Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville Read online

  To be sure, very few kids owned a real bat (although we did play softball occasionally and some neighborhood kid would then turn up with a proper bat). Mom’s broom or mop handle served our daily needs, and stickball became the standard everyday game. Yes again, we always played stickball with that ubiquitous pink rubber projectile. But now consider the two errors. Most sources insist that the ball bore only one name—a “spaldeen.” Well, my Brooklyn friends did so designate the ball, but in my neighborhood we called it a “spalding,” with strong accent on the final syllable. (These variations, of course, record the same theme, for the balls, made by the A. G. Spalding company, carried the name embossed in black letters.)

  Second, the impression has grown that New York stickball followed one set of rules—played in the street, with sewers used as standards of distance (two for a double, four for a homer, for example). Well, I knew the sewer version, and my Brooklyn friends did play by these standards, but on my turf in Fresh Meadows we almost always played stickball by chalking a box (the strike zone) against a wall (usually of a store or an apartment building), and then pitching toward the batter and into the box, with prearranged distances counting for hits of various merit. Broken windows—not so rare, by the way—were automatic outs and usually the game’s end as well.

  New York City stickball, circa 1940s. Credit: Bettmann/Corbis

  While I cannot provide an exhaustive description of even the major forms of New York City street games played by baseball rules, let me at least briefly describe five major forms. Each occupied a distinctive role in our overall play.

  Punchball: the canonical “recess” game. In that blessed half hour or so of midmorning schoolyard recess, when the girls jumped rope and the teachers sat and smoked, the boys invariably gathered at the concretized baseball diamond to play the unvarnished “standard” form of baseball with a Spalding—punchball by our name. No pitching. The fielders of the opposing team took their positions and the “batters” of the other team then proceeded by throwing up the Spalding and punching it with their fist. Some kids threw the ball high and punched it overhand; most (including me) tossed it up a foot or two and punched it underhand. Pure baseball rules applied. No exceptions. (And you could often get in a three-to five-inning game during a full half hour of recess time.)

  Punchball truly held status (in my neighborhood at least, but not in other, even adjacent, turfs). It was the game we would play unless kids specifically called for another form. If we played by teams rather than twosomes after school, we “automatically” went to punchball, which required no equipment beyond the ball and a spontaneously laid-out field with bases.

  Just one (true) story illustrates the kid–grown-up issues that arose on a daily basis. Boys on first and second; no one out. The batter pops one high in the infield. I, playing third base, shout out “infield fly rule” and insist that the batter is automatically out. Most players have never heard of this “arcane” rule and dispute my claim (it didn’t really matter because I caught the pop-up in any case). We agreed, by standard custom, to ask the first adult man who passed by, and to abide by his judgment. Thank goodness. The gent turned out to be a knowledgeable fan who not only affirmed the existence of such a rule but even gave a well-wrought explanation for its necessity.

  By utter contrast, one summer at camp I got into an argument with a bunkmate about whether humans and dinosaurs had coexisted: me, already a budding paleontologist, in the correct negative; he, citing Alley-Oop, in the wrongly positive. We bet a candy bar and agreed to abide by parental opinion at the forthcoming weekend visitation. My parents were unable to come. His father affirmed that, of course, humans and dinosaurs had coexisted—just look at Alley-Oop—and I had to pay, Hershey’s chocolate with almonds. What can be more galling than absolutely to know you’re right but to have to submit anyway! I don’t remember the guy’s name, but I’ll murder him (something slow and painful like drawing and quartering comes to mind) if I ever find him.

  Stickball, the second “standard” form, either by pairs or by teams. Much is known about New York City stickball. The rookie Willie Mays worked on his game by playing stickball with neighborhood kids in Harlem, for example. I have little to add to the consensus, except to note the enormous variety of norms and styles. Each neighborhood, each tiny subdivision of each neighborhood, developed its own local customs.

  Stickball could be played by twos or by teams. Twosomes predominated on my turf, and I suspect that Roger and I logged more stickball hours during the 1950s than I spent in any other activity.

