Seriously, this is not happening?!

The Braves lost.  Cards are tied in extra innings.  Is it time to go crucify a goat or something?  I mean really.

Three Games for the Wildcard

Thanks for nothing Cubs.  Now we sweep the best team in baseball.

The Braves go to Philly and the Cards go to Houston.  Three games remaining, one game lead.

Note to My Cardinals Fans

Kyle Lohse outpitched Roy Halladay as the Cards beat the Phillies on Monday night to pull the Cards within two-and-a-half games of the Wildcard. The Braves, with both aces Jair Jar-Jar Jurrjens and Tommy Gun Hanson on the DL, are fading faster than a summer tide. The Braves's magic number is 7. This is starting to become painful to watch. Excruciatingly nerve-racking, like watching a bull that's already been slain fight to the bitter end as the evil crowd cheers. I still believe, but damn. If we hold ya'll off, it's looking like it might have to be without two of the best pitchers in the N.L. Not good.

As always, I remind you that I love the Cards, and if it has to be anyone to do it, I want it to be them. So just keep that in mind as you're gloating like a horny goat. I'll buy the damn Moylan's Kilt-lifter Scotch-style ale for you if you win, and I'll watch you drink it. (I made a stupid bet with my tennis team captain.) And I'll cheer for your boys to go all the way if it happens.

But if the Braves eek it out, and they get the Gun and Jar-Jar back, we could make a run that we'll all remember for the rest of our lives. Chipper Jones, bottom of the 9th, Game 7 of the World Series, on one leg a la Kirk Gibson, cue The Natural soundtrack, bases loaded, down by 3...

Go Braves!!!!

What Every Little Boy Knows

Because of baseball.

A beautifully written, neat little essay by T.R. Heally: "Chin Music"

My recommended reading for the month of September. (See sidebar.)

Slow Trains and Baseball

If you haven't figured it out yet, I like thinking about baseball, talking about baseball, reading about baseball, writing about baseball, watching baseball, playing fantasy baseball, and pitching Wiffle balls to my 3 year old. (He hit one over the carriage house into the alley the other day.) I've written numerous posts on Dirt Bombs about baseball. I "collect" and devour baseball scenes from fiction and poetry--even ones that are bad. I'm just a sucker for them. (My favorite baseball scene is probably in The Old Man and the Sea, and Don DeLillo's Underworld also has some great baseball writing.)

A while back, I found a literary journal that has a whole section of baseball stories. I haven't read it in a long time so when my fantasy baseball season ended suddenly and unexpectedly without making the playoffs--my boys just folded in the final week of the season and lost the last playoff spot by one game--there was a deep void in my life. I've had to find other ways to get my baseball fix. If you're like me, you'll love Slow Trains's section "On Baseball." The stories, some good and some bad, are amazing. Check it out and let me know what you think.

And if you know of any other stuff like this, please, LET ME KNOW about it. I love this stuff!

Ernie Johnson, Sr.

Ernie Johnson passed away Friday night. I grew up listening to Skip and him on the radio and on TBS. If a game was televised nationally, we'd often turn down the volume on the television and listen to the radio. Dad and I would get so tickled at 'dem boys sometimes.

After serving 3 years in the U.S. Marine Corps, Ernie pitched, primarily as a reliever, for the Boston Braves, the Milwaukee Braves, and then with the Baltimore Orioles during the 50's. He went 7-3 and had 4 saves for the World Series Champion Braves in 1957. Ernie went on to become a legendary play-by-play announcer and color commentator for the Atlanta Braves from 1962-1999.

I'd like to think that he and Skip are hanging out and catching up at this very moment--in the big broadcast booth in the sky. Maybe they'll get to call the World Series this year for God and all His angels.

If I were to draw up a list of the most influential men in my life, he'd be on it.

The Iron Horse: Lou Gehrig's Farewell Speech

For the last two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.

Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn't consider it a highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure, I'm lucky. Who wouldn't have considered it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball's greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I'm lucky.

When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice-versa, sends you a gift--that's something! When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies--that's something! When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter--that's something! When you have a father and mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body--it's a blessing! When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you knew existed--that's the finest I know!

