World Series

     Yogi jumps up from behind the plate and runs toward the mound. He leaps onto Don Larsen and wraps both arms and legs around Don.  They are celebrating the first (and only, so far) perfect game in World Series history.

       I don’t remember whether I watched that game in real time or if I have seen the scene replayed so many times that it is imprinted in my mind.  Don Larsen was notable to Coloradans because he had pitched for the Denver Bears during the 1955 season.  I remember many a summer night playing pool in the basement and listening to the Denver Bears on the radio, but I don’t remember any of the players.

     Things have changed since Don Larsen's 1956 feat.  For one thing, the season is nearly a month longer now than it was in 1956.  Larsen’s perfect game was on October 8, the fifth game of the World Series.  This year’s World Series will end during the first week of November.

     For another thing, the games were all during the afternoon until 1971.  For the few games that fell on weekends, that was great.  The weekday games were a problem.  School was in session.  Many of the games took place in the Eastern time zone.  For us Mountain zoners, the game was probably over by the 3:15 or 3:30 class dismissal time.

      Occasionally, a sympathetic teacher would let us turn on a radio and listen, say for the last five or ten minutes of the class period if we had behaved ourselves earlier in the hour.  Then there were the hard-hearts who would have none of it.  Baseball was a game and had no place in the classroom.

     Somewhere about my junior high years, the first transistor radio appeared on the scene.  It came via a classmate whose brother was in the navy, had been to Japan where such things not only existed but were cheap.  It had a little earphone.  Could you hide the cord and the earpiece so the teacher couldn’t see it?  I’m sure we tried.  There was a hazard.  If the teacher saw the contraband radio, she could confiscate it.

      The afternoon games during school days added a whiff of forbidden fruit to the greatest spectacle American sport had to offer.  The World Series was all-consuming when it came to our interest.  I’m speaking for the boys now.  I don’t recall the girls entering into our discussions of who was the best team, the best player, etc. 

     I recall getting onto the bus with an armload of stuff, books, yes, but the important thing was to have a baseball glove, maybe a set of tennis shoes to be worn every recess.  (During class time, the shoes hung by the strings from the corner of your desk chair.) 

      You had to have a cap or hat representing your favorite team.  Very rare were the caps with a team logo.  Instead, we created our own with what we had.  In my case, it was an old felt hat with the front brim turned up Texas John Slaughter style.  (Don’t remember Texas John Slaughter?  He was a good guy with a gun, who “made ‘em do what they ‘oughter’, Cause if they didn’t they died.”)  On the turned up brim, I had painted a crude “N” imposed over an equally crude “Y”.  It wasn’t a real world Series unless the Yankees were in it.  They usually were.     

     Basically, there were two camps, the Yankee fans and everybody else, including a great many Dodger fans, a few Giant fans, even a Pittsburgh fan or two.  Three major teams were in New York in those days, the Dodgers and Giants not having moved west yet.  There was a good reason to take a day off between games two and three and again between games five and six.  It was a travel day at a time when most of the travel was done by train or bus.  Getting to St. Louis from New York might take a day.   

     At recess, during the World Series, if we had enough to field two teams, we would choose up sides and play a game with rocks for bases and pitcher’s mound.  We weren’t allowed to cross the street to the real field, which would be in football mode anyway.  At World Series time, the two teams would form themselves around fans of a particular team.  The Yankee fans would form one team, the Dodger fans, the other, for example.  If we didn’t have enough players to field two teams, we might play workup.

     In workup, you had three or four on offense, batting or waiting to bat.  Everybody else took to the field.  When a batter made an out, he grabbed his glove (borrowed one if he didn’t have one, not all that rare) and headed for right field.  Every time a batter made an out, the fielders all moved up one notch, the right fielder replaced the center fielder, center moved to left, the left fielder went to third base, the third baseman went to short stop, short stop moved to second, the second baseman took over at first base, the first baseman became the pitcher, and the pitcher went on offense and got in line to take a turn at bat.  A batter waiting for his turn usually performed catching duties.

      The object of workup was to avoid making an out, to score a run on another batter’s hit, and to stay on offense.  If we didn’t have enough players for workup, we played 500.

