar steps. He turned and flung the coffin down the stairs behind him where it crashed and waited to be discarded with the rest of the next day’s trash. The Dodgers, “Dem Bums” as they were known by their long-suffering but faithful fans, had disappointed once again — and this time after having led the Giants in the standings by 13-1/2 games just weeks before. Hours later, after work, Dad walked around the corner to his basement apartment, his wife and his son. The trip took him longer than usual, I am sure. His mood was heavy. One week past my third birthday, I was too young to understand any of this.

There are connections between fathers and sons. Despite differences in attitudes and values that may result in very different lives, there are always connections between fathers and sons. Sometimes they are embodied by something tangible, like a business, or a house, or a profession, the son benefiting from the father having preceded him down the road to success. But Dad didn’t own the grocery store in which he worked seventy-two hours each week, he never owned his own home, and any possibility of a profession were dashed by his family’s need for him to go to work instead of to the eleventh grade. For Dad and me, the connection was baseball.

A most vivid childhood memory is of Dad returning home from work at a little after 7 PM, eating alone because the rest of the family had eaten hours earlier, and eating fast. He would always be conscious of the weather and the amount of daylight remaining because his plan was to take me to the schoolyard across the street from our home to teach me how to catch and to throw and to hit. But maybe Dad’s motivation was more than just a desire to have me develop my baseball skills — maybe he needed to do this. Maybe he knew that it was to be his legacy; he could leave me with the ability to appreciate and play the summer game. To Dad, if you were a ballplayer, you were somebody.

A stocky child who had to buy his clothes in the “Husky Department” at the Robert Hall store on 86th Street, I was not an athlete in those days. Among my problems was that I just couldn’t seem to learn how to throw the baseball with an overhand motion. Dad’s words of encouragement and instruction would quickly deteriorate to those of criticism and exasperation. His screams of “Overhand! Overhand!” were heard even in the most remote corners of the Edward B. Shallow Junior High School’s yard. He embarrassed me — and maybe I persisted with my sidearm style of throwing just to punish him for that. But I’m sure that I remember a Topps baseball card of Luis Aparicio poised to throw sidearm, probably to complete a double play after having taken the underhand toss from Nellie Fox. And Luis was an all-star shortstop — just what Dad wanted for (and from?) me.

On some nights, we would go to the schoolyard to practice hitting. He’d pitch, I’d hit the ball as far as I could, he’d chase it, bring it back and pitch it again. Dad was in his forties by then, but each night we’d stop playing when it got too dark to see the baseball or when my arm became too sore to throw any more, whichever came first. We never stopped because Dad was tired.

He pressured me to play when I didn’t enjoy it, when I didn’t want to. There were many times during the summers of my ninth and tenth years that I wished for rain on Little League game nights. But I could never share these feelings with Dad. I don’t know whether I feared his anger or his disappointment more, but I could never tell him that I didn’t really want to play, that I felt I would never meet his standards.

But in four of the seven years that I played on organized teams as a youngster, my teams won championships. And thanks to Dad’s efforts, my skills improved. In my last year, I was the league’s all-star shortstop and I led my team in home runs and stolen bases despite missing nearly a fourth of the season with a dislocated elbow suffered in a collision during a close play at first base. Dad was never again as proud of me as he was during the summer just before my sixteenth birthday. I was a ballplayer.

I spent the Sundays of the following summer watching Dad’s softball team play. He was the catcher, the position usually reserved for the team’s slowest player, but Dad wasn’t self-conscious about this because he was also the team’s oldest player. When some of his teammates did not show up for games, I would be asked to fill in for them. This pleased each of us a great deal, but in no way was this a tribute to my playing ability — Dad was the only player old enough to have a son old enough to play.

It was a thrill to play alongside him and to watch his love for the game as he played it — always talking to his teammates and at his opponents, sliding hard to break up double plays, showing disgust with himself when he failed to come through in clutch situations. Doc, though, impressed me more. A real doctor, the only one that I had ever seen outside of a medical office, was the shortstop.

