Baseball Memories
September 13, 2024
ALAN writes:
“Young and foolish,
Why is it wrong to be,
Young and foolish,
We haven’t long to be,
Soon enough the carefree days, the
sunlit days go by…..”
— “Young and Foolish” (1954)
How very true. And so now, I look back to those carefree, sunlit days from the other end of life. The years 1958-’64 stand out in memory, and baseball was a big part of those years — as it was then, not as it is today.
Grandfather, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins — all took an interest in baseball, mostly via radio, sometimes in attending games at Sportsman’s Park in north St. Louis. Some of them had played softball or baseball at neighborhood parks when they were young. When I was 9-10 years old, each of my parents took me to games at that wonderful old ballpark, just a few years before it was made into dust. (Frank Sinatra comes to mind: You could stand at that location today and invoke his recording of “There Used to Be a Ballpark” right there.)
Baseball entered my awareness in 1958. My father taught me the essentials of the game on many evenings and Saturday afternoons at Marquette Park. I learned about baseball cards from classmates at St. Anthony of Padua school. All summer long, we collected them, traded them, and carried them in our pockets. In spring and autumn, we played games with them outside our school building during recess. We reconnoitered our neighborhood and found five confectionaries, two dime stores, two drug stores, and two corner markets where we knew we could find five-cent packs of baseball cards in case our nickels and dimes became too burdensome.
The vivid colors, the format, the names and players pictured on those 1958 Topps cards became etched forever deep in memory. My boyhood pal Jeff and I compared our evaluations of such cards as we walked through Marquette Park in the heat of midsummer days, pausing now and then for life support at one of the two drinking fountains. We walked countless times past the screen door with a bell on the top and into the Kozy Korner Confectionary in search of such cards. One of my classmates suckered me out of a nickel in exchange for a 1957 Cardinals team card. (Real value in 1958: One cent.) Couldn’t even trust a fellow altar boy.
I remember sitting in our living room with my grandfather as he watched games in the 1958 World Series on our black-and-white television. Twenty years earlier, he watched my mother and her classmates play softball at Fox Playground in south St. Louis. If the Cardinals were well on their way toward losing a game, he would get up and turn the radio off in exasperation. At age 79, he could endure only so many losses by the home team. In later years, I felt the same.
Radio then was more important to us than television. Cardinals’ broadcaster Harry Caray made listening to games on radio a wonderful part of summer, just as reading stories aloud can be a wonderful part of childhood if parents are smart enough to realize it. There were only eight teams in each league in the 1950s. Baseball players appeared in episodes of the TV shows “Leave It To Beaver” and “Father Knows Best”, each of which upheld the integrity and strength of family life. It was a time long before professional baseball would agree to accommodate hype, gimmicks, promotions, expansion, gaudy uniforms, alterations in the game, carpets in place of grass, profanities galore, and — worst of all –rock music, to the point where it would become the spectacle of excess that it is today.
My father did not like spectacles, but he liked baseball. He played the game with boyhood pals and classmates in the 1920s. Then he attended many games at Sportsman’s Park. Then he listened to baseball on radio till he reached age 87. I believe doing so enabled him to relive again in memory the joys he had found in the game when he was young.
Sportsman’s Park at Grand Blvd. and Dodier Street in St. Louis.
Certain baseball players, teams, and years have always lingered in my memory. From time to time in years long afterward, I would read about the death of this or that player who was part of the St. Louis Cardinals teams in the years 1958-’64. At such moments, their names would command my attention. In effect, I “met” those men through their baseball cards in 1958-’59 when they were in the prime of life. But soon enough, those carefree, sunlit days went by. Decades then flew by, and before I realized it, they began to die — which meant another chapter in my life was closing. They were a connection to home, family, and boyhood days. I’m sure my father felt the same way when he read long years afterward of the death of baseball players he had admired in the 1920s-’40s.
Stan “The Man” Musial, Ken Boyer, Larry Jackson, Lindy McDaniel and Von McDaniel, Vinegar Bend Mizell, Wally Moon, Don Blasingame, Eddie Kasko, Alex Grammas, Gene Green, Alvin Dark, Julian Javier, Ernie Broglio, Curt Simmons — all but one of them are gone now. Not all of them were great players. But they were heroes to my classmates and me in 1958-’64. Their very names were magic to us: Solid, masculine names, and in some cases perfect names, we thought, for men who played baseball.
