All of us baseball fans out here in cyber-space are pumped because pitchers and catchers have reported to spring training sites in Florida and Arizona and, in just a matter of a couple days, the position players will join them and our American Pastime will be in full swing.  I would now like to reminisce over some special times I have had with the game in my lifetime.  I first discovered a board game called APBA Baseball with my boyhood friend Bill Oxner when we were in junior high school.  It was like a built-in way of discovering players who had come and gone before we ever hitched a ride on this watery little planet.  Bill and I learned the history of the game by playing with teams like the 1927 New York Yankees, the 1934 “Gashouse Gang” Saint Louis Cardinals, and the 1955 “Boys of Summer” Brooklyn Dodgers. 

Bill and I began a joint subscription to The Sporting News in 1959, and the time had arrived for us to pick out our favorite current teams.  I picked the New York Yankees, and Bill opted for the Los Angeles Dodgers.  Those two teams were certainly worthy of young boys’ adoration, and The Sporting News was certainly “The Bible of Baseball” back then, it covered no other sports but baseball.  It arrived every Saturday in the mail, and you could see box scores of every game for every team, from low minor affiliates right up to their major league teams.  It was a different era; only one game per week was on the television, on Saturday afternoons.  The rest of the time you had to listen to games on the radio at night.  I had a high powered shortwave radio to pick up the mighty clear channel AM stations at night that broadcast games across the country.  The next morning when you awoke,  you could see the box scores in the local newspaper.

Bill and I listened to the entire 1960 World Series while attending Amphitheater Junior High in Tucson, that is except for one weekday game that my mom, realizing just how much it meant to me, let me ditch school to stay home and watch.  I can still remember hiding in a closet at the back of my shop class and hearing when Bill Mazeroski hit that “walk off” homerun in the bottom of the 9^th to beat the Yankees in game 7.  I learned the agony of defeat in that Series.  By the way, “walk off homerun” did not enter baseball vocabulary until many decades later.

I went to high school and college in Houston, Texas and I finally lived in a city that had major league team, the Houston Colt 45’s/Astros, and they soon became my favorite team.   I hitch-hiked to a game one day in April to watch the Colt 45’s play the Cincinnati Reds in the Astrodome (then called the Harris County Dome I believe).   I sat in the left field bleachers close to the field, and before the game I got my nerve up to speak to Pete Rose, who was shagging balls.  I asked him why he was playing left field when he had been named Rookie of the Year just a couple of years earlier playing 2^nd base.  He asked my name.

“Harvey”, I said.  “Well Harvey, I have never played catcher before and if they told me that was the only position I could get into the starting line-up, I’d be warming up the pitcher right now.  Get it?”  I got it.  When the game started, Pete hit a two run double in the 1^st and the Reds ended up winning the game.  Pete would talk to me between innings.  At the end of the game, Pete asked my last name.  I told him, and he said that he would have four box seats for me on a Saturday the next time they came to Houston.  I took a girl friend and another couple with me when the Reds came back to town.  I wondered if Pete had remembered his promise.  I walked up to will call and gave them my name.  They handed me an envelope with four tickets inside.  Pete had not forgotten!  Written on the envelope was a note.  “Hi Harvey”, it said.  “I hope that you are doing well in school.  We are going to beat your team again today”.  Damned if Pete's team did not proceed to best us again!

P.S.  With a mind-blowing experience like that, how could baseball not be my favorite sport?