And so, I would argue (at least for myself and, I suspect, for most baseball fans of scholarly bent as well) that a serious personal affection for the sport does not follow, either logically or intrinsically, from any particular inherent property of the game’s uniqueness, but rather needs to be explained in the same basic mode as most autobiographical phenomena—that is, as a contingent circumstance that did not have to unfold as it did, but that makes perfectly good sense as a reasonable outcome among a set of possibilities. In this general sense, and for a large array of excellent reasons, baseball became America’s “signature sport.” I can think of no reason why its appeal should be any less or greater among intellectuals than among any other segment of our population. So I would suspect that the appeal of baseball should, at least as an initial hypothesis, be equally strong among intellectually minded fans as among any other group of Americans.
I am not, however, either in this introductory piece or in the book in general, trying to advance general explanations of the appeal or success of our national pastime. Thus, I can only speak for myself and from my own life. If any of my personal reasons apply more generally, then we will need the confirming testimony of others. I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. I myself am the oldest member of the third cohort, the offspring of immigrant grandparents who passed through Ellis Island—that is, the generation destined for university education and professional careers outside the garment district and the world of small shopkeepers.
I accepted this circumstance gladly (not that we have much choice in such matters). And I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents. In other words, my affection for baseball does not predictably follow from any generality of my being (in a “laws of nature” type of explanation preferred by scientists like myself), but rather from a set of “accidents” arising from the particulars of my personal life.
Among these particulars, I would single out two for special emphasis. In fact, I rather suspect that versions of these two factors tend to rank high on the list of contingencies for explaining the inclinations and commitments of many serious fans.
1. Issues of how, or whether, to assimilate to the language and customs of an adopted land stood in the forefront of consciousness for the millions of immigrants (including all members of both sides of my family) who arrived in America during the great wave of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some chose to retain native languages and customs so far as they could, and to assimilate only to the minimal degree required for basic success and solvency. Others consciously abjured their natal tongues and traditions and struggled to speak only English and to learn and practice the history and customs of their adopted land. This second assimilationist group tended to dismiss the traditionalists and newcomers who had not yet made up their minds as “green horns” or “greenies.” My maternal Hungarian grandparents (the relatives I know best and who served as my surrogate parents during World War II, when my father fought in Europe and Northern Africa) were devoted assimilationists who spoke Hungarian only when they didn’t want me to understand, and who took great pride in their accommodation to America. I doubt that they ever understood the limits to their success, particularly as expressed in strong accents that they actively denied, but never lost nonetheless.
Immigrants who opted for assimilation tended to choose particular American institutions or customs as public foci for their commitments. Some veered toward politics of democratic systems that they and their families could enjoy for the first time—as in, for example, the domination of local governments in several major cities by new Irish and Italian citizens. (The WASPs of old Brahmin Boston feared the death of their beloved city when poor Irish immigrants took local political power away from traditional sources, but the Hub persevered and prospered.)
Particularly for men, and especially commonly for Jewish men, a dedication to a distinctively American sport provides the major tactic for assimilation. The three Bs in particular (boxing, basketball, and especially baseball) assumed great importance in the lives of many Jewish and other immigrants. Few Jews grow very tall, so we were probably not destined for basketball triumph as players (although Abe Saperstein put together and coached the Harlem Globetrotters, and many important teams in the early history of basketball—notably the SPHAs, for South Philadelphia Hebrew Association—were formed and staffed by Jewish players).
Boxing and baseball offered stronger possibilities, where champions like Benny Leonard, Max Baer, Moe Berg (a mediocre player, but absolutely outstanding character) and especially Hank Greenberg and, later, Sandy Koufax could become heroes and role models for entire generations, and where even your average city street kid (like me) could play with reasonable success. As a happenstance of personal contingencies, the men of my strongly assimilationist maternal side took up baseball as their major sign and symbol of “Americanization,” and became serious and knowledgeable fans, eager to pass this new tradition to subsequent generations.
Thus, baseball became a centerpiece of family life in my house-hold—and, as several essays in this book acknowledge and discuss, I take pride in being enmeshed within an unbroken string of four generations of serious baseball rooting. The sequence began with my maternal grandfather, Papa Joe, a dedicated Yankee fan from, by his testimony, 1904, when he thrilled to Jack Chesbro’s forty-one victories in a single season—a pitching record that will stand unless the game undergoes radical changes in scheduling and counting—until his death in 1953. All three of his sons followed in serious fandom, although his only daughter, my mother, never really caught the bug despite a personal crush on Mel Ott. (“She thinks a foul ball is a chicken dance,” if I may quote a misogynist line from my father.)
