“I want to play baseball,” I told Harry.
Harry said he’d be happy to play with me sometime.
“I want to play now.”
Harry said he couldn’t play then because he needed more sleep.
Three and a half hours later, Harry woke up again. I was still standing next to his bed, still ready to play. Harry got up, changed clothes, and took me outside to play baseball.
Some time later, Harry came to watch me in one of my youth-league games. Afterward, Harry hung around the park, and I wasn’t ready to go home yet.
“You want to catch a few fly balls?” Harry asked.
“Sure!” I said.
Harry took a fungo bat and started hitting pop-ups to me. He hit the flies progressively higher and higher, and I kept catching them. Harry was impressed.
“Why don’t you come out a little earlier tomorrow, and we’ll play some pepper,” Harry said. “I want to see you field ground balls.”
I was there the next day, eager to play. I wasn’t about to miss out on that invitation.
When we were a little older, Harry started coaching my team. He took a real interest in me, to the point that hardly a day went by during baseball season when we weren’t playing catch or fielding flies and grounders. When he had a job, he would meet me after work at the elementary school between our houses. We had a routine in which Harry would hit ground balls to me, and I would have to field one hundred in a row without missing one. If I made an error, Harry would start the count all over. If I reached one hundred, we would stop for the day.
The problem was, I didn’t want to stop for the day. I wanted to keep playing. So when the count reached into the nineties, I would miss a grounder on purpose.
It didn’t take long for Harry to catch on to my scheme. “I saw you do that,” he’d say. “But okay—one more time.” Then he would hit me one hundred more grounders.
I never got tired of playing baseball with Harry. Rain or shine, I was always up for our sessions together. When there was really bad weather and we couldn’t meet at the schoolyard, I would stay home, heartbroken.
I wasn’t the only player Harry helped, of course. Harry loved baseball and loved sharing his knowledge of the game with young players. But I always knew our particular baseball bond was special.
Together, Harry and my dad represented a proud and capable baseball-mentoring partnership for me. On the occasions when they would sit together at my games, I would look over at them from my spot on the field and feel so fortunate to have both of them there.
My dad was a great baseball dad. His quiet nature carried over to the ballpark. He often chose to sit alone and watch, sometimes in the left field bleachers away from everyone else. He wouldn’t yell or cheer or anything like that; he just quietly took note of me and the game. Afterward he would offer me a short, encouraging word—something like “Good game” or “You played well”—and that would be it. He didn’t criticize me or pick apart everything I had done, and he didn’t try to coach me when we got home. He believed that was the job of my coaches, and he wasn’t going to interfere with what they were doing.
Even though Dad didn’t say much, he said enough for me to never doubt that I had his full support. Harry also was a great encourager. When he corrected me—and all players need correction—he did it in a positive way. From when I first began watching Harry play American Legion ball, I understood that he knew what he was talking about, and I put complete trust in what he told me. If Harry said I needed to do something differently, I made the change.
After Harry completed high school, he was able to play semipro ball until he was drafted and spent two years in the service. I missed Harry when he was gone, but he stayed in touch through letters. Harry had a knack for knowing when I was in a batting slump or struggling in the field, and he always seemed to come up with just the encouraging word I needed.
When I reached the majors, I made sure Harry had opportunities to come watch some of my games. I wanted to do the same for my dad, but his emphysema had worsened to the point that he couldn’t travel very far. Harry would often come up to New York with his older brother—another fine baseball player who once led a lower-level minor league in batting average—and watch some of my games.
Harry looked like he could have been a major leaguer. When he was with me and other Yankees, he was frequently mistaken for a player. Always the prankster, Harry would just play along. A couple of times when someone asked who he was, he claimed to be Al Kaline, the famous Detroit Tigers outfielder.
After I retired, I invited Harry to go with me to New York for an Old Timers’ Game at Shea Stadium. I took Harry into the dugout with me during the game, and he sat next to Art Howe, who was then the manager of the Houston Astros. One of the hardest balls that ever came my way in an Old Timers’ Game was hit to me that day. There were runners on second and third, and the ball was hit on a line toward me so that the runners had to hold their places to see if I would catch the ball before it hit the dirt. I shuffled to my right and fielded the ball on a short hop, looked the runners back to their bases, and threw to first to retire the batter. It might have been the best play I made in the Old Timers’ Games.
Knowing who Harry was, Art looked over to him and said, “None of my players on the Astros could have made that play.” Then Art added, “I understand you taught him about baseball.”
That one statement from Art made Harry so proud. He couldn’t wait to tell me what Art had said, and he told me that story again many times over the years. Just that one moment on that bench with Art was worth the entire cost of taking Harry to New York for that game. I am so glad I had the means to pay for Harry to experience a taste of life in the majors. I’m sure he’d had his own major league dreams, and with all the time he devoted to working with young dreamers back home, he deserved to have a major league manager compliment his work.
When we won the pennant in 1960, I gave Harry my American League pennant ring. He wore that ring just about everywhere he went. “When did you play for the Yankees?” someone would ask him. “Well,” the jokester would answer, “it’s been a long time ago now. It seems like yesterday, but it’s been a long time.”
