Pitchers and Catchers Report...

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.