This may be my all-time favorite phrase. As the sun begins its inexorable march toward the vernal equinox, days lengthen and I prepare to escape the claustrophobic confines of indoor sports. Thoughts of sunshine, green grass, and red dirt pervade my sensibility. It is time to contemplate The Game.
Most of the people who know me know that I am always involved in some kind of sport or physical activity. At various times, different generations of friends and acquaintances have seen me at ice hockey, soccer, cycling, mountain biking, yoga, hiking, canoeing, tetherball… But the people who have known me longest, those who understand me best, know that my one true sports love – my main squeeze of athletic endeavor – is baseball. How much am I enamored with baseball? I named my first son after myself (a four-generation, quasi-narcissistic family tradition) and named my second son after my favorite baseball player.
The affair began fairly early: as far back as I can remember, actually. In my earliest days baseball was religion at my house. From April to September (If you’re a Phillies fan you know it was never October in those days) Sunday meant going to church, having lunch, and watching the Phillies on TV. Possibly the only thing better was sitting on the front steps of my grandmother’s house on sweltering summer nights, listening to the Phils on the radio while the neighbors swigged from their quarts of Ortlieb’s or Schmidt’s. That's where I was when Rick Wise threw his no-hitter in 1971.
My father gave me baseball. A pretty fair player in his day, he helped coach my first organized team when I was nine. At the start of the season we made the Bad News Bears look like the Gashouse Gang, but by the end of that season we were winning the league championship. (Yay! Everybody to 7-11 for Slurpees!) He took me to see the last game at Connie Mack Stadium with him. We also saw the first game at The Vet together. By moving the family to Massachusetts when I was ten, he was unknowingly indoctrinating me into the Red Sox Nation. During my mostly undistinguished baseball career, he was both my biggest fan and my harshest critic. Watching me play in a men’s softball league as a teen and seeing me make the best play of my career to that point, a running, over-the-shoulder catch of a ball hit way over my head, he had one word to say as I jogged back to the bench: “Hotdog.” After the game I asked him why, when Willie Mays makes a similar play, they call it “The Catch,” but when I do it, I am branded a hotdog. He says, “Simple. You’re not Willie Mays.” What I’m not sure he realizes is that I made that catch with a glove that I swiped from him – the glove he bought the year before I was born, a glove so prized that I found a local shoemaker who could repair it when it started to break down, and a glove I continued to use into my thirties until it literally fell apart. I donated that glove to the Hall of Fame; I’m not sure if it’s on display.
Playing kid baseball in 1960s Philadelphia was an interesting endeavor. We lived a predominantly concrete existence. There was a lot more pavement than grass where we lived. But what we lacked in sod, we made up in numbers. In a densely populated urban environment, when we organized a neighborhood pickup game, filling out two teams of nine was rarely a problem. Finding a place to play, on the other hand, was always a problem. There was considerable competition for the one field at our local playground, so we played in the streets, alleys and schoolyards more often than we played in the park. We were responsible for more broken windows and dented car doors than I should admit in writing. The statute of limitations may not yet have run out. Every game was played with the specter of real estate damage lurking nearby. One errant swing or missed line drive and you didn’t wait for someone to yell, “Run!” You tried to slink into your house without being seen, then hoped your father didn’t ask, “So who broke the Finley’s window?” over dinner.
No one in our neighborhood had a lot of money, so there was never enough equipment to go around. We shared gloves, we had community bats, and, on a good day, we had an actual baseball. We used everything we had until it had nothing left to give. There were no aluminum bats when we were kids. Wooden bats actually broke, and unlike today, when someone broke your bat, your parents didn’t run right to Sports Authority to buy you another one. When we broke a bat, we appropriated nails and electrical tape from our dads’ workbenches and rebuilt it best we could. (Okay, so we weren’t very smart, but we were industrious.) We used a baseball until the cover literally fell off. When that happened we wrapped what was left of it in the same electrical tape that we stole earlier to fix the bat, and kept playing.
Being the tallest, skinniest kid in the neighborhood carried a certain stigma (never a problem for me). That meant you were the one who was lowered by the ankles into the sewer to retrieve the ball when it rolled down. And God forbid you were the last one to have a play on the ball before it rolled into the sewer. That was a guaranteed beating at the hands of everyone on the macadam diamond, followed by the indignity of having to wipe the sewer muck off the ball on your shirt or pants - another sure beating from your mother when you got home. One of the best days of the year was “Bat Day” at the Phillies. That meant that one or two kids were coming home with a new Johnny Callison or Richie (before he was Dick) Allen Louisville Slugger to replace the nailed and taped batons of death we were using. Sadly “Bat Day” came to an end when New York fans used their free bats to beat on each other in the stands during the game, then in the subway afterward.