Gehrig died within a year of his retirement from baseball. His speech, one of the finest I know, was pieced together using first hand accounts, brief audio clips and video footage, notes that people scribbled down on the spot. The fans and writers who were sitting in the stands, in attendance on that glorious day, heard what Gehrig said and passed it along.

This is the stuff myths are made of.

Not Charlie Brown Too!

#7 Mickey Mantle

Mickey Mantle is Big J's all-time favorite ballplayer.  When he was growing up in Columbia, a young boy, there weren't any professional baseball teams west of Chicago and St. Louis, and there were none at all in the South.  Papa, Perky, Big J, and Uncle L didn't get their first TV until about 1953 or 1954.  That was while they lived on Denny Road in Columbia.  Big J said, "Believe it or not there was only one televised game a week, creatively called The Game of the Week by CBS."  Papa and Big J started watching the game together, and since the Yankees were the dominant team in the land, the televised game usually turned out to be the Yankees versus whoever they were playing that day.  They watched Mantle, Maris, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, their home-state boy Bobby Richardson from Sumter, and manager Casey Stengel every time they were on TV.  

Big J wrote about some of the highlights of the new, televised games:  

The broadcasters for The Game of the Week were Pee Wee Reese and Dizzy Dean.  Often when the game was slow (or truth be told, most of the time), by the late innings, Old Diz had drunk one-too-many Falstaffs.  One time, the TV camera panned over into the right field bleachers where the crowd was sparse and showed a young man and young woman really going to it.  Dizzy's all-time great Falstaff-inspired line was, 'Ah, look out yonda in the bleachers.  A couple of youngsters having fun out at the old ballpark this afternoon.  It appears as if he's kissing her on the strikes, and she's kissing him on the balls.'  There was a blacked-out silence for two or three minutes while the booth got their composure back.

The summer after Big J's high school graduation, Papa won a trip to the Provident national convention in New York City for selling a lot of insurance.  He took the whole family along.  They stayed in a big, fancy hotel.  The popular band, The Herman Hermits, was staying in the same hotel so there were screaming groupie girls running around everywhere.  They took a Gray Line boat tour that week up the East River, under the Brooklyn Bridge, turned onto the Harlem River going north, came out on the Hudson, and followed the whole western length of Manhattan going south back down to The Battery.  The 1964 New York World's Fair was also going on at the same time at Flushing Meadows in Queens.  The family spent a whole day there.  

The city had constructed a brand new stadium on the fairgrounds, Shea Stadium, which was the first of the monstrous, multi-purpose, cookie-cutter stadiums built for football and baseball, concerts and other entertainment events.  There happened to be a game that day between the new New York Mets and the San Francisco Giants.  Many New Yorkers were still bitter because the Giants had moved to the West Coast from New York along with the Brooklyn Dodgers.  It was practically a home game for the visiting Giants.  That day, Papa, Perky, Big J, and Uncle L sat in the third deck of the new stadium and watched Gaylord Perry, a country boy from North Carolina, pitch for the visiting Giants.  It was a muggy summer day and Perry was soaked by the end of the first inning, sweat streaming off of his chin.   Willie Mays hit the game winning home run for the Giants, and the crowd went went wild.      

   

There is something that I want for you to know about Big J and me, and I want for you to understand it plainly.  We were both born and raised in the Deep South, not only physically, but also ideologically.  Our childhoods were very different from yours.  South Carolina has never been a friendly place for black folks.  Your ancestors were slave owners.  We have family documents officially freeing the slaves years after Lincoln's "Emancipation Proclamation."  Schools and busses and restaurants and water fountains were segregated while Big J was growing up.  When he was a boy, he said it was common for pranksters to ride through "Niggertown" in their cars throwing rotten apples at people in their yards.  While I was a boy in Camden, I went to an integrated school, but there was a deep divide between whites and blacks.  Train tracks literally cut Camden into two distinct communities.  South of the tracks, there was extreme poverty.  As I grew older and started to drive, I would secretly explore streets most whites never dared to drive.  Sad images are stuck in my mind of dilapidated shanties, weathered and oppressed men and women sitting on their porches in the severe heat of summer afternoons.  North of the tracks, there were beautiful, shady, oak-lined avenues, horse-drawn carriages in the streets, marvelous marble-columned colonial houses with four-foot high slave entrances in the back--dark tunnels that led into the kitchens.  I heard racist jokes on a regular basis.  I laughed at them.  I even learned to tell them by the time I was 13 or 14.  I used the "N word" on a regular basis for a few years, and I believed that I was part of a superior race of human beings.  I only tell you this because I want for you to know.  I want you to know how far we have come.  You see it now.  People can change, R.L.