Moving to the other side, my father passed his boyhood rooting for the great Yankee team of Ruth and Gehrig—and his dramatic and detailed memories provided me, a lifelong skeptic in religion, with my closest insight into the potential nature of a deity. In this familial context, my own adoption of serious interest can scarcely be deemed surprising! I must also confess to a feeling of personal pride that my youngest son, Ethan, has now continued a family tradition into a fourth generation—although he grew up in Boston, and three generations of Yankee fandom have now been eclipsed, understandably of course, by his exquisite pain of rooting for the Red Sox, and hoping to live long enough to win another World Series—last achieved in 1918!
2. If we honor the entertainment and real estate industries’ cliché that the three most important factors for success are “location, location, location,” then we must aver, I think, that my being a baseball fan requires no special explanation and should evoke no surprise, whereas we might become puzzled and feel the need for some resolution if I were indifferent to the game. As a pure contingency of my own life, I happened to come of baseball fandom’s age in the greatest conjunction of time and place that the game has ever known: in New York City during the late 1940s and early 1950s. (I was born on September 10, 1941.)
The situation was entirely unfair to the rest of the country, but—hey—you can’t possibly cast any blame on me, so I owe no one any apology. From 1947 to 1957, New York City had the three greatest teams in major league baseball. (Many fans do not understand why a county or borough, rather than a full city, had its own team as the Brooklyn Dodgers. But New York City did not incorporate its outer boroughs into a single city until 1897, so the Dodgers represented an independent city when the team first formed and played major league ball.)
During these eleven years, one of the three New York teams (the Yankees of the American League and the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers of the National League) won the World Series in all
but two years, when the Cleveland Indians prevailed in 1948 and Milwaukee in 1957. Only in 1948—Cleveland vs. the Boston Braves—did a New York team not play in the Series at all. In seven of these years (’47, ’49, ’51, ’52, ’53, ’55, and ’56) two New York teams played each other in the World Series—all won by my beloved Yankees except for the ultimate tragedy of ’55, when the Dodgers won their single victory over the Yanks as a Brooklyn team. We got them back the next year, though, in ’56!
My earliest vague memories of baseball date to the 1946 or 1947 season. I remember the great 1948 season in substantial detail—the year that should have been the Boston subway series, but the Indians tied the Red Sox and then won the single game playoff for the right to play the Boston Braves in the World Series. Starting in 1949, I suspect that I could narrate at least the major events of all World Series games through the Yankees’ revenge on Milwaukee in the 1958 contest.
But my point is simply this—and plausible though the claim may be as an abstraction, one really had to “live it” to know the full extent of the pull and the virtual inevitability—during these years, nearly all boys in New York City and quite a few girls, as well, became passionate baseball fans, spending a good bit of each day, from April to early October, tracing the developing fate of one’s favorites.
Patterns of rooting were neither entirely capricious nor entirely predictable. Nearly all of Brooklyn’s two million citizens rooted passionately for the Dodgers. I’m still mad at my cousin Steve Sosland for failing to protect me, as he promised he would, when I admitted to being a Yankee fan while playing stickball with his Brooklyn neighborhood friends—the worst street beating I ever received, but a rite of passage in the coming of age for any New York street kid.
The still solid Jewish and Italian ethnic communities of the Bronx lived and died with the Yankees (a.k.a. The Bronx Bombers), of course. The Polo Grounds, home of the New York Giants, located in northeastern Manhattan and literally within sight of Yankee Stadium across the Harlem River, did not command so clear a geographic region of nearly exclusive rooting—and Giants fans tended to be scattered throughout the city. Many kids, myself included, rooted for two New York teams, one from each league. Affection for the Yankees and Dodgers proved difficult, for they played each other too often in the World Series (’41, ’47, ’49, ’52, ’53, ’55, and ’56, all won by the Yanks except 1955). By contrast, the Yankees and Giants only met in 1951—on my watch at least, for several Yankee-Giant Series had been played before my birth in the 1920s and 1930s.
I grew up in Queens, the most “neutral” borough, with no team of its own (the expansion Mets did not begin until the early 1960s, and I have never been able truly to view them as a “home team,” despite substantial affection based on pure accidents of birth and upbringing—and some wonderful memories of going to Shea Stadium whenever Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers pitched against the Mets, and invariably won).
Memory, of course, is the ultimate trickster, but I do have a very clear impression that at least 50 percent of boy-talk between April and October in Queens focused on the fates of our three teams, with constant bets, threats, and bickerings about pennant races and World Series outcomes. I rooted for the Yanks and Giants. But I even managed to tolerate the Dodger fanaticism of some of my best friends.
The final point is simply this: All New York City boys of the late 1940s and early 1950s were baseball nuts, barring mental deficiency or incomprehensible idiosyncrasy. How could one not be? This decade was the greatest conjunction of quality and place that the game has ever known. Grossly unfair to the rest of the country, of course, but a fabulous piece of luck that made the “coming of age” for me and a million other New York kids ever so much easier—and what purely contingent blessing of ontogeny could be more precious?
