Baseball always comes back
I’m nostalgic. Oh, it could be because I miss the Republican Party, the dear GOP of old, before it was taken over by loonies like Judge Roy Moore of Alabama.
It could be because I miss George Bush. Both of them. Suffice it to say, Donald Trump is no Ronald Reagan. Where have you gone, Gipper? America turns its lonely eyes to you. The party of Lincoln has become the party of Bannon. Sad.
Or it could be I’m nostalgic for real autumn. You know, the kind where you’d walk to school through 10 feet of fallen leaves.
But no. It’s none of these. This is the time of year I realize how much I will miss baseball in the coming weeks and months. The playoffs and the oddly-nomenclatured World Series will soon be underway. I’ll watch, root against the Cubs, pull for the Yanks and Dodgers.
(I’m such a traditionalist. A Yanks-Dodgers World Series sounds fine to me, even though The Mick and The Boys Of Summer cleaned out their lockers long ago. The Judge and young Cody are waiting to take the field.)
Maybe because baseball was the national pastime when I was a kid, I still consider it as such, though it’s clearly not. If there is any lesson to be drawn from the Trump-agitated national anthem controversy, with its focus on NFL and NBA players, it’s that baseball occupies a spot in America’s cultural hinterlands.
No longer front and center with fans and the media, baseball plods along. Oh, if only Trump could carve out mic-time to disparage a guy who swings lumber rather than a fellow who slings pigskins. Mr. President, baseball needs your disdain.
During my younger days, my brother kept day-to-day track of the Pirates. It might have been 1960, the year of Maz, when he divided the season into 154 squares (teams played 154-game seasons then).
Doug placed his rectangular calendar of games on the downstairs wall at home and dutifully recorded wins and losses, the pitchers of record, and who slammed one out of the park, if anyone.
Starting last season, I’ve been doing the same, only on a smaller scale, minus home runs and pitchers and the wall mounting.
Let me turn now to my trusty 2016 pocket calendar. I will open it randomly … to Saturday, June 11, 2016. Not a good day. Buccos 1, Cardinals 5. In fact, the Pirates lost the previous game to the Cardinals and they lost on Sunday, too. A Cards weekend sweep.
We must try to find a Pirates win. There … Wednesday, July 27, the Bucs thumped the Seattle Mariners, 10 to 1, at home.
I’m really not sure why I keep track of the Pirates this way. The internet keeps track. I don’t need to. And yet …
Maybe it has something to do with being close, or closer, to the game. Maybe it has something to do with the past of my childhood when baseball was everything; everything, and then some.
I saw my first major league baseball game in late September 1956 at Forbes Field. My family sat behind the screen in right field. There was a huge crowd: the biggest in Forbes Field history. It was Prize Day. Pirates versus Dodgers.
I was 8. I remember the Dodger right fielder; he seemed close enough to touch. His name was Carl Furillo. He had a gun for an arm. (If Roberto Clemente played right field that day for the Pirates, he left no impression on me; I do not recall him.)
I remember the Dodger pitcher. He looked huge from our seats 300 or so feet from the Forbes Field mound. His name was Don Newcombe.
The Brooklyn team, the best in the National League, was there in all its glory: Snider and Reese and Robinson, Hodges and Gilliam and Campanella. But I can’t conjure up any of these from that day. Only Newcombe and Furillo.
I read somewhere that Furillo never recovered emotionally or spiritually from being cut loose by the Dodgers a year or two after the team moved to Los Angeles in 1958. Later, he worked at odd jobs. One of these was installing elevators at the World Trade Center in lower Manhatten.
Carl Furillo loved baseball.
I saw the Pirates-Dodgers this season. Doug and I were there for the nine-inning no-hitter spun by lefty Rich Hill. It was a great game in which nothing happened. Or nearly nothing. The Pirates shortstop, Jordy Mercer, speared a line drive, saving a run. Dodger second baseman Chase Utley snatched a sharp liner on a spectacular play, saving the no-hitter.
Then Josh Hamilton teased a ball over the left field fence in the 10th. Bucs win, 1-0. Rich Hill was the losing pitcher.
I watched from the stands as the Pirates scored 8 times in the first inning against the St. Louis team on Sept. 23. That’s baseball. You never know.
Nearly every winter there comes a time when I think it will never be warm again, when both summer and baseball are so remote they seem impossible. By now, I should know better. Baseball will be back.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.