Moving from Philadelphia to western Massachusetts during my formative fan years afforded me a rare luxury: the right to have two favorite major league baseball teams. I rationalized it by pointing out that the two teams played in separate leagues and would never cross paths. (Interleague play wasn't on anyone's radar back then.) No one really cared because neither team ever won anything anyway. Loving two of the most inept and star-crossed franchises in professional sports for over forty years meant twice the frustration and twice the misery. I lived through the Phillies monumental 1964 collapse. Thankfully I was too young to remember it. I was also too young to remember the Sox’ (possessive of Sox?) heartbreaking World Series loss to the Cardinals after the 1967 Impossible Dream season. But I was there to watch my Sox fall to the Big Red Machine in 1975, just as I watched Greg Luzinski bobble away the Phillies’ chances in the 1977 National League Championship. The first ever professional sporting event that my wife-to-be got to attend was a 1983 World Series game in Philadelphia. (Suffice it to say, a suburban Jersey Girl wasn’t ready for that experience.) The Phillies lost the game and the series to the Orioles. (I caught a ball at that game, which my kids later fed to our dog, but that’s a story for another day.) I can tell you where I was when Bill Buckner booted away the 1986 Series for the Red Sox, and I still have the television with the scuff on it from the shoe I threw when Mitch Williams squandered Curt Schilling’s masterpiece in the 1993 Series. Hidden and almost lost amidst it all was the Phillies 1980 World Series victory over the Royals, but all anyone remembers of that series were the mounted police in the stadium and the riots and looting in the name of “celebration” afterward. A real jewel in the crown of Philly sports fandom that was.
But lately it’s been much different. The last seven years have been a baseballic epiphany in my life. (Baseballic? Go ahead. You try to make an adjective out of “baseball.” Baseballian? Baseballesque?) The Sox reversed the curse in 2004, then took a curtain call in 2008 for good measure. The Phillies rampaged to the 2009 title and almost did it again in 2010. Entering the 2011 season, the Phillies have assembled the best pitching staff in recent memory, and the Red Sox have made important off-season acquisitions. A month before pitchers and catchers are due to report to spring training, there are already whispers that the Phils and the Sox are the odds on favorites to meet in the Fall Classic. That mythic matchup that I once swore would never occur, might actually occur. Could the apocalypse be upon us? Is this confluence of my notions of baseball transcendence a sign of the end of days? The people who know me already want to know how I will split my allegiances. My answer is: I don’t have to. I will have won either way.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
For Better or Wurst
I have come to grips with quite a few realizations as I shuffle into the latter half of middle age. Most important among these are: more protein, fewer carbs; and fiber is my friend. Like most men, especially former athletes who ate with impunity in their youth, I've grown both shorter and wider. It doesn't matter that I exercise like a madman. These days, I accumulate weight like Michael Vick accumulates fan mail from PETA.
In my younger days, I had the metabolism of a gerbil. I was convinced that if I did not consume my weight in food every other day, I would perish. Tales of my gustatory prowess are legion. I was a world class gurgitator long before gurgitation was a sport. Binge eating? Please. Not only did I invent it, I elevated it to an art form. Five regulation size Philly cheesesteaks? That was dessert. I can tell you how to spend $50 in Chinatown without getting a happy ending. There was no stigma attached to compulsive eating as practiced by me. My feats of eats earned me several nicknames. At various times I was known as “Mongo,” “The Human Garbage Disposal,” or simply “Meat.” My sisters referred to me as “The Beast,” but my personal favorite was "Tapeworm." (My kids don't even know what a tapeworm is. Times sure have changed.) Don’t ask how many all-you-can-eat establishments I’ve been banned from. NASA’s computers may be able to tally those numbers; I can’t. People spoke of me in Paul Bunyanesque terms. "A monster of a man he was. Appetite like a whole herd of wolverines and gas production exceeding that of Exxon." Not bad for somebody who entered college standing roughly 5'4" and weighing barely 130 pounds. Didn't matter. I could still out eat most of the football team, several of whom were close to triple my size.
And not only did I eat extraordinary quantities of food, I ate things that people no longer even recognize as food. I grew up on the fringes of some of the last blue collar ethnic neighborhoods in Philadelphia, where people ate things like oxtails, pigs' knuckles, and sweetbreads (which were neither sweet, nor bread). Beef tongue. Duck's blood soup. Scrapple. I ate it all. Hannibal Lecter had nothing on me. Not only do I know what haggis is, I actually like it. Do you know how hard it is to find good haggis in the 'burbs?