This was the card we coveted most in 1959.
For when the one Great Scorer comes to write against your name, He marks — not that you won or lost — but how you played the game.
If Grantland Rice had not immortalized that thought in his 1908 poem, my father would have spoken it. It was exactly how he felt about sportsmanship, and about life. He placed his bookplate in a book of Grantland Rice’s poems, and kept a framed copy of one of them on a wall in his apartment.
I was terribly stupid at times, but not too stupid to realize that he and Grantland Rice were right. It was in that frame of mind that I came to look upon those Cardinal players in 1958-’64. Seven of them stood right before me on the field at Sportsman’s Park on Camera Day in July 1960, their brilliant white uniforms with redbirds-on-the-bat more vivid and impressive than any baseball cards I had held in my hands. It was also “Ladies’ Day” at the ballpark, and several hundred nuns were there as guests of the Cardinals. It was a high point in my boyhood and another connection to home: My father took me to the ballpark that day, and my mother gave me the camera with which I took seven color snapshots. Being so young at that moment and in those years, I did not realize how wealthy I was.
Nearly thirty years later, we sat at his kitchen table one evening, trying to identify players pictured in team photographs from the 1950s-’60s. In a way, it was like old times — baseball uniting us first in those carefree, sunlit days when I was a boy and now, again, when he was 75 and when I had become all too aware of mortality.
Those Cardinals played to win, but they played fair. They did not whine or lend their names to political agitators. They were family men with wives and children. They were well aware that children looked up to them. They did not smoke in public or speak profanely. They were loyal to their team, their city, their fans, and those children. They played by the rules and by a moral code at a time when professional baseball was a decent and worthwhile endeavor in a respectable nation.
None of that has anything to do with what professional baseball is today. Only the name is the same. The essence, the character, the sense of life are utterly different. Where today are the good sportsmanship, talented sports-writing absent trendy buzzwords, universal disapproval of profanity, and continuity with the past that were part of baseball’s charm and heroism in the 1950s? Where are the restraint, the manners, the honor that were still part of baseball then? Where are those today who know how to enjoy a game without constant background noise and cartoons on giant screens? Where are “Ladies’ Days”? Abandoned, no doubt, because there are so few ladies.
“I can’t stand what baseball has become,” Lawrence Auster wrote on July 12, 2008, at View from The Right. Neither can I, I thought to myself when I read those words that day. He and I were in complete agreement
One good thing about the Internet is that we can find well-written articles about men like those I named above at several Internet sites where baseball history is respected and preserved.
When I read such articles, I am “going home” — to the green years, whose evanescence I could not then have imagined; to days and evenings at home with my family and the sound of baseball on radio, usually in our kitchen; to Saturday nights when I read the rotogravure baseball section in the big weekend newspapers, in our living room where my plastic Hartland statue of Stan Musial stood atop my bookcase; to the double pleasure of Sunday afternoon doubleheaders; and to nights when I fell asleep to the sound of baseball on my transistor radio next to my pillow.
From a vantage point the better part of a lifetime later, I now take less interest in those men’s baseball achievements than in their home life and family life in the last years of a comparatively decent time in America. My classmates and I gave little thought to those matters in the 1950s, but now they add texture and detail to the lives of those men, the years when they played, the cultural setting in which they played, and why they inspired our respect. How quickly those years went by.
— Comments —
Kidist Paulos Asrat writes:
Lawrence Auster at VFR wrote several posts about baseball, much more fondly than of other sports. I enjoyed reading them.
I agree with him that baseball has these dramatic moments. I am by no means a baseball expert, but I would watch the Toronto Bluejays.
For example, the catcher throwing the ball to first base, and the player who tries to outrun the catcher’s bionic throw to first base – man against ball. And all this coordinated with all the rest of the bases, to put out subsequent players, fast deductive reflexes by all players: to run or not to run, to throw or not to throw (and where to throw).
I read somewhere that baseball commentary lulled, soothed, the senses, and didn’t get people watching excited in a frenzied way. Even animals near a radio broadcasting a game were soothed by the commentary.
