The Best Ball of All: Baseball at the Edge of Teen

This post is for Andrew Rusca.
But anybody else is welcome to watch the game, of course.
Please click on the images to see much better versions.

Looking in from behind the right field fence, first inning. The venue is the Will C. Wood School's baseball complex in Alameda, California, an island city in San Francisco Bay. The right fielder, #13 on his back but #1 in our cheers, is Andrew. (Photo by Adam Harrington.)

Last Saturday, April 18th, Adam and Lynda invited me to Alameda to watch Lynda's son, Andrew Rusca, play with his Little League team (the Diamondbacks) against the league's A's. It was a gorgeous day for a little drive, and a great opportunity to see how Little League had changed since I was of that age. (Not much, really, as it turns out: the uniforms are fancier, and there are a lot more regulations concerning safety and injury issues, but a fastball is still a fastball, a line drive into the left field corner is still pretty surely a double, and the big kid on the other team who yells a lot is still a jerk.)

Andrew started the game in right field for the Diamondbacks. Here he measures a fly ball for the grasping. (Photo by Adam Harrington.)

I had hoped to see Andrew pitch, since he does very well on the mound, but he had pitched in the team's previous game and according to pitch-count regulations was ineligible to pitch on Saturday.

The view from right field in the first inning. (Photo by Adam Harrington.)

Above: In the bottom of the second inning, Andrew (batting fourth) led off and made his way to second base, but only after two were out. He leans toward third (actual off-base leads are forbidden in Little League until the pitch is thrown, just as was the case half a century ago)...

... and, rounding third, tries to score on a single...

... makes a textbook slide as the throw from the outfield comes to the catcher...

... and is CALLED OUT ON THIS PLAY. Can you believe it?? After this play, the Diamondbacks' manager came out to argue with the ump, but to no avail. (To all of our credit, the adults in the stands didn't make a peep -- but, damn, he was safe. Really.)

Between-innings entertainment: a gorgeous, elegant CKCS-Terrier mix enchants the photographer.

Adam and I talked about Andrew's batting stance and swing between his first plate appearance and his second (above). Andrew's a big kid for his age, and really, really wants to pop one over the fence -- an urge that can lead a kid to overswing and try to "kill" the ball, leading to an undisciplined, unproductive effort. Adam expressed some worry that Andrew was falling into that trap, but I didn't see any evidence of it on Saturday. What I did see was a patient, controlled batter with a compact, efficient, level swing -- the kind of batter I hated to see half a century ago when I was a pitcher!

... and, in this at-bat, that compact, level swing paid off with a laser-shot double down the left field line.

Andrew coasts into second base as the throw comes in from the left fielder to the shortstop.

Andrew surveys the territory from second base after his double.

Ready to go to third...

... where he is stranded as the third out is made. No matter how good you are, you still need your teammates to come through.

Mid-game, Andrew was moved from right field to first base on defense. Above, he takes a throw from the third baseman on a ground ball...

... recording the forceout at first, but -- seeing a runner break toward home from third base...

... fires the ball back to home, where the runner is O-U-T. Double play!

A later at-bat, and that great compact swing is still alive...

... putting Andrew at first base...

... from which he takes off for second...

... and puts on another sliding-form clinic. Better result this time, though.

He eventually makes his way to third...

... and the batter slices one that might allow Andrew to score...

... but it wasn't to be. Baseball, she breaks your heart.

As I drove back South after the game, across the causeway from the island of Alameda to the East Bay mainland, I stopped to look across the estuary to the Oakland Coliseum complex.

It struck me that my sons and I -- and, as they matured into men, their families and I -- had sat in those stands for many, many afternoons over the past 40 summers, and always the final score was important when we left. Did the A's win? Did the A's lose?

And I was struck by the fact that I didn't even remember the score of the Little League game I had just seen. I had been connected to the details, not the uniforms, as I was when I played the game. What I remember most clearly about playing the game 50 years ago, when I was Andrew's age, are the little things -- the pitch well-thrown, the ball well-struck, the out or the safe arrival at a base -- not whether my team won or lost. Watching Andrew go through the details of his game took me back to that sense of baseball, and he handled those details extremely well.

And that pleased me.

Thank you, Andrew, and I hope to come back to watch you play again sometime soon.

Yankees 3, Red Sox 1...

... and Most of the Players Are Still Alive.

That most of them are still above ground surprises me a little bit, since the game was played 50 years ago, on September 19, 1958.

(The illustrations in this post are smaller than usual because they are links to much larger and more detailed images in Flickr. Please click on them to see them as I intend them to be viewed. Thanks.)