Sometimes when Big J talks about Mickey Mantle now, there is a tinge of regret in his voice--just sometimes.  Now, when he speaks of Mantle, he often points out that one of the biggest baseball questions of the day was whether Mantle or Mays was the better player of the era.  According to the numbers, it's obvious that Mays was the better of the two, but many whites at the time couldn't see past the contrasting colors of their skins.  Mantle was a good ol' country boy from Oklahoma with a million dollar smile.  He appeared to be the All-American kid.  The TV camera loved him.  But Mays was another black boy, born into a working class family in Alabama, trying to break into the white man's world.  A lot of people resented Mays and lauded Mantle as a heroic baseball god.  Period.  No matter that Mantle was a womanizing alcoholic in real life who showed up to as many games hung over or drunk throughout his career as he did sober.  I would not understand this side of the Mantle vs. Mays question if Big J had not explained it to me, and I am grateful to him for being so reverend in his honesty about the subject matter.  His anomalous transformation from a typical, racist South Carolina boy to the all-inclusive, accepting, and loving man that he is today is heartening.  

Regardless of all that ugly stuff, Mickey Mantle was a fabulous ballplayer.  There's no telling what he might have done if he hadn't torn up his knee in a stupid drain grate out in center field at Yankee Stadium during the 1951 World Series. 

#7 Mickey Mantle.  5-11.  198.  Throws right.  Switch hitter.  Outfield.  Hall of Fame.  536 career HR's.  Mantle was the greatest switch hitter ever.  A real legend of the diamond.      

   

#36 Robin Roberts

When Big J was a boy, Papa and Perky gave him a weekly allowance of 25 cents.  He started his Brae Springs Train Fare Fund with that money, and over a period of several years, he saved up the $17 or $20 necessary to purchase a train ticket from Columbia, South Carolina to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to visit your great, great grandparents, Lee Leslie MacLellan (Dad Mac) and Irma Baker MacLellan (Mom Mac) at their home in Bethlehem, PA.  (I met Mom Mac several times when I was very young.  I called her Mom-mom.)  When Big J was 9, he purchased the ticket, Perky and Papa put him on a train in Columbia, and he made the trip up the East Coast all by himself.  At a changeover in Richmond Perky's sister, Aunt Sally, met him for a hug and a snack.  Then Dad Mac picked up Big J in Philadelphia when he arrived and drove him back to Bethlehem to their home, Brae Springs.

That week, Dad Mac and Mom-mom paraded their first grandson all over town.  Big J went to work with Dad Mac.  He and and his brother, Uncle Alden, owned Plymouth car dealerships in Bethlehem and Allentown.  They visited the Bethlehem Steel Company farm, the owners of which were Dad Mac's and Mom-mom's good friends, to see their champion Labrador Retrievers straight from Scotland--one of the original Lab bloodlines to come to the United States.  They frequented the storied Saucon Valley Country Club where Dad Mac and Mom-mom golfed and socialized with Pennsylvania's educated elite.  And Dad Mac took Big J to his first professional baseball game in Philadelphia to see the Phillies and the Chicago Cubs.

The game was at Connie Mack Stadium (formerly Shibe Park), by that time a decrepit old place.  Big J called it a "barn,"  even though when it was built in 1909 it had been America's first concrete and steel stadium.  He said he sat behind a post because "there weren't many seats in Connie Mack that weren't behind posts.  You were lucky if you didn't get a splinter in your ass, too! [from the weathered wooden benches]"  That ballpark witnessed 7 World Series and 2 All-Star Games and was the site of the first night game in the history of professional baseball.  Your Dad Mac and Big J watched the great Philly pitcher, Robin Roberts, defeat the Cubs 3-1.  The only run he allowed was a solo home run off the bat of Cub-great, Hall of Famer, Ernie Banks.  Your grandfather said he left the stadium "thrilled cause our team had won."

