Editor’s note: Another one of the lost pieces from the restore.
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“You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”
When Jim Bouton wrote the final sentence of his classic book, “Ball Four,” he gave us a profound truth.
Once you let baseball into your heart, it never lets you go. If I remember correctly, it was 64 years ago this summer that I first had my heart filled — and then broken — by baseball. There hasn’t been a year since that I haven’t cared in one way or another what happened in the game.
+My two closest friends in my teen years loved the game. One was a Yankee fan who lived and died with Mickey Mantle as Mantle’s career wound down. The other was a Dodger fan who adored Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale.
When I first started following the game at age 7, my favorite ballplayer was Cleveland pitcher Herb Score. He was a phenomenal young pitcher in 1955 and ’56, but in early May of ’57, Yankee third baseman Gil MacDougald hit a line drive back to the boxthat hit Score directly in the right eye.
Score was never the same.
I saw my first games in person that year, one at Yankee Stadium in New York and a Sunday doubleheader at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. I saw more games in New York, a couple in Cleveland and games in Baltimore and Washington after we moved to Virginia.
I was fortunate to get a ticket to the 1969 All-Star Game in Washington, and for some reason I seem to remember seeing Tom Seaver pitch a shutout in 1973 at Shea Stadium.
I never played on youth baseball teams, although there were a couple of summers — 1966 and ’67 — when I spent hours most summer days playing on the sandlots with my friends. On rainy days, we played Strat-O-Matic baseball in my friend Tom’s basement.
Other than people — my family and friends — I don’t think I have ever cared about anything as much as I do baseball. When I decided I wanted to be a sportswriter, my No. 1 goal was to be a baseball beat writer, covering a major league team year-round, starting in spring training and then traveling with them during the season.
That never happened. I did have three big-time traveling beats in my career, but one was a college football team and the other two were college basketball teams.The closest I got with baseball was in 1995, when I covered an entire season of Class A baseball, home and away, in the California League.
I covered at least one great player. Derrek Lee played two seasons at Rancho Cucamonga and moved up to Class AA when he was 19. He played 15 years in the majors, mostly for the Marlins and the Cubs, and he hit 331 home runs. He was in the top 10 in MVP voting twice, and he won a World Series ring with the Marlins in 2003.
The 1995 season was my last as a sportswriter, and I spent it around California in Lake Elsinore, San Bernardino, Adelanto, Lancaster, Visalia, Bakersfield, Modesto, Stockton and San Jose. I put miles on my Honda Civic and I spent nights — usually three at a time — in some of the lesser motels.
Most of the games were less than memorable, although one evening in Adelanto (just outside Victorville), I saw the rarest play in baseball — an unassisted triple play.
When I first moved to Southern California, I spent two summers covering the Dodgers. A bigger deal in a way, but I only covered home games and didn’t travel with the team. I saw Fernando Valenzuela pitch a no-hitter in 1990, but I had maybe the worst day off ever the next year when I was told to take a weekend off and Montreal’s Dennis Martinez pitched a perfect game at Dodger Stadium.
Actually my longest connection with the game has been playing fantasy baseball. I had wonderful weekends in Las Vegas with my friends in the Golden State League, and one of the saddest things in my life came in 2008 when the GSL fell apart and I lost one of the more important friendships of my life.
I’ve played in another league, the Outcast League, for most of the times since then. It’s a great league, but far less personal contact. Still, it’s the one connection to the game I maintain.
I wish there could have been more. It’s one of my few regrets. Not that I didn’t play in the big leagues or even in the minors. I don’t delude myself into thinking I could have been good enough to play at that high a level. But there’s no reason I couldn’t have had a career in the front office.
That would have been nice.