Harry wore that ring until he developed dementia late in his life. He didn’t have a son of his own to pass it along to, so his daughter, Sherri, graciously returned it to me so I could give it to my children.
I learned the fundamentals of baseball—and their importance—from Harry. Following his lead, I always took pride in my ability to make the routine plays. Every major leaguer can make those plays, but not everybody works on them as much as they should. It takes commitment and focus to recognize the importance of basic plays and to diligently practice them daily, even those plays we think we could make in our sleep.
Outside of my dad, Harry was the person who did the most to instill in me the belief that I could become a professional baseball player. “I feel like you can play,” Harry would tell me, “and one day you might even play for the Yankees.” It was largely due to Harry’s belief in me that in my junior year of high school, when the yearbook staff asked what I wanted to do when I grew up, I answered, “I’d like to play shortstop for the New York Yankees.”
Even after I had made it with the Yankees, Harry’s support helped me keep a positive outlook during the frustration of batting slumps. “Hey, listen, don’t get discouraged now,” Harry would write in a letter or tell me in a well-timed phone call. “Tomorrow is a new day, and I’m sure that it’s gonna work out fine.” Harry encouraged me like that throughout my career.
More than all that, Harry was a reliable friend. Harry loved to quail hunt. When my dad wasn’t physically strong enough to take me hunting, Harry did. Harry helped me get my own bird dogs, and every off-season, when I came home, we would go hunting together.
In the late 1960s, shortly after I had retired from baseball, my friend Billy Zeoli led Harry to the Lord in my house after watching a gospel film. I look forward to spending eterni
ty with my first baseball hero.
Every ballplayer needs a Harry Stokes in his life.
Come to think of it, every person needs a friend and mentor like Harry.
The Pride of the Yankees
My first close-up look at the Yankees came as a young boy when my dad took me and some of my friends to an exhibition game in nearby Columbia. A Yankees minor league team was playing against the Cincinnati Reds. Dad had been a shortstop in his playing days, and he encouraged me to study the play of the Yankees’ shortstop, Frank Crosetti.
Little did we know that one day I would play for the Yankees—even playing a few games at shortstop—or that Frank Crosetti would become one of my coaches.
My path to Yankee Stadium began as a catcher for a kids’ team sponsored by the Salvation Army. At tryouts, the other players were all bigger than me—that would be a theme throughout my career—and I wasn’t sure I could earn a spot on the team. But one thing I had that the others didn’t was the willingness to play catcher. The catcher’s equipment can become burdensome, especially in the hot and humid summertime. There is a good reason we used to call a catcher’s equipment “the tools of ignorance.” I didn’t mind wearing all that heavy gear and extra sweat, though. I just wanted to play baseball.
I continued to catch into the next level up, the Knee Pants League—a YMCA league similar to Little League. But I made the move to shortstop (and occasionally pitcher) before graduating out of that league. Shortstop and second base would be my primary positions all the way through the rest of my Sumter playing days.
As a freshman, I decided to go out for the high school team, but because I had qualified for and played in a basketball all-star game, I joined the tryouts about a week late. By then, there was only one roster spot left. It came down to me and another player who had also come out late—a catcher. A big catcher.
The coach picked the big catcher.
I jokingly told him, “You know why the coach kept you, don’t you?”
“No,” he said. “Why?”
“Because you’re big enough to roll the batting cage by yourself.”
That summer I did make the American Legion team—the Post-15 team, or the P-15s, as we were known—as a second baseman. That team included many members of the high school team I had failed to make a few months earlier.
Sumter has a storied history in American Legion ball, which first came to South Carolina in 1929. Post-15 fielded a team that year and every year since, making it the second-longest American Legion team fielded in the world. “Hutch” Hutchinson—the same coach who would fail to launch my football career—coached that team, and we won the state championship. We did it again in 1952, and the P-15s have now won a total of fourteen state titles. My two oldest sons also played for Sumter Post-15.
A key moment for me came after we won our first state championship and advanced to the southeast regionals in Charlotte, North Carolina. We were scheduled to play a team from Richmond, Virginia, in the championship game. But before the game, our team went downtown to see a movie that would help determine the course of my life.
The film that was showing was The Pride of the Yankees. Babe Ruth played himself in that film. So did catcher Bill Dickey, who would be one of my hitting coaches with the Yankees. And Gary Cooper starred as Yankees legendary first baseman Lou Gehrig, who played in 2,130 consecutive games to set a major league record that stood from 1939 until 1995, when Cal Ripken Jr. broke the mark. A year before The Pride of the Yankees was released in 1942, Gehrig had died from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which became known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
The movie helped popularize a line from Gehrig’s farewell address at Yankee Stadium on the Fourth of July during the 1939 season: “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” Gehrig actually spoke those words early in his address, but in the movie they were moved to the end of his speech for dramatic effect. That editing move certainly worked on me. By the time Gehrig’s emotional words famously echoed throughout the Stadium—“Today (today, today) . . . I consider myself (self, self) . . .”—I was sold. I wanted to play for the New York Yankees.