#36 Robin Roberts.  6-00, 190.  Throws right.  Switch hitter.  The Phillies' greatest right-handed pitcher ever.  In his 19 year, Hall of Fame career, he won 287 games and had an ERA of 3.41.  The game's toughest pitcher for most of the 50's, he had 6 consecutive 20 win seasons.  He worked with a great fastball and incredible control.  He challenged hitters, keeping the ball over the plate, so he gave up some runs.  Roberts claimed that he never slept after a loss.  He'd watch the sunrise, the pitches, hits, and runs playing out over and over in his mind.  Critics say he hung on a little too long.  The end of the career was rough.  Several seasons of lack-luster ball hurt his stats, but there aren't many folks around who don't believe he was one of the great right-handed pitchers of all-time.  Big J is convinced.

#8 Carl Yastrzemski

In the summer of 1982 I was nine.  I had just finished fourth grade at Bradley Elementary School in Columbia, and my best friends were classmates named Tucker and Rob.  

A typical day in 4th grade was pretty dang cool from what I can remember.  I was one of the older kids in the K-5 school.  A proud Bradley Bee. Big J was the President of the PTA.  I had one of my favorite teachers ever, Mrs. Vaughn.  I wore cowboy boots.  I had a crush on a cutie named Lela, and she even had the same last name as me.  Everywhere we went at school, we were together.  While I sat in class, stood in lines, was pictured in yearbooks or checked for lice, she was there.  But the best part was that Tucker, Rob, and I rode our BMX bikes to school rain or shine.  When the bell would ring at the end of the day, we'd race out to the bike racks and tear outta the parking lot like a three-car bullet train and run a course that we had carefully plotted at recess.  The route varied from day to day but always included several distinct obstacles.  One was a long stretch by a chain-link fence with a barking Husky with one brown eye and one blue eye.  One was a ramp in the sidewalk where a water main had busted and a city work crew had torn up the sidewalk into a perfect launching pad.  The last was a wash in the street that collected loose, fine Carolina sand.  After landing the jump clean, we'd stand on the pedals, bikes violently thrashing back and forth beneath us, and in the middle of the wash, slam on the brakes for a big, long skid mark in the sand and at the end sling the back tire around to a perfect perpendicular stop right in front of Lela's house.  We'd wave and then coast on down Dalloz Road to the house for a pick-up baseball game in Scott and Chuck's backyard or turns on the ski rope swing Dad had built us in the oak tree whose limbs reached out over the street from our sloping front yard.  Although we lived in the city, I had free rein on the whole area surrounding our neighborhood.  My home range on bicycle or skateboard was a 2 or 3 mile radius from my house in any direction by the time I was 9.  As long as I checked in every now and then.

That summer, Tucker invited Rob and me to visit his grandparents at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.  Rob spent summers at his dad's so he couldn't go.  But for two weeks, Tucker and his family showed me one of the best times of my life to this day.  Their place was on the ocean and they had a boat and a floating dock about a quarter-mile out in front of their house.  We'd swim out to the dock in the mornings and do flips off the diving board and go for rides on the boat.  His aunt was a college student, and she liked to skinny dip in the sea.  Didn't even care if her own parents were watching.  Hell, I think all of em did it at one time or another come to think of it.  The highlight of the trip though was a trip into Boston for a Red Sox game.  We sat directly behind home plate about ten rows up in the shade, and the sun shone on the Green Monster of Fenway.  We could here the players talking, see into the dugouts on both sides, practically smell the pine tar.  Before the game, we went behind each of the team's dugouts with our gloves to solicit autographs.  Don Sutton was pitching for the Brewers that day and when Tucker asked him for his autograph as Sutton descended into the dugout after warm-ups, he said something like, "No time kid but have this."  And he flipped him the ball he had thrown his warm-up pitches with.  Tucker stood stunned and stared at the ball for the rest of the game.  I ran over behind the Sox dugout determined to get my own souvenir, and I did, but it wasn't a ball or an autograph.  Yaz spoke to me for a second.  He has been one of my favorite ball players ever since.  

