It’s early April. The North Texas wind is, as they say, blowing like a bandit. White, fluffy clouds are scooting quickly and I have that wonderful aching feeling again, the one I’ve had every March and April of my life for as long as I can remember.
Cool, soggy dirt, the smell of new wet grass. It’s spring.
Baseball season is back.
In the early 1960s, when I was a kid of 13 or 14, I spent my summer days on a baseball field on Thomas Drive in North Highlands with my buddy Norm Miller. We always got there right after breakfast and didn’t leave until nearly sundown.
Sometimes we were eventually joined by other kids. Often we were not. Didn’t matter to us. Norm and I would throw baseballs at each other, taking turns swinging for non-existent fences, hearing cheers from imagined crowds.
The stars of our daily fantasy were our San Francisco Giants heroes: Mays, McCovey, Cepeda, Marichal, Jimmy Ray Hart, Tom Haller, Jose Pagan, Jim Davenport, and the Alou brothers. We loved them all and paid tribute in our two-kid fantasy game by batting left or right-handed as they did and even mimicking their unique batting stances.
Mays looked at the pitcher with both eyes, not just one. Cepeda held his monstrous piece of lumber straight up and circled it slowly. Matty Alou was an odd duck. He always held his bat head pointing at the ground behind him as if it weighed 40 pounds. He made it work quite well.
As make-believe Giants hitters, we advanced to the plate mimicking Candlestick Park public address announcer, Jeff Carter.
“The batter, number 5, Tom Haller!” We heard the cheers in our heads as we had in our occasional real-life visits to the Stick.
That’s how Norm and I spent our summer days, in baseball heaven.
One day an old man wandered up behind the backstop and watched for a while as I threw slow fastballs and flat curves to Norm, who was always a sucker for any pitch high and away as many of mine were.
Balding, portly, and puffing on a cigar the man behind the backstop watched. We thought nothing of him until he eventually hollered, “Hey, mind if I take a swing?”
In those days it never occurred to any kid to say no to any adult request. It was a weird thing for an old fat guy to ask but we never thought about running home in fear and suspicion. Bad things didn’t happen to kids in the 60s.
He just wanted to hit a baseball and we said, “Sure”.
Together, Norm and I had collected a kid’s treasure trove of baseballs, maybe three or four between us. Some had their torn covers taped shut. Maybe one had all its seams intact. That’s the one I picked up as Norm ran out to center field.
Something told me I should impress this old guy with my best stuff. I was only 13 or 14 but on that particular day I had never been older and I had never played baseball with an adult.
I concentrated, scraped my toe at the non-existent pitching rubber, peered in at the non-existent sign from non-existent Tom Haller, and fired in my best non-existent fastball.
Thwack!
The fat, bald guy slammed it on a line into centerfield and hadn’t missed a puff from his cigar.
Two or three more times I threw baseballs as hard as I could and the old man peppered them around the deepest outfields, left to right. Poor Norman was run ragged chasing them down.
The old man smiled, dropped the cigar on the grass beside him, and got down to business.
THWACK! THWACK! THWACK!
He slammed everything I had that came anywhere near the plate. A couple of wild pitches he let pass but had to chase down because there was no catcher. He casually ducked the ones that were flying straight toward his head.
The game ended when the bat splintered. It simply gave up, glued, nailed, and taped together as it had been to begin with.
When the old, fat, cigar-chomper came out to the infield, grinning from ear to ear and offering to pay for the bat, we said nah, it was already broken. We were just amazed at what he had done and asked him, with the ignorance of youth: “Did you ever play baseball?”
He smiled again and took the wallet out of his back pocket. Then he carefully fished out a yellow newspaper clipping nearly twenty years old.
I’m sorry to say it didn’t mean anything to me at the time and I remember nothing about it now. But his wallet also displayed his driver’s license and his name caught my attention.
Wikipedia explains the rest of the story.
Carl Anthony Furillo (March 8, 1922 – January 21, 1989), nicknamed “The Reading Rifle” and “Skoonj,” was a right fielder in Major League Baseball who played his entire career for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers. A member of seven National League champions from 1947 to 1959, he batted over .300 five times, winning the 1953 batting title with a .344 average – then the highest by a right-handed Dodger since 1900. Noted for his strong and accurate throwing arm, he recorded 10 or more assists in nine consecutive seasons, leading the league twice, and retired with the fifth most games in right field (1408) in NL history. – Wikipedia
Thanks for sharing a great story, as always, I recall as a kid a young man in our neighborhood that was a prospect in the 60’s that would always make time to play some ball with us! We had a neighbor that dated a offensive lineman that would toss the football too. Great days, I am saddened that most of the kids I see today, have never experienced that feeling. I bounced many a tennis ball of the garage as a backstop or threw many “wicked” curve balls with a wiffle ball!!
Good story. What was he doing in Sacramento?
Said he was visiting family.