My favorite luncheon meat was, and still is, liverwurst, which the missus refers to as "wife repellent." I knew there was a reason I liked it all these years. As early as second grade, I was taking three liverwurst sandwiches to school for lunch every day. I was one of the few kids in my Catholic grade school that got to eat meat at lunch (provided it wasn't a Friday during Lent). It seems that liverwurst was the only lunchmeat cheaper than peanut butter, and nobody - I mean nobody - could spread Oscar Mayer Braunschweiger thinner than my mother. One tube of 'wurst (about two sandwiches' worth by my current standard) was good for an entire week. As I grew older, say fifth grade, my tastes became more sophisticated: liverwurst with American cheese and yellow mustard. There was, however, one thing that I couldn't eat: "The Stinky" - a sandwich so vile it leaves one with no wonder why vultures prefer roadkill. Oil-packed sardines, Limburger cheese, horseradish mustard and Bermuda onion on rye. Rotting fish, sweat socks, and molten lava on savory bread. Yum! When an inch-thick slice of raw onion is the least pungent thing on your sandwich you know you have your work cut out for you. I couldn't get it past my nose, but the old guys at my music club could two-fist them. I'm now perplexed. If they were two-fisting Stinkies (the plural form of Stinky?), which fist were they using to hoist their beers?
Sadly those are bygone days. The old guys have died off. Those neighborhoods, at least as we knew them, are long gone. My days are now filled with whole grain and fiber. I know more about diet and nutrition now than I did as a college athlete, you know, when I was fueling my body for peak performance. I have forged a new existence as a quasi-vegetarian. I eschew meat for health reasons, but I am still a carnivore at heart. I still love to cook, and I love my cooking, but I have grudgingly come to realize that the foods I like best don’t necessarily like me back. Don’t tell my nutritionist that I still sneak the occasional plate of greasy breakfast meat or a huge Italian hoagie with so much oil it slides off the roll. I do take some solace in this one thought: even though I have doctors and dieticians telling me what to eat, I haven't forgotten how to eat.
In my younger days, I had the metabolism of a gerbil. I was convinced that if I did not consume my weight in food every other day, I would perish. Tales of my gustatory prowess are legion. I was a world class gurgitator long before gurgitation was a sport. Binge eating? Please. Not only did I invent it, I elevated it to an art form. Five regulation size Philly cheesesteaks? That was dessert. I can tell you how to spend $50 in Chinatown without getting a happy ending. There was no stigma attached to compulsive eating as practiced by me. My feats of eats earned me several nicknames. At various times I was known as “Mongo,” “The Human Garbage Disposal,” or simply “Meat.” My sisters referred to me as “The Beast,” but my personal favorite was "Tapeworm." (My kids don't even know what a tapeworm is. Times sure have changed.) Don’t ask how many all-you-can-eat establishments I’ve been banned from. NASA’s computers may be able to tally those numbers; I can’t. People spoke of me in Paul Bunyanesque terms. "A monster of a man he was. Appetite like a whole herd of wolverines and gas production exceeding that of Exxon." Not bad for somebody who entered college standing roughly 5'4" and weighing barely 130 pounds. Didn't matter. I could still out eat most of the football team, several of whom were close to triple my size.
And not only did I eat extraordinary quantities of food, I ate things that people no longer even recognize as food. I grew up on the fringes of some of the last blue collar ethnic neighborhoods in Philadelphia, where people ate things like oxtails, pigs' knuckles, and sweetbreads (which were neither sweet, nor bread). Beef tongue. Duck's blood soup. Scrapple. I ate it all. Hannibal Lecter had nothing on me. Not only do I know what haggis is, I actually like it. Do you know how hard it is to find good haggis in the 'burbs?
My favorite luncheon meat was, and still is, liverwurst, which the missus refers to as "wife repellent." I knew there was a reason I liked it all these years. As early as second grade, I was taking three liverwurst sandwiches to school for lunch every day. I was one of the few kids in my Catholic grade school that got to eat meat at lunch (provided it wasn't a Friday during Lent). It seems that liverwurst was the only lunchmeat cheaper than peanut butter, and nobody - I mean nobody - could spread Oscar Mayer Braunschweiger thinner than my mother. One tube of 'wurst (about two sandwiches' worth by my current standard) was good for an entire week. As I grew older, say fifth grade, my tastes became more sophisticated: liverwurst with American cheese and yellow mustard. There was, however, one thing that I couldn't eat: "The Stinky" - a sandwich so vile it leaves one with no wonder why vultures prefer roadkill. Oil-packed sardines, Limburger cheese, horseradish mustard and Bermuda onion on rye. Rotting fish, sweat socks, and molten lava on savory bread. Yum! When an inch-thick slice of raw onion is the least pungent thing on your sandwich you know you have your work cut out for you. I couldn't get it past my nose, but the old guys at my music club could two-fist them. I'm now perplexed. If they were two-fisting Stinkies (the plural form of Stinky?), which fist were they using to hoist their beers?