#8 Carl Yastrzemski.  5-11, 182.  Bats left.  Throws right.  CF, LF, 1B, 3B.  Second-best Red Sox player of all-time behind Ted Williams.  452 career home runs.  In his Hall of Fame induction, he told his fans and peers, "I can stand before you today and tell you honestly that every day I put on that Red Sox uniform I gave a hundred percent of myself for my own.  I treated it with dignity and respect in deference to our fans.  A high regard for my teamates, coaches, and management.  Anything less would not have been worthy of me.  Anything more would not have been possible."  I didn't get to watch much of his career.  He retired the next season in 1983.  And I don't remember what he said to me exactly, but in my imagination, it goes like this: "Where you from kid?  That's a long way away.  Listen.  You don't always make an out.  Sometimes the pitcher gets you out."     

#3 Dale Murphy

Big J moved your grandmother and me from Chattanooga, TN back home to Columbia in 1977 to work with Papa in the Family business.  Your grandparents had lived all over the country while he was on active duty in the Navy, and after I was born they were ready to settle down for a while.  When Aunt M.C. was born in '78, Big J converted a big, screened-in porch on the back of the new house on Dalloz Rd. into a family room and rewarded himself and the family with a new, color TV and cable service.  The year was 1981, and I was eight.

That season, Dad and I started watching TBS games, and manager Bobby Cox moved a struggling catcher named Dale Murphy into center field.  Murphy had a great bat, but his confidence (and 6 foot 5 knees) had suffered as a catcher.  Dad said Murph led the league in "throwing out center field." In 1982, Joe Torre took over Cox's team, named Bob Gibson as his pitching coach, and they won the division.  That's the year Dad took me to my first game so I could see Murph hit a homer in person.  I remember it well.  Several friends and I were begging to go so he loaded us up in our Datsun stationwagon and took every kid in the neighborhood.  We lugged our entire baseball card collections and gloves along to get autographed.  At The Varsity restaurant in Atlanta, it became apparent that the game against the Mets was gonna be rained out.  So we headed on out and toured Fulton County Stadium in the rain and then drove home to Columbia in the middle of the night.   From 1982-1987, Dale Murphy hit between 36 and 44 HRs a season and was named to the NL All-Star team every year.  Dad watched all the games in his new family room on his new color TV with his new cable service, and I missed fewer and fewer the older I grew. I owe a great deal of my love for baseball to Dale Murphy, my first hero.  It seemed like every time I saw him at bat, he hit it over the fence.  I practiced his pigeon-toed batting stance and unique bat-waggle in backyard pickup games with neighbors Scott and Chuck, T.W., and R.S.  We played two on two, taking turns at all-time pitcher. 

#3 Dale Murphy. 6'5", 215.  Bats right.  Throws right.  Center Field.  Murph was a natural lefty, but his folks made him learn to hit and field right-handed.  Dale Murphy was best known in baseball for being Mr. Clean.  He didn't drink, smoke, or cuss--or use steroids as they gained prominence in the league.  With a .265 career batting average and 398 HRs, he's not a Hall of Famer--yet, but he'll always be one of the best in my book.  Seven-time All-Star. Twice voted the NL MVP. Best player in the 80's?  Great human being on and off the field.  If only-if only he coulda laid-off the curve ball down and away...   

--MJF

#44 Hank Aaron

This series is dedicated to R.L. for your first birthday.

Kshof took me to my first baseball card show yesterday.  Several tables set up with striking sports memorabilia.  Cards, coins, pictures, balls, autographs, jerseys and the like.   I was looking specifically for a Chipper Jones rookie card for R.L.'s first birthday, and Kshof found one for us, professionally graded and encased, preserved forever.  Larry "Chipper" Jones is my favorite baseball player of all-time.  