That September I started college. Academic requirements, the need to have a job to pay school expenses, and the fact that City College’s baseball team practiced a long subway ride from the downtown location of my classes prevented baseball from fitting into my life. Dad never really accepted my choosing academics over baseball, but he never said so. By the time my formal education was completed, I had two graduate degrees to go along with my college diploma.

Now, as a psychologist, I am accustomed to having my sleep disturbed by telephone calls from patients in need. But one night at 3 AM my sleep was disturbed from within by my thoughts of baseball and Dad. It was the night after he began his last hospital stay, just a month past his sixty-ninth birthday.

We want our heroes to last forever. When professional ballplayers age, it’s sad, but we have the opportunity to cheer them at old-timers’ games and at other special occasions at which their enthusiasm and dedication to the game are recognized. It’s sad, but we can recall their accomplishments and, while talking with other fans, we can even reminisce about specific game performances.

When Dad aged, it was just sad. Nothing else.

Family problems and circumstances had caused us to have less and less contact over the years, but saying good-bye to him was much more difficult than I had expected it to be. I suppose I never realized how much he had given me and, through me, what he continues to give to my own son.

The Dodgers played the Yankees in the World Series seven times between 1941 and 1956, winning only once. The rivalry between these two teams from the same city was intense. Every Dodger fan was a “Yankee hater.” Dad could truly be described in this way, but he called me “Mick,” an obvious reference to Yankee superstar Mickey Mantle. Only Dad ever called me Mick — and he only called me Mick while we were on the ballfield.

And I signed the baseball that I placed in his coffin, “To Dad, With thanks and love, Mick.”

*****

The meeting on the pitcher’s mound included the manager, a coach, the pitcher and catcher and each of the four infielders. It was the last inning of a playoff game with the bases loaded, nobody out and the team on the field holding a 6-4 lead. The batter waiting to hit was my ten-year-old son, Michael. It was June 8, 1991. As the manager of his team, I called Michael over to explain that our opponents were planning a strategy to try to keep us from scoring and that the meeting had nothing to do with him, personally. He needed these words of comfort.

Michael grew up with video games, karate classes, his own color TV set, cable television, ice skating lessons, swimming lessons, and the beach and the Atlantic Ocean a half block from his home. I grew up with a black-and-white set in the living room of my parents’ apartment a half block from the elevated West End line in Brooklyn. Baseball has never meant as much to Michael as it did to me as a child. When I wasn’t in school, I was playing baseball, softball, stickball, stoop ball, or catch-a-fly-you’re-up with a handful of friends from the block. When there was no one around, I’d practice my skills by throwing a rubber ball against the wooden fence in the yard that Dad had built specifically for that purpose.

Michael’s attachment to baseball was much looser than mine was. His commitment to developing his skills and his enjoyment of the game was much less intense. Although he got upset when he struck out, he was not interested in working to give the game his best effort. He had one hit — an infield single — all season. And when he went up to the plate with the infield drawn in to get the forceout at home in that playoff game, my last words to him were, “You can do it, Mikey. You can hit the ball over those guys.”

First, there was a called strike. Then, on the second pitch, there was a loud “ping.” (Aluminum bats just do not make the satisfying “crack” that the wooden bats of my youth made.) A line drive — over everybody and into left-center field — drove in three runs and gave us a 7-6 lead. Michael ended up standing on second base, absorbing the cheers and all of the excitement, his face gleaming, his head swiveling around to take it all in. For me, the entire scene occurred in slow motion and I saw everything — the flight of the ball, the baserunners speeding toward home plate, the first base coach waving Michael on to take the extra base — and my shining son.

Thanks again, Dad — from both of us.

MICHAEL V. MIRANDA is a psychologist in private practice on Long Island in New York. He is also the first baseman for the Mineola Washingtons, a vintage 1860s base ball team that plays at the Old Bethpage Village Restoration. This article was presented at the conference, “Jackie Robinson: Race, Sports and the American Dream,” April 3, 1997, Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York.