Our Long National Nightmare Is Over!
Not the One You Were Thinking
Our long national nightmare is finally over!
No, they haven’t finalized a vaccine for COVID-19 yet.
No, the president didn’t leave office before the end of his term.
No, we haven’t reconciled all of the racial ills that should have been healed in this country years ago, but are still the source of much of the current unrest on our streets. It’s time for some serious change in how we do — just about everything.
But, that’s not what I’m talking about, here. That’s another article for another time.
Not those nightmares. What I’m talking about here is baseball. I’m talkin’ baseball, people!
Baseball is finally back!
I’m as excited as a little kid at…well, at the beginning of the baseball season! That little kid in me gets just as excited at age 65 as he did at age10 over the prospect of a fresh new baseball season. Hope springs eternal at the beginning of each new baseball season. ‘This could be our year’! (Last year actually was my home town team’s year, as the Washington Nationals finally won their first ever World Series, and brought a baseball championship to the Washington DC area for the first time since the 1924 Washington Senators won it all. There was finally joy in Mudville!)
Statistical Love
A new season of statistics are about to begin to be compiled! Yes, I’m as drawn by the stats as I am by the action, when it comes to baseball. I’m a total math nerd. What’s not to love about baseball for a math geek like myself?
In fact, one of the ways I have combated the repetitive boredom of quarantine, to break up the monotony of the day-in, day-out staring at the same walls, has been to go out and purchase several seasons’ worth of Strat-O-Matic Baseball cards, to play the realistic cards-and-dice game that is statistically based on each player’s real-life stats for any given season. Suffice it to say, I’ve been like a pig in shit since I got them, late in March. I’ve probably played 300 games since then.
First I got the latest set of cards, last season’s, so I could replay my Nationals’ championship season. Then, I thought it would be cool to get a set of cards for the first season I seriously got into baseball, the year I began my 20–30 games per season attendance at old Forbes Field to watch my team (the Pirates) play in the great baseball days of the 1960’s, an era I still consider to be baseball’s very best era. That was definitely cool. It brought me back to my first days as a fan, some 56 years ago. It brought all those players back to life in my childlike baseball imagination.
Then, they offered a deal on the 1971 season, the season my then home town Pirates won it all, beating the mighty Baltimore Orioles, with their vaunted pitching staff of four 20-game winners in a down-to-the-wire, 7 game series that I still consider to be one of the best ever played. It was also the national showcase for my childhood hero, Roberto Clemente. Before the beginning of the series, the press were making many comparisons between him and the great Frank Robinson, both rightfielders for their respective teams, both superstars, but the comparisons all seemed to tilt in Robinson’s favor.
This pissed “the Great One” (Roberto) off so much, he went out to play that series with a serious chip on his shoulder. He put together one of the most stunning World Series performances of all time, one they’re still talking about nearly 50 years later, a performance that made him a national icon, and made me so proud and happy for my childhood hero. He really showed them, and carried those Pirates on his shoulders all the way to the end. He’d finally gotten the recognition he so richly deserved.
Sadly, he would only have a little over another year to bask in that glory, as he was tragically killed in a plane crash off the coast of San Juan, Puerto Rico, when the planeload of relief supplies that he was personally delivering to earthquake ravaged Nicaragua never made it. He was just 38 years old. I’d lost my childhood hero that day, though he still very much lives on in my heart, and in the hearts of millions that he inspired, these many years later.
Yes, that is when I learned that there is, indeed, crying in baseball. My family had just moved from Pittsburgh to Connecticut by then, but I was still a diehard Pirates fan, and still worshiped the ground the Great One walked upon. It was my first real loss growing up. I took it pretty hard.
In my replay of the 1971 season, the team is off to a slow start, but Clemente is doing everything in his considerable power to right that ship. I am sure he will do so, soon. He’s just tearing it up out there, playing a caliber of ball only he could play.
Next, I’ll be receiving the 1960 and the 1980 seasons’ sets of cards.1960 was the Pirates first championship season in my lifetime, their first in 35 years at the time, and my earliest baseball memory. In that World Series, they defeated the mighty, and heavily favored, New York Yankees of Micky Mantle, Roger Maris, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford and inimitable Yankees manager Casey Stengel.
A relatively unknown Pirate Second Baseman, the great-field, light-hitting Bill Mazeroski, drove the final dagger into the mighty Yankee evil empire with the first ever World Series walk-off, series-winning home run when he sent a shot over the left field wall at old Forbes Field in the bottom of the 9th, to break a 9–9 tie and give Pittsburgh the World Series championship!
That moment is my earliest baseball memory. I was 5 at the time. I remember seeing old Yogi Berra, Yankee catcher-turned-left fielder on that play, watching as the ball sailed over the wall. Yogi turned sadly, hanging his head low as he began the long trot from deep left field in to the Yankees’ dugout. Meanwhile, the exuberant Mazeroski was losing his mind on the basepaths as he made his way around the bases, realizing what he’d just done. The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, all happening on that field at the same time. That’s baseball!
The 1980 season was the year my then home town team, the Philadelphia Phillies, finally won their first ever championship. I’d settled into the Philly area when I got out of the Navy, largely because my parents were, by then, living in Cherry Hill, N.J., just across the river from Philadelphia. I’d only been to a couple of games since we’d moved from Pittsburgh in ’72. One of those had been up in Montreal, where I enjoyed hearing the fans cheering in both English and French. I didn’t know, then, that that team, the Montreal Expos, would eventually become my home town team here in the D.C. area. They moved here in 2005 and became my beloved Nationals.
Back to Philadelphia — that team really captured my imagination, as did their mascot — the Phillie Phanatic. Having been away from the game through most of the 70’s, I was at first offended by that crazy character running around the field, messing with the players and just basically goofing off down there. The baseball purist in me was highly offended by that Phanatic’s hijinks. However, watching the faces of the kids in the stands as he (it?) pulled all these crazy pranks, I lightened up, and actually began to look forward to its regular appearances on the field, and throughout the stands. As a matter of fact, many years later, I would find myself down on a major league field myself, trying out for the Nationals’ mascots, the Racing Presidents. That’s a whole other story!
I am sure I will enjoy playing those two seasons, 1960 and 1980, as much as I have enjoyed playing 2019, 1964 and 1971. Baseball is beautiful to me, and this is a way I can celebrate that beauty, and get through this pandemic without going too crazy.
And then, there’s the brand new season about to begin tonight. First pitch is sometime between 7:00 and 7:30 this evening, when my reigning champion Nationals will finally begin defense of their champion crown against the mighty, and hated, New York Yankees. I have it set up to record, since I’ll have a meeting to attend from 7–8:30. I am so excited, I can barely contain myself.
Play Ball!!!