Yankee Stadium, After the Game of September 19th, 1958

It was the only major-league game Dad and I ever attended together, and the first one I ever saw in person, so it holds a special place in my memory. I doubt that any of the living players remember it at all, though. It was very late in the season, both teams were insurmountably behind the White Sox for the American League title (in those days there were no "playoffs" -- you either won your league or you didn't), and they were just playing out the schedule because, well, that's what you do. But you do it fast; the game took less than two hours (today, a typical major-league game takes about three hours to complete.)

The inconsequential nature of that particular game is probably why Dad and I were able to attend. Dad hated the Yankees, so he sure as heck wasn't going to pay for his own tickets and travel all the way to New York City (which he also detested) to see them. We had a perfectly good minor-league team to go watch, too: the Binghamton Triplets*, just 40 miles down the Chenango Valley from our home outside Norwich, so why go to all that extra effort and expense, anyway? The company he worked for had a couple of season tickets to Yankees' games. The Yankees of that era were almost always in first place (a big reason why Dad didn't like them), so the corporate tickets were usually spoken for all year -- but not in '59, so Dad grabbed the languishing ones for Saturday, September 19th.

Watching Batting Practice from our Loge Perch

What I remember most clearly about the day was, oddly, our welcome at our seats. The seats were on the loge level (a narrow deck between the lower- and second-decks in old Yankee Stadium), with office-style chairs (not fixed to the floor) and a writing surface for keeping score or for resting hot dogs and drinks -- they were like desk seats. A very suave, tall, black usher greeted us at our seats, and whisked a dustcloth over the chairs. He said, "Welcome to Yankee Stadium" in a somber tone... with his palm outstretched in Dad's direction. I didn't notice that latter part, and was awed by the ceremony. I was twelve years old.

Dad was so caught up in the game in front of him that he didn't take any pictures during the action itself. This picture...

Dragging the Infield Between Innings

... is as close to an action shot as I can find in his slides. Too bad -- four players saw action in that game who eventually would be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle started at catcher and center field for the Yanks, Whitey Ford (whose fluid, powerful, left-handed form I still remember with snapping clarity) was their starting pitcher, and Ted Williams, at the end of his penultimate season, pinch-hit for the Sox late in the game. I don't remember that Teddy Ballgame grounded into a double play; I do remember his stroll from the dugout to the plate and the goosebumps on the back of my young neck as he approached the batter's box.

Dad took one more picture after the game was over:

Postgame fans' stroll.

After the game, fans were allowed to stroll on the field (except for the infield area, which you can see being politely guarded by red-jacketed ushers.) After posting this quartet on Flickr, and including them in a couple of NYC groups, I was astonished at the level of viewing they garnered. This shot, in particular, provoked responses from folks much younger than me. For example:

"Chocolatepoint" says:
Baseball looks so much more interesting way back when. I suspect that just being able to walk on the field gave fans a connectedness to the game, the stadium and their team.
Nowadays, we have to rebuild stadiums so that rich people can have more skyboxes, security will barely let people move around and we have far too many whiny overpaid yet underperforming athletes.

... and ...
"sds70" says:
No way teams would let their fans do this anymore :( :( . . Too many security concerns, issues with messing up the grass, etc. . . . That would've been cool to do once

... and ...
"Jersey2Bronx" said:
Its sad that this era is gone.
I did a Yankee Stadium tour 2 weeks ago, and while we got to walk the warning track, we were not allowed to step foot on (or even touch) the grass on the field. The stadium is closed - there will never be another baseball game there, and yet STILL - a "regular guy" like me was not allowed to touch the grass. That in and of it self is contrary to what baseball used to be about. Its gone from being one of the most accessible and inclusive sports to being one that caters to the exclusive who can afford it - "access" for a price.
Sad...

As "chocolatepoint" noted, the connection between the players and their fans has been broken. I don't know when it happened, precisely, but I know it was after 1964. I know that because, in April of that year, Dad and I went to see a spring training game while we were on vacation in Florida. The game was in Daytona Beach, and the teams -- "barnstorming" out of their Florida headquarters elsewhere -- were the Kansas City Athletics and the Houston Colt .45s (later the Astros.) We sat close to the plate, and chatted with the players exactly as we did with the people sitting next to us in the stands: comfortably, without any sense of separation, physically, economically, or otherwise. Two players, both near the end of stellar careers, who I remember talking to were:

Nellie Fox (closing it out with the .45s) and...

Rocky Colavito (ditto with the A's.)

Adam, my son, it was a different time, one in which the players were more like their fans. But it was the same for fathers and sons then, a game you either got or you didn't, and if you did, it was a bond that surpassed time. Really, really strange, when you think about it.

Doug, Adam, and Me at a Baseball Game, San Francisco, Summer 2001.