I was drawn into the story line by how classy Gehrig was. I also related to the fact that his mother had wanted him to be anything other than a baseball player. Sometimes I thought my mother felt that way too, so I was glad to see baseball had turned out so well for Gehrig. Watching him and his teammates on the train trips during the movie, I envisioned the Yankees as a baseball family. I’d like to be a part of that, I thought to myself.
Unfortunately, the movie didn’t have the desired effect on the field for our P-15s. In front of a couple thousand fans from Sumter who had driven up to Charlotte to root for us, we lost the regional championship by one run. That was the day I received my first taste of how bitter losing can be.
The score was tied at 3 in the eighth inning when a hard grounder was hit to our shortstop. The shortstop tossed the ball to me at second base, and I turned and threw to first for what should have been a double play. The umpire, however, ruled that I failed to touch second base for the force play, and he called the runner there safe. That runner wound up scoring the game’s deciding run.
I knew I had touched the bag and the umpire had missed the call. But I still felt I was the reason our team had lost and would not advance to the American Legion World Series in Omaha, Nebraska. I’ll never forget how hard I took that loss and how responsible I felt. In my mind, I had let down not only my teammates but also the two thousand fans who had made the trip to Charlotte, plus everyone back home awaiting the result of our game.
I told my dad that I really had touched second base, and Dad wrapped his arm around me. The man of few words again said little, but I can hear his words still to this day: “I know, Son. You’ve never lied to me.”
That helped. So did the words of Spud Chandler, who walked up to me after the game and introduced himself as a scout for the Yankees. He explained that major league rules prevented a scout from recruiting a prospective player until he had finished high school. (Major League Baseball would not begin its amateur draft until 1965, so at the time prospects were free to sign with any team they chose.) Chandler said he would be back in touch with me when I graduated and asked me to remember his name.
I assured him I would, and I’ll tell you, his was one of the easiest names I’ve ever had to remember. That short visit thrilled me and my dad. I couldn’t believe it—a real-life major league scout liked the way I played.
And he wasn’t just any scout. He was a scout with Lou Gehrig’s New York Yankees!
An Easy Decision
In my sophomore year in high school, with a new coach in charge of the team, I made the Edmunds High Gamecocks as the starting second baseman. That turned out to be a busy spring for me. Not only was school in session and high school baseball in full swing, but the Norfolk Tars, a Yankees Class-B farm team in the Piedmont League, had come to Sumter for spring training. I took advantage of every opportunity I had to watch how those minor leaguers went about the business of preparing for their season. I particularly remember watching an outfielder named Bill Skowron work out with the Tars. That player would later become a first baseman more commonly known as Moose—a Yankees teammate of mine for eight seasons.
Mayo Smith was the Norfolk manager, and after the high school season, when I was back on the Post-15 team and playing shortstop, he and the Tars general manager, H. P. Dawson, would come to watch some of our games. Our team had a big, left-handed first baseman with a powerful bat who also handled himself gracefully around the first base bag. He was one of the best players ever to come through Sumter, and most, if not all, of the major league teams were taking a look at him that summer.
Back in junior high, whenever that guy came to the plate during our recess softball games, I would go stand right in front of our deep outfield fence. Sometimes the ball would fly over my head and out of our schoolyard park, but much of the time I would catch his long drives just
short of the fence. He possessed amazing power even at a young age, with defensive ability to match. Sadly, he never signed with a team. A tough home life prevented him from reaching his baseball potential. I still wonder what he could have developed into as a baseball player.
Although the Tars manager and general manager were there to scout our first baseman, they noticed me, too. Mr. Smith came up to me after one game and said that when I graduated from high school, he would make sure that I had a chance to sign with the Yankees. So now I had two Yankees representatives saying the Yankees would want to sign me!
Immediately after my talk with Mr. Smith, the Yankees began mailing me literature about their team and organization. Based on what I read, I picked out their shortstop, Phil Rizzuto, as my favorite player. Rizzuto had been selected the Most Valuable Player of the American League in 1950, and he was a shortstop like I wanted to be. Actually, he was the shortstop I wanted to be. Defensively, he was about as good with the glove as a shortstop could hope to become. Scooter, as he was called, also wasn’t very big—only about five feet six and 150 pounds or so. Because of his size, he wasn’t a power hitter, and to make it in the major leagues he had to be excellent with the bat—adept at detailed skills such as bunting and moving runners with the hit-and-run.
The next year of American Legion ball, after my junior season of high school baseball, I was invited by the new Norfolk Tars manager, Mickey Owen, to work out with the team during its training in Sumter. I also got more attention from scouts. In all, scouts from twelve of the sixteen major league teams said they wanted to sign me when I graduated. But my heart was set on the Yankees. One Yankees scout didn’t like my size—I was five feet eight and 158 pounds—and questioned whether my arm was strong enough for me to play shortstop at the major league level. I had heard similar concerns from a few others within the Yankees organization, but Mr. Dawson believed in my abilities enough to visit with my dad and make plans for the Yankees to sign me the day of my high school graduation.
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