Not to get all gooey on you, but for some reason I was thinking the other day about my first time in a major league baseball ballpark. Yankees-Angels, Aug. 26, 1968, in the old Yankee Stadium. Second game of a double-header. Future Phillies manager Jim Fregosi at shortstop for the Halos. The immortal Horace Clarke batting leadoff for the Bombers.
I had traveled with my dad from our North Jersey home to the Bronx, and my 10-and-a-half-year-old self really, really wanted to see Mickey Mantle play. Alas, The Mick didn’t do nightcaps in his final season – at least not those that involved baseball – and the only glimpse I had of him was his No. 7 retreating down the steps leading from the first-base dugout to the clubhouse, presumably en route to whatever delights the night might hold.
Funny the other things I remember about that night. Funny the things I don’t. I knew the Angels romped – they won, 10-2 – but for some reason I thought Celerino Sanchez played for the Yanks. Alas, he spent parts of two seasons with them, a few years later. (And sheesh, the always-credible Yankee Yearbook detailed how he hit .472 in the Mexican League! Wasn’t he destined for Cooperstown?)
And I could have sworn a reliever named Joe Verbanic, likewise exalted in the Yankee Yearbook (there was a photo of him eschewing the throw to first after fielding a slow roller to the right side, and enthusiastically sprinting to the bag himself!) had come on for beleaguered starter Al Downing. But the boxscore on retrosheet.org shows Downing went the first six innings, while Gene Michael, a good-field, no-hit infielder who later enjoyed a long, successful run as a Yankees executive, worked the final three. Each allowed five runs.
Had no idea.
I share this now, with the Yankees about to face the Dodgers in the World Series, if only to note the way time wears away at fandom. That’s especially true when you have spent any amount of time haunting major league clubhouses, as I have, shifting from foot to foot, awaiting someone who might or might not acknowledge your existence, much less answer your questions.
On a good day you might encounter a Doug Jones or a Trevor Hoffman, guys who were willing to talk about things like serving as an overnight deejay in some nothing Arizona town or listening to Tim McGraw while doing wind sprints before a scorching August game in Citizens Bank Park. On a bad day you might get growled at by Randy Myers or blown off by David Segui. (Yes, David Segui.)
So yeah, baseball quickly loses its romance when you’re approaching it from the journalistic side. And really, it’s probably healthy and necessary to excise all the gee-whiz you had about the game way back when, to retain memories of looking out at the green of a major league field for the first time as a kid – Is this not the most magical place on Earth? – while coming to grips with the fact that in a figurative sense there are a great many weeds and bare spots in that emerald carpet.
I would argue that I’m still a baseball fan all these years later, but hardly to the extent I was back then, when my dad returned home from his job at the tobacco warehouse, carrying his lunchpail and a folded-up copy of the New York Daily News and smelling of cigars, cigarettes and Skoal. I would scour the Daily News for dispatches about the Yanks, then amid the doldrums after decades of excellence – not to mention years away from the Reggie Jackson Era, much less the one where Derek Jeter headed the marquee.
Mel Stottlemyre pitched heroically for the Yankees of that day and age, and Roy White was a steady hitter who managed to hang around long enough to win World Series in 1977 and ‘78. But before the team vaulted back to prominence under George Steinbrenner, the braintrust was forever touting some prospect – whether Jerry Kenney or Ron Blomberg or, yes, Celerino Sanchez – as someone who might measure up to the titans of previous generations. None of them did, though Bobby Murcer, unfortunately ballyhooed as The Next Mantle when he emerged in the last ‘60s, did become a solid player.
Whether because of that or just the mere passage of time, my Yankee fandom waned. Didn’t even watch when they ended a 12-year postseason drought in 1976. I was a freshman at Gettysburg College at the time, and I remember sitting in my third-floor dorm room, wondering what all the commotion was in the first-floor lounge, where several of my fellow scholars were celebrating Chris Chambliss’ pennant-clinching homer against Kansas City.
Time marches on, and these days I consider myself more of a baseball agnostic – still apt to sit and watch a game but not the least bit worshipful. Again, seems healthy to me. Time to worry about other things, like what might happen a week from Tuesday. Or, ya know, one’s own mortality.
But every now and then, it doesn’t hurt to revisit the distant past. To think about how Stottlemyre could win 20 games multiple times with some of the sorriest teams on the planet. Or how Bill Robinson was laughably described as hitting a “strong .240” in 1968, again according to the Yankee Yearbook. Or how the smells of cigars, cigarettes and Skoal never quite leave your nostrils.
If the Yankees beat the Dodgers, so be it. But the opposite would be fine, too. It’s somebody else’s turn to be a fan, somebody else’s turn to agonize over such things. North Jersey is a long way away. My infatuation with Celerino Sanchez, too.