REFLECTIONS AND EXPERIENCE
Streetball from a New York City Boyhood
I do understand the practical and sensible reasons behind such a profound change. But when I grew up on the streets of Queens in New York City, school ended at 3 P.M., and then, weather permitting, we went outdoors to play with our friends until our parents called us in for dinner at about 6 P.M. And, yes, most families did then eat dinner together, every single day—no TV allowed (we didn’t yet own one), no newspapers; just conversation.
My mother still lives in the same neighborhood, and nowadays no kid would venture outdoors alone. Children make “play dates” with their friends, and parental tracking has become ubiquitous. By contrast, and throughout the 1950s until we left for college in 1958, Roger Keen (still my best friend) and I played stickball or some other variety of baseball together practically every afternoon of our lives.
A lot of different games “erupted” each day in Fresh Meadows, our neighborhood of three-story garden apartments with adequate greenery separating the buildings, and with space aplenty on the streets (and few cars to hog all the potential parking spaces). We boys—and I must speak of “boy culture,” for very few girls ever ventured to inquire about joining us—played so many different games, many just one kid against another, others by teams always “democratically” selected by sequential choices of two designated captains. One did not want to be chosen last—and I still say thank God for Ira, wherever he may be now, the shortest kid in the neighborhood, and almost invariably the final selection; I usually got my assignment in the lower half, but not embarrassingly far down.
The point has been made many times, in this book and elsewhere, but the phenomenon really did define New York at the time. Throughout the 1940s, and until 1958 when New York City began a serious decline with the migration of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants to California, baseball virtually defined the joys of city life.
Almost all the neighborhood boychicks (about half Jewish and half Catholic in our vicinity of rising working-class families, “ruled” by fathers still recently returned from service in World War II) lived and breathed baseball all the time, for our city then boasted three truly great teams. Nearly all our street games—the main point of this chapter—applied baseball rules to the object of the contest. To this day, my memory remains tickled by the diversity that I can remember, and frustrated by the several versions beyond my recall.
I don’t mean to claim that we did nothing else but adapt our activities to the rules of baseball. For example, I was also an avid philatelist (particularly on rainy days), but I never really warmed up to the Lionel electric train set that my Uncle Milton insisted on giving me. A few outdoor games did not follow baseball conventions. I did enjoy my roller skates, and we did play touch football, but only in season. The big kids hogged the few basketball courts in the schoolyard, while adults took constant possession of the four handball courts. Indeed, in the weirdest “time warp” I have ever experienced, the same men have never yielded their ground. When my mother moved back to the old neighborhood about twenty years ago, I walked over to the schoolyard and found the very same men—not their sons and not their cousins—still presiding over the handball courts!
I remember only three street games not played by baseball rules, and only one of these held any interest for me. Some kids played marbles (I didn’t), or one of the various versions using bottle caps and known as skelley. Others played mumbledepeg (called “land” or “territory” in my neighborhood), but you needed a switchblade, or at least a pen knife. I owned neither and couldn’t have brought such an implement to school in any case.
Chinese handball enjoyed substantial vogue and was the single exception that captured my participation. As a key to spontaneous street games in major cities, one must acknowledge the two controlling variables: the nature of the projectile (the ball), and the geometry and distribution of sidewalk boxes. To play Chinese handball, you first need to put together a substantial and uninterrupted row of chalked boxes, all abutting a wall. Each player gets a box and the game proceeds as follows: using the canonical pink rubber ball (not always called a “spaldeen,” but more about this in a moment), a player hits t
he ball with his palm against the wall on a bounce. The ball must bounce into the chalked box of another player, who must then bounce it against the wall and into someone else’s box. Whenever a player fails to execute this maneuver properly, and his ball does not bounce clearly into another player’s box, then he has “lost” the round and must move down to possess the box at the end of the line, while all players below him move up a box. And so the game proceeds, until Mom calls you in for dinner. Really good players—not including yours truly, who never really got the hang of this particular activity—could hold onto their top boxes nearly forever.
Let’s get to those spaldeens. Yes indeed, those smooth, hollow, pink rubber balls made by the A. G. Spalding company were the sine qua non of boy play. Prices varied, but I remember ten or fifteen cents as the usual cost. And you never abandoned a ball until all potential utility had been extracted. Each was made as a two-piece mold with a full center seam. Eventually, the ball would split in half, and Roger and I played many a full stickball game with half a ball—either because the drug store was closed on weekends or because neither of us could get our allowances for another day or two.
Quite a bit has been written about New York streetball over the past two decades or so, and I have tried to follow the claims carefully. As usual in such circumstances, a few prominent errors emerge and then become entrenched by constant and mindless repetition. Let me then dispel the most prominent of these mistakes, citing as evidence no more than my own absolutely firm memories of Queens in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville Page 3