     In 500, the batter hit flies to the “outfield”.  The fielders vied with one another to catch the fly balls.  A good batter could scatter the fly balls and keep the fielders from grouping together.  The first guy to earn five hundred points went up to bat.

      Points were earned for catching a fly ball (100 points), a one bouncer (75 points), a two bouncer (50 points), or a grounder (25 points).  When a player earned 500 points, he replaced the batter and everybody else wiped their slates clean and started over.  We practiced a little math at that game.  We also figured out who was honest and who was not, since each player kept his own tally.  I remember many an argument over how many points a player really had.  I don’t remember such an argument coming to blows. 

      While we were playing our grade school games, I remember the high school football team dividing along baseball lines.  The year I remember best was 1960 and the football team divided into Yankee fans and Giant fans.  It was October 13 and the game, and the Series, was over by the time football practice rolled around.  It ended when Bill Mazeroski, dreaded Pirate, hit his famous ninth inning walk off home run.

      Even though it was over (even Yogi had to admit that), the football team divided and scrimmaged along Giant—Yankee lines.  I rode the bus home (I was in the eighth grade in 1960) and didn’t take in any of that football session, only knew that the Yankee fans on the team were disgruntled, as was I, and intended to make a grudge match out of it.  By Friday baseball was off the stove and the football team coalesced to face another eight-man foe.

     For my classmates and me, after that game, the baseball paraphernalia went into storage until spring and football became the game of the day.  (We were supposed to only play touch or flag football, but we played tackle until the playground-supervising teacher stopped us.)  Actually, we had been playing football since the beginning of the school year, but baseball returned for a week during World Series time.           

     One other World Series I remember, I was younger.  Dad was in the process of doubling the back porch to make a place for the “automatic” washer and dryer that had replaced the old wringer machine.  He had the kitchen radio sitting in the east dining room window near his carpentry project.  He had sawhorses and tools on the lawn.  The game was still on when we got home.  I think we flipped on the television to watch the end of the game.  Dad asked us to turn the tv volume down (the tv stood beneath the same dining room window) so he could hear his radio.  He continued sawing, hammering, as the game went on.  I have no idea who was playing.  Probably not the Yankees, or I would remember, maybe.

     My interest in professional baseball waned a bit during my college years.  It wouldn’t pick up until 1970 when the only thing on evening radio in Western Kansas was country-western music, or the newly-minted (1969 their birth year)Kansas City Royals with Bud Blattner and Denny Matthews.  I became a fan and suffered through the agony of defeat again and again as the Royals almost made the big time but would lose out near the end to the hated Yankees or the dominating Oakland A’s of the 1970’s.

     Finally, in 1985, George Brett and the boys would win the big one.  It was a bit of a hollow victory.  The ’85 series should have ended in the sixth game, but for an umpire’s blown call at first.  The KC runner should have been out, the game over, and St. Louis would have won another trophy.   (That call would have been overturned with today’s rule allowing for reviews of controversial decisions.)  Instead, the runner was called safe, the Royals went on to win game six and had a fairly easy time winning game seven.

      Following the ’85 season, the Royals slid under the rock of mediocrity, the Rockies would come to Denver and I was forced to face a lot of distasteful things in order to be a Rockies fan.  When I became a Royals fan, I had to face the horrible truth that I had once upon a time actually rooted for the hated New York Yankees.  Switching my allegiance to the Rockies required additional crow-swallowing.

      I had to question my long-held belief that the American League was superior to the National League.  Right along with that flip-flop, I had to question the validity of the designated hitter rule.  Only in rare moments of candor do I confront my fickleness. 

     Otherwise, The Rockies’ exciting run up to the playoffs and winning the pennant in 2007 helped me to forget past allegiances.  The Rockies slide into less-than mediocrity was lowlighted by this summer’s trade of all-star shortstop Troy Tulowitski under the guise of improving the team.  It leads one to question the owners’ true motive.

     With the Royals’ second appearance in the World Series in two years, old allegiances reappeared.  While I haven’t totally abandoned the Rockies (they haven’t traded Nolan Aranado or Cargo, yet), I am certainly watching this world Series and rooting for the Royals.

     Being a fan of a National League team, I have come to the conclusion that the designated hitter has no more place in professional baseball than does an aluminum bat.  You have to have some principles, you know.