It got me to thinking.  My personal standards for greatness have a lot to do with the baseball players that I watched and/or heard about growing up.  Baseball was paramount in the "F"amily home.  Longtime Braves voices Skip Caray, Ernie Johnson, Pete van Wieren, and Don Sutton helped Dad raise me.  From the day that he subscribed to cable TV in Columbia, through my Camden High School and Mars Hill College summers, until the day that H and I left for Arkansas, we watched more TBS-televised Braves games than we missed.  We were dazzled by Phil Niekro knuckle balls and Dale Murphy home runs.  We saw Glavine and Smoltz and Maddux pitch most of their games in Braves uniforms.  He would fall asleep upside-down in the lazyboy and snore, and I would sneak upstairs usually about the eighth inning unless there was a chance for a complete game or a save.  He tried to take me to games in Fulton County Stadium every so often too.  We'd stop at The Varsity on the way into town and then go to the game wearing baseball gloves and binoculars and listening to Skip on headphones,and we'd eat boiled peanuts and hot dogs.  He got a smile out of Chipper once with his booming game-voice.  We were sitting in right field, and Chipper was warming up out there, playing catch with Deion Sanders and "Crime Dog" Fred McGriff.  Then, he'd drive us home safely while I slept, east into the early-morning Carolina summer air.  My buddies and I danced in the halls of the dormitory when Smoltz shut out the Pirates in Game 7 of the NLCS in '91 to go from worst to first in the National League.  He was the first person I called.  We couldn't even talk over all the ruckus.  That started a run of fourteen consecutive division championships for our Braves, the most stunning feat in the history of sports if you ask us.  We had watched the whole thing develop from the ground up, across two decades, and that's how we learned to communicate with one another, and it's how we became best friends.  We still attend games almost every year at Turner Field.  My standards for greatness stretch beyond Atlanta Braves.  Dad taught me about lots of players and teams.

Today I'm starting a series on greatness through baseball based on the Family way.  Things I learned from Dad and Skip and Ernie.  

#44 Hank Aaron.  We have to begin with him.  6', 180.  Bats right.  Throws right.  Right field. Best Brave of all-time.  Purest power hitter ever.  Under-appreciated as a fielder.  Humble.  Determined.  Serious and often silent ambassador.  He got to where he was with talent and hard work, not performance-enhancing equipment or drugs.  Hand-eye coordination and strong wrists.  755.  A complete man, R.L.

--MJF

  

These are a few of my favorite things

from The Old Man and the Sea

by Ernest Hemingway

"Your stew is excellent," the old man said.

"Tell me about baseball," the boy asked him.

"In the American League it is the Yankees as I said," the old man said happily.

"They lost today," the boy told him.

"That means nothing, the great DiMaggio is himself again."

"They have other men on the team."

"Naturally. But he makes the difference.  In the other league, between Brooklyn and Philadelphia I must take Brooklyn.  But then I think of Dick Sisler and those great drives in the old park."

"There was nothing ever like them.  He hits the longest ball I have ever seen."

"Do you remember when he used to come to the Terrace?"

"I wanted to take him fishing but I was too timid to ask him.  Then I asked you to ask him and you were too timid."

"I know.  It was a great mistake.  He might have gone with us.  Then we would have that for all our lives.

"I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing," the old man said.  "They say his father was a fisherman.  Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand."

"The great Sisler's father was never poor and he, the father, was playing in the Big Leagues when he was my age."

"When I was your age I was before the mast on a square rigged ship that ran to Africa and I have seen the lions on the beaches in the evening."

"I know.  You told me."

"Should we talk about Africa or about baseball?"

"Baseball I think," the boy said.  "Tell me about the great John J. McGraw."  He said jota for J.

"He used to come to the Terrace sometimes too in the older days.  But he was rough and harsh-spoken and difficult when he was drinking.  His mind was on horses as well as baseball. At least he carried lists of horses at all times in his pocket and frequently spoke the names of horses on the telephone."

"He was a great manager," the boy said.  "My father thinks he was the greatest."

"Because he came here the most times," the old man said.  "If Durocher had continued to come here each year, your father would think him the greatest manager."

"Who is the greatest manager, really, Luque or Mike Gonzalez?"

"I think they are equal."

"And the best fisherman is you."

"No.  I know others better."

--MJF