baseball Archives : The Aging of Aquarius

I got the Willies

by Dave Williams

I heard a guy on the radio this morning waxing nostalgic about the time he met his childhood hero, Bart Starr. At that point he employed a clever trick we radio talkers carry in our toolbox, asking rhetorically, “Did you ever have a chance to talk with your idol?”

It’s what we call a hook. It engages the listener. We get you personally involved in a topic. This is called active rather than passive listening. It works every time, even on me.

I’ve told these stories here before but hell, I’ve been telling one of them for about 60 years, the other for 32. Why stop now? They still haunt me.

I met Willie Mays when I was ten or twelve years old. For reasons I still don’t understand a security guard protecting the San Francisco Giants players’ parking lot from an excited crowd of kids waving pens and gloves opened his gate just wide enough to admit me, and me alone, into the autograph promised land. The other several dozen kids were left clamoring at the chainlink barrier like starving waifs in a Dickens novel.

This was my golden ticket, even before Willie Wonka was created.

When my hero emerged from the locker room door my heart started pounding and my mouth went dry. I walked toward him calmly, on rubber legs; I politely raised my baseball glove and pen to his world-famous face and muscular shoulders, forcing my thick, parched tongue to stammer, “Mr. Mays, can I have your autograph?”

Willie kept walking. He didn’t slow down, look at me, smile, or shoo me away.

He made me doubt my existence.

Willie got in his car, I went back to my dad and we started the sad two-plus hours drive home.

Willie Nelson was much nicer. He smiled and nodded as I looked at him dumbly. I mean that in the literal definition of the word, I was struck dumb, so enamored by his presence that I was unable to utter a word.

I was no kid at this point. I was 38, host of the highest-rated morning radio show in Sacramento history, but at that moment I was dumb as a fencepost.

CarolAnn bailed me out, as she often still does in social settings. She smiled sweetly at Willie, fluttered those gorgeous eyes, and asked him to sign our ticket stubs. He did so with a charmed (and may I suggest, slightly lecherous) smile.

As I chewed on my tongue to reduce it to a usable size, my wife-turned-radio producer, asked Willie if he could find a few minutes to talk with me on the air the following morning by phone. He kindly explained that he’d love to but he would be sleeping in his bus hundreds of miles away on the road to Utah. He might not even have a cell phone connection.

Then the Red-Headed Stranger smiled again and tipped his hat to the love of my life, giving me a quick, curious glance as he left.

“Radio show?” he thought, “The guy can’t even talk.”

Play ball!

Today is the first day of the Major League Baseball season and as always I’m just a bit melancholy.

Throughout my life I’ve taught myself to treasure my past without clinging to it. Some people can’t let go of their “good old days”. They just seem worn out and refuse to go any farther.

They seem to quit on life before it leaves them.

I’ve worked hard to avoid what I call GOMS, Grumpy Old Man Syndrome. It’s not hard. I’m blessed. I love my life, my family and friends. I love waking up each day.

But every year there is one day, this day, that makes me feel old and frustrated because my body won’t allow me to play the game in my heart.

Baseball is the essence of eternal youth, of fluffy white clouds in March and the smell of freshly cut grass. To play the game, to run and leap and slide in the dirt using muscles that stretch and coil in perfect harmony with young reflexes, is indescribable.

Spring turns to summer and we played daily, all day, until darkness sent us home for a brief time out. In those days tomorrows were endless and each new morning began with a promise of glory.

All the wonderful tributes paid to the game that turns old men into little boys again hurt just a bit. It’s the only time of the year when I am painfully nostalgic for my youth.

I’ll watch the boys of this summer. I’ll remember their skills and hope for them that they love it all as much as I still do.

The kid pitches to a Dodgers legend

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

It breaks your heart

A writer who loves baseball must be careful. It’s too easy to slip into flowery purple prose about the game and I’m prone to over-writing.

Besides, the love of baseball has already been written with soul-stirring elegance by the likes of Roger Kahn, Roger Angell, Red Smith, George Will, Jim Murray, Joshua Prager and many others.

This morning I started watching the Ken Burns documentary, Baseball, for the third or fourth time. For reasons I understand in my heart but have trouble putting into words it still chokes me up. I get teary and a lump in my throat. It’s that good, cleansing, happy cry that makes you feel young, fresh and wholesome again.

The memories melt years from my body. I remember how I felt when my legs were lean, springy and swift; when my arms were powerful.

I could smash a fastball to the moon and run like the wind all day with a huge smile on my freckled face.

I can still smell freshly mowed grass under a cool March sky of scooting, fluffy clouds.

The base paths are wet from last night’s rain.

One water-soaked, torn-cover baseball is heaved toward the mud on home plate. I swing the bat held together by glue, nails and electrician’s tape.

Foul ball.

Pitcher and batter make eye contact. Both are determined, both are scared.

See? There I go, pushing the flowery purple envelope. When you love baseball you just can’t help it. It’s a disease you catch as a child and it festers inside you for a lifetime. As the great sports writer Pete Hamill once wrote:

“Don’t tell me about the world. Not today. It’s springtime and they’re knocking baseballs around fields where the grass is damp and green in the morning and the kids are trying to hit the curve ball.”

Pete Hamill has the delicious disease of his youth.

Here are more of my favorite quotes about the game from the men who played it professionally and fed the dreams of the rest of us who imagined we could.

“You can’t sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You’ve got to throw the ball over the goddamn plate and give the other man his chance. That’s why baseball is the greatest game of them all.” – Earl Weaver

“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.” – Rogers Hornsby

“I don’t care how long you’ve been around, you’ll never see it all.” – Bob Lemon

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.” – Bart Giamatti

“During my 18 years I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times. You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at bats a season. That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball.” – Mickey Mantle

“The pitcher has to find out if the hitter is timid. And if the hitter is timid, he has to remind the hitter he’s timid.” – Don Drysdale

“Every player should be accorded the privilege of at least one season with the Chicago Cubs. That’s baseball as it should be played – in God’s own sunshine. And that’s really living.” – Alvin Dark

“You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you, too.” – Roy Campanella

“When they start the game they don’t yell, ‘Work Ball!” They say, ‘Play ball!” – Willie Stargell

“You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out it was the other way around all the time.” – Jim Bouton, Ball Four