  As mentioned above, we pitched toward a chalked box on a wall and the batter flailed away. Distance determined the status of a hit. Caught pops and flies were outs, and cleanly fielded ground balls were also outs (probably the most common mode, along with strikeouts). We tried to play seven innings, but didn’t always have enough time for a full game. Roger, by the way, is a lefty—a great advantage in this forum (and I think he won about two-thirds of our games over the years). And, yes, it isn’t easy to hit a Spalding with a broomstick, but when you swing hard and catch the “sweet spot,” the ball really sails—up and away, often far enough to count as a home run.

  Stoopball, much of a muchness, but each a bit different. Baltimore may be the greatest American city for stoops, but New York owes no apologies to anyone. The garden apartment buildings of Fresh Meadows each have three entryways, each up a stoop of several concrete steps. Each stoop leads to nine apartments, three to a floor.

  Stoopball, usually played one to a side, works basically like stickball, with the Spalding as projectile, the status of a hit determined by distance, and the steps of the stoop as the analog for a bat. The “batter” throws the Spalding against a step and the fielder tries to catch the rebounding ball on the fly or ground.

  As almost every player knows, each step has a pronounced “sweet spot” located at the perpendicular intersection of the horizontal and vertical portions of the step. If a batter manages to hit this spot with his Spalding (called a “pointee” or a “pointer” on my turf), then the ball really flies—usually over the head of the fielder and often into home run territory. An extensive mythology surrounded the issue of whether anyone could figure out a way to hit the point of a step in some systematic way and at high probability. We all tried, but so far as I know, nobody ever succeeded.

  A boy playing stickball catches a ball thrown to home plate, represented here by the manhole cover. Credit: Ralph Morse/TIMEPIX

  As any kid will affirm, the chief fascination of stoopball lies in the fact that no two stoops are exactly alike, and that, consequently, each stoop generates its own unique and idiosyncratic set of rules. A little story in conclusion: I once dislocated my arm during a stoopball game as I crashed into the side rail of the stoop when I ran in to catch a pop-up. So, one day, I’m sitting on the stoop, arm in a sling, when the local beat cop—as big, tough, and Irish as any stereotype of the profession could possibly suggest—sidles up to me and simply says, thus suffusing me with immense pride: “How’s the other kid?”

  Boxball-baseball and using the sidewalk. We played a wide variety of games by hitting a Spalding between two or three sidewalk chalk boxes. One could, for example, put a penny on the crack, to be awarded to the first contestant who hits it with a Spalding.

  We called our local favorite “boxball-baseball” and played the game across three boxes, one belonging to each contestant, with the middle box neutral. The “pitcher” had to toss the Spalding into the neutral box, and the “batter” then had to slap the ball with the palm of his open hand into the pitcher’s box and hopefully far beyond on the subsequent bounce, with (just as in stickball and stoopball) the value of the hit determined by distance of the first bounce.

  Baseball cards before the full hegemony of capitalism. We had baseball cards in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. I even kept, while discarding all others, my favorite set of 1948 Bowman cards—black and white photos of players rather than Topps’s caricatures. My s
et is now worth several thousand dollars, but I’m not selling.

  Nothing amuses (or puzzles) a fan of my generation more than the current treatment of baseball cards as commodities of distinctive monetary value. I confess that I laugh every time I see a kid these days acquire a new card and immediately transfer it to a plastic binder, lest, God forbid, an edge should become frayed, thus destroying the pristine value.

  We collected cards, but never with a thought of money. We used them in a variety of games. You could stick them in the spokes of your bicycle wheel, where they made a pleasant whirring sound as you rode. But two utilities in real games predominated. First, we played flipping or matching. One contestant took a card and, from belt height, flipped it toward the ground, making sure that it turned several times on the way down. The other contestant then flipped his card—taking both if his matched the other in “heads” or “tails” of the final position, but losing both if his fell in the opposite orientation. Unlike the inability to hit pointers systematically in stoopball, a few neighborhood kids did learn—don’t ask me how, for I could never master the method—how to throw a heads or a tails almost every time.