Sadly those are bygone days. The old guys have died off. Those neighborhoods, at least as we knew them, are long gone. My days are now filled with whole grain and fiber. I know more about diet and nutrition now than I did as a college athlete, you know, when I was fueling my body for peak performance. I have forged a new existence as a quasi-vegetarian. I eschew meat for health reasons, but I am still a carnivore at heart. I still love to cook, and I love my cooking, but I have grudgingly come to realize that the foods I like best don’t necessarily like me back. Don’t tell my nutritionist that I still sneak the occasional plate of greasy breakfast meat or a huge Italian hoagie with so much oil it slides off the roll. I do take some solace in this one thought: even though I have doctors and dieticians telling me what to eat, I haven't forgotten how to eat.
So, where were we?
I don't believe I'm here. It has been nearly 30 years since I've written anything that wasn't about how to operate a computer or a camera. A delightful muse has convinced me I should do this.
First and foremost, I never saw myself authoring a "blog" because, even though I have worked on computers going back prior to the introduction of the IBM PC, I have never subscribed to web-speak. I didn't want to have anything to do with an entire cyber community that was too lazy to say "web log." There was also that part of me that said "blogging" was nothing more than self-indulgent vanity writing. I still haven't decided whether I'm getting in step with the times or just giving in.
Let's get a few preliminaries out of the way. I have ADD, and it's reflected in my writing. I make copious use of hyphens, and every whirling dervish of thought will be expressed parenthically in my prose. I will intentionally sling bad puns and malapropisms as I see fit, I make up words to suit my agenda, and my really bad mixed metaphors are a work of art unto themselves. If you don't like it, adjust!
I am a self-confessed grammar nerd. I love the English language and all its convoluted parts and rules. I will skewer the people who disrespect it. And I will sometimes vitiate those rules to make a point. In fact, if you see any grammatical errors in my writing, assume they were intentional.
My sense of humor is simultaneously sophisticated and off kilter. Sharp word play is right up my alley, but I also love "dick and fart" jokes. My mother would love to tell you, I'm a wise ass. I can still vividly hear her saying it to me for the first time when I was about eight. (Love ya anyway, Mom!) Nothing that is written here is to be taken seriously (unless I say so). If you like what you find here, I accept all compliments graciously. If you don't like what you see, keep it to yourself. You have been warned.
In case anybody was wondering, the font this text is presented in is Trebuchet, because I love medieval siege engines. Chew on that, kids.
First and foremost, I never saw myself authoring a "blog" because, even though I have worked on computers going back prior to the introduction of the IBM PC, I have never subscribed to web-speak. I didn't want to have anything to do with an entire cyber community that was too lazy to say "web log." There was also that part of me that said "blogging" was nothing more than self-indulgent vanity writing. I still haven't decided whether I'm getting in step with the times or just giving in.
Let's get a few preliminaries out of the way. I have ADD, and it's reflected in my writing. I make copious use of hyphens, and every whirling dervish of thought will be expressed parenthically in my prose. I will intentionally sling bad puns and malapropisms as I see fit, I make up words to suit my agenda, and my really bad mixed metaphors are a work of art unto themselves. If you don't like it, adjust!
I am a self-confessed grammar nerd. I love the English language and all its convoluted parts and rules. I will skewer the people who disrespect it. And I will sometimes vitiate those rules to make a point. In fact, if you see any grammatical errors in my writing, assume they were intentional.
My sense of humor is simultaneously sophisticated and off kilter. Sharp word play is right up my alley, but I also love "dick and fart" jokes. My mother would love to tell you, I'm a wise ass. I can still vividly hear her saying it to me for the first time when I was about eight. (Love ya anyway, Mom!) Nothing that is written here is to be taken seriously (unless I say so). If you like what you find here, I accept all compliments graciously. If you don't like what you see, keep it to yourself. You have been warned.
In case anybody was wondering, the font this text is presented in is Trebuchet, because I love medieval siege engines. Chew on that, kids.
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