*I loved going to Triplets games, by the way, and followed several of their players through their careers after Binghamton. One of them was Alphonso Downing, a pitcher who later gave up Henry Aaron's Ruth-surpassing 715th home run; another was Deron Johnson, a big lug who could hit a baseball farther than you could launch it with a bazooka -- but just not very often.

Lookit What I Got in the Mail Today!

[Recommended listening while reading this post: "Teach Your Children" by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.]

My friend ronniecat visited Cuba recently, and sent me a souvenir from her trip. When I opened the package, the first thing I saw was the box -- a delightful recipe box with a chicken theme, appropriate for Ft. Harrington. Inside the box was the brown baseball, which ronnie described thusly in her note that accompanied the package:

"... I bought this at a market in Old Havana [...] these had wooden balls at the core [...] when Cubans play 'beisbol,' this is typical of what they're playing with, though this is a step up, as store-bought, from 'I made it myself' balls!"

Unknown to ronnie, after the box, and after the ball, a whole series of memories came tumbling out of the brown paper package:

When I was a little kid in Upstate New York, I loved the game of baseball, and I was enchanted by the Brooklyn Dodgers, whose games I could hear on the radio. I was a chunky, awkward little kid, though, and wasn't very good at athletic enterprises:

Little League tryouts, spring, 1958. I'm the kid throwing at the target.

When I was 11 years old, I tried out for Little League. I was one of the few kids who didn't make the cut for any team at all. I was crushed. My Dad was inspired.

He built a number of training facilities around our home in the backcountry, including:

Hand-eye coordination wall, 1959

... this "bounce-back" stone wall and flagstone terrace. Its function was to improve my fielding abilities by providing unpredictable ricochets which trained me to react to batted balls quickly (very quickly, since I was to use a tennis ball, not a baseball), and...

Batting cage, 1960

... a batting cage, where he would pitch balls to me from the regulation 60 feet, 6 inches away. He enticed me to learn to switch-hit by having me simulate the Dodgers' (by then in the faraway land of Los Angeles) lineup according to whether the hitter was right- or left-handed.

It became clear pretty soon, though, that hitting wasn't going to be my strength, so we switched to pitching. By 1962, he had trained me to throw accurately enough that I could do pretty well in summer-league competition:

Me pitching for the Norwich Masons against the Sherburne town team, 1962

By then, I was in high school, and the goal was to be a pitcher for the Norwich Purple Tornado. Dad's training went into high gear. My athleticism was still meager, but I was a strong, chunky guy, and Dad knew a thing or two about leverage. In the summer of '62, he had me throw over and over again with a prop that engaged my best assets (ahem), husky thighs and a big butt: a folding chair placed right in front of me. By having to kick my left leg over the back of that chair, I learned to bring maximum force into my pitches, and eventually developed a nasty fastball. Poor Dad, the batter in all this training, developed quite a colorful left side that summer from all the bruises. Velocity, he could train me for -- accuracy, not so much. Unfortunately, I can't find a picture in his slide trove of the infamous chair.

Fireballer in training, 1963

All of his and my efforts paid off in 1964, my Junior year in high school. I made the varsity team, and was their ace starting pitcher for that one season. There is not a single picture of that chapter. Dad couldn't stand to do anything but sit on the back rail of the bleachers while I was pitching, anxiously chewing on his fingernails, and he never brought a camera to any of my games as a varsity pitcher. I did okay, not great, because I still couldn't accurately guide my pitches -- I still hold the league record for hit batsmen in a season (primarily because the league dissolved the next year, but still...), and the Catholic kids who batted against me would cross themselves before every pitch.

The coach was a former minor-league pro player who knew some scouts, and (I think as a favor to my Dad, but I don't know for sure) he brought in a Yankees' scout to watch one of my games. His advice to me after the game was blunt: I could throw balls past high school kids, but there was no way I could ever do well even in the low minors, so I should concentrate on my studies.

So I did. And I never played organized ball again after that season, but I wasn't bitter about it at all. I pretty much knew that was the case, anyway, and Dad and I had already proved that I was better than somebody who couldn't make Little League!

More importantly, Dad and I had worked on something important together, for crucially formative years for each of us, and had accomplished much more than baseball alone could account for.

Veterans' Park, Norwich, New York: the home field of the Norwich Purple Tornado

I took the last picture in the summer of 2001, when I made a pilgrimage back to Chenango county to scatter my parents' ashes in the nearby Whaupaunaucau forest, across Thompson Creek from the little house I grew up in, and its hillside lot where Dad built the batting cage and all the rest. The little grandstand looked bigger when I was playing earnestly there, and you can see the corner rail, high up in the back, where Dad sat and gnawed his fingernails so many years ago.

Thank you, ronnie. Thank you so very, very much.

[Coda: the title of this post is meant to echo the one you can see by clicking here.]