  Second, we scaled them against a wall. In this paper version of “pitch pennies,” each contestant scales a card, and the card closest to the wall wins them all. I once had sixteen identical cards of Ewell Blackwell—a fine pitcher, but not the greatest—and lost every one of them in a scaling game!

  I could go on, but enough’s enough. We derived a great deal of enjoyment from these games. They also kept us out of trouble and away from girls. And what more could a boy have desired in preadolescence?

  The Babe’s Final Strike

  Tiny and insignificant reminders often provoke floods of memory. I have just read a little notice, tucked away on the sports pages: “Babe Pinelli, long-time major league umpire, died Monday at age 89 at a convalescent home near San Francisco.”

  What could be more elusive than perfection? And what would you rather be—the agent or the judge? Babe Pinelli played the role of chief umpire in baseball’s unique episode of perfection—a perfect game in the World Series. It was also his last official game as arbiter—October 8, 1956. Twenty-seven Dodgers up; twenty-seven Bums down. The catalyst was a competent but otherwise undistinguished Yankee pitcher, Don Larsen.

  First published as “The Strike That Was Low and Outside” in the New York Times, November 10, 1984. Reprinted with permission of the New York Times.

  The dramatic end was all Pinelli’s, and controversial ever since. Dale Mitchell, pinch hitting for Sal Maglie, was the twenty-seventh batter. With a count of one ball and two strikes, Larsen delivered a pitch low and outside—close, but surely not, by any technical definition, a strike.1 Mitchell let the pitch go by, but Pinelli didn’t hesitate. Up went the right arm for a called strike three. Out went Yogi Berra from behind the plate, nearly tackling Larsen in a frontal jump of joy.

  Don Larsen pitches the only perfect game in World Series history, leading the New York Yankees to victory over the Brooklyn Dodgers in game five on October 8, 1956. The Yankees ended up winning the Series in seven games. Credit: Bettmann/Corbis

  “Outside by a foot,” groused Mitchell later. He exaggerated, for it was outside by only a few inches, but he was right. Babe Pinelli, however, was even more right. A man may not take a close pitch with so much on the line. Context matters. Truth is a circumstance, not a spot.

  I was a junior at Jamaica High School. On that day, every teacher let us listen, even Mrs. B., our crusty old solid geometry teacher (and, I guess, a secret baseball fan). We reached Mrs. G., our even crustier French teacher, in the bottom of the seventh, and I was appointed to plead. “You gotta let us listen,” I said. “It’s never happened before.” “Young man,” she replied, “this class is a French class.”

  Luckily, I sat in the back just in front of Bob Hacker (remember alphabetical seating?), a rabid Dodger fan with earphone and portable radio. Halfway through the period, following Pinelli’s last strike, I felt a sepulchral tap and looked around. Hacker’s face was ashen. “He did it—that bastard did it.” I cheered loudly and threw my jacket high in the air. “Young man,” said Mrs. G. from the side board, “I’m sure the verb écrire can’t be that exciting.” It cost me ten points on my final grade, maybe admission to Harvard as well. I never experienced a moment of regret.

  Truth is inflexible. Truth is inviolable. By long and recognized custom, by any concept of justice, Dale Mitchell had to swing at anything close. It was a strike—a strike low and outside. Babe Pinelli, umpiring his last game, ended with his finest, his most perceptive, his most truthful moment. Babe Pinelli, arbiter of history, walked into the locker room and cried.

  The Best of Times, Almost

  Look, I’m a Yankee fan—have been since long before most of you were born. I have benefited from Boston’s suffering (most, after all, for Yankee gain) all my life. I reacted with boyish glee when, in 1949, Boston faced the Yanks one game up with two to go—and my guys won both for the pennant. And, although (honest to God) I didn’t want Yaz to make the last out by popping to third, I decided that Bucky Dent was the greatest living American one afternoon in early October 1978. The Red Sox, in other words, began as my mortal enemies.

  That is, until 1967, the year of the Impossible Dream, and my rookie season in the Harvard professoriat. I loved that pennant race and cheered Boston on (why not, the Yanks were out of it, and one of my New York heroes, Elston Howard, was catching for the Sox). For the first time in my life, I suffered with you through the seventh Series game—though the final result was inevitable (I mean nobody but nobody could beat Bob Gibson, not even Lonborg, especially on two days’ rest).

  First published in the Harvard Crimson, November 5, 1986.

  My affection for Boston crept slowly apace until it blossomed in 1975, and I began to understand Boston pain. I watched the sixth game of the Series from a hotel room in Salt Lake City (no beer, not even before the seventh inning), and exulted in Carlton Fisk’s homer with a glee unmatched since Bobby Thomson’s for the Giants in 1951. I also watched, from the same room, the next day as the Sox, in the finale, took a 3–0 lead into the sixth, and then blew it.

  This cocky Yankee fan, accustomed to victory as a rite of fall, began to understand the uniqueness—also depth—of Boston’s special pain. Not like Cubs pain (never to get there at all), or Phillies pain (lousy teams, but they did take it all)—but the deepest possible anguish of running a long and hard course, again and again, to the very end, and then self-destructing one inch from the finish line.

  Well folks, guess what? Call it shallow, fickle, or anything else you want. But this year I was with you all the way. The Yanks never had a real shot (and Steinbrenner does wear on you after a bit). Maybe you thought I would switch caps for the Series and start chanting “Let’s Go, Mets.” Not on your life. I’m a loyal New Yorker, to be sure, but the Mets are nothing to me. They didn’t exist when I was a kid, and loyalties are shaped by those early years of splendor in the grass and glory in the flower.

  I rooted for the Sox all the way, as hard and as diligently as I ever rooted in all my life (and spurred by my son Ethan, a Sox zealot too young to remember any previous postseason play).

  What can possibly be said? It’s a week later, and I’m still numb. To hell with the French Revolution; to hell with Dickens. This, not that, was the very best, and then the absolute worst, of times.

  When, a millimeter from final defeat (with the champagne already uncorked in the Angels’ dressing room), Dave Henderson hit that fifth-game homer, I reacted as I never had before. I didn’t cheer or jump; I wept—not a few tears stifled by the customs of manhood, but copiously. Then, alone again in a hotel room (this time in D.C.), I had to watch when Henderson, reaching for immortality, apparently won the Series with another homer in the tenth inning of game six, and, with two outs and nobody on, the Sox came—not once but four times—within a micron of taking it all, only to blow it once again.
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br />   The Mets’ scoreboard had already flashed “Congratulations Red Sox.” NBC had already named Marty Barrett player of the game, and Bruce Hurst the Series MVP. But the Sox knew better. They had peeled the aluminum off the champagne bottles, but they hadn’t popped the corks. You all know what the great Yogi Berra says about when it’s over—and when it ain’t.

  Yes, I do understand finally. I came to it late, but I do understand now. This was worse, more bitter than ever. A total self-immolation, by guys we love and admire—by Calvin Schiraldi, who got us there; Rich Gedman, who performed with such quiet efficiency; Bill Buckner, who, though hobbled, had fielded flawlessly. I even grieved for Bob Stanley (nine times out of ten, Gedman stops that ball, even though it must technically be ruled a wild pitch; and Stanley did what he was brought in to do—he got Mookie Wilson to hit an easily playable ground ball). Yes, this was much worse—worse than selling that great lefty pitcher named Ruth, worse than Pesky holding the ball in 1946, worse than facing the Gibson machine in 1967, worse than Joe Morgan in 1975, worse even than Bucky Dent and Yaz’s pop to third in 1978.

  What does it all mean? (We academics do have to ask that question after all.) I held and abandoned my hypotheses in this vein during postseason play. After Henderson’s resurrection in playoff game five, I actually dared to suggest that God was a Red Sox fan. After the most providential rain delay in recent sports history, between games six and seven of the Series, I decided that God cannot influence human actions, but still controls the weather. After the last game, I realized that He must hate the DH rule so much that He only favors the Sox within the American League. (I must, of course, now also entertain the possibility that either he doesn’t exist at all or doesn’t give a damn about baseball.) We are left alone with our pain.