It was probably wrong to idealize baseball in its golden era, but that’s what kids do, and baseball was always for the kids. It’s a great game, sufficiently slow to let us savor each play, sufficiently fast to have the heart pound with excitement.
And look what it’s become.
When I grew up, I was a Brooklyn Dodger fan. Players lived in the neighborhoods around Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. After a game you could see their wives picking them up in Pontiacs and Chevvies. World Series “money” was $8,000. One year, the “bonus” for Brooklyn pitcher Preacher Roe was a pair of dogs. You could often go down to Lundy’s, a seafood restaurant near Sheepshead Bay, and watch our heroes and their families have dinner. There was a kind of understanding that you didn’t bother them.
Baseball was local. We loved the Dodgers. We hated the Yankees. As Roger Kahn wrote in his terrific book about the Dodgers, “The Boys of Summer,” rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for U.S. Steel. The Yanks had money. The Dodgers had heart, even if it was usually broken by the Yanks in some ill-fated World Series.
A “western trip” ended in St. Louis. To us kids in New York, that was way out west, and you got there by choo-choo. We didn’t think the people had indoor plumbing.
Of course, it was always a business. Money was being made at the top, and not much filtered down to the players. One year, in the late twenties, there was almost a scandal because Babe Ruth was awarded the then unheard-of salary of $75,000 a year. When a reporter sarcastically told him that he made more than the president of the United States, Ruth shot back, “I had a better year than he did.”
Ruth wasn’t exactly the pure-of-heart soul portrayed by William Bendix in “The Babe Ruth Story.” Sam Falk, the legendary New York Times photographer, knew him personally and described the real Ruth to me as a fun-loving vulgarian. But he was a terrific player who represented the scrappy baseball of his time, and he did in fact love kids.
So now, as we approach the so-called World Series, what do we have? We have so many teams that it’s hard to remember their names. We have players who “earn” $26,000 every time they come to bat, almost as much as some school teachers make in a year. We have a “sport” that is strictly big business, where most of the good seats in a stadium are bought up by corporations. We have a “game” that costs a family hundreds of dollars to attend. We have first basemen who charge for autographs, and who can be reached only through lawyers, agents, and PR men.
Is it like rooting for US Steel? Well, US Steel doesn’t exist anymore. The Yankees do, and each player is like his own US Steel.
The fun has been taken out of it. I was a baseball fanatic as a kid, trading baseball cards and going to local clubs, where we’d read each others’ sports magazines. Today, the biggest issue of the biggest sports magazine features swimsuits.
This isn’t baseball. When I was a kid my mother took me to Ebbets Field to buy tickets. It was the only place you could get them. If the guy in the ticket booth was okay, he’d let us into the empty stadium so we could see where are seats would be. I remember looking out on the deserted field, and imagining what it would be like that night, when it would come alive with the crack of wood, and the cheers…and boos…of the raucous Brooklyn crowd.
I hate to talk about the “good old days,” because they weren’t all good, and many things have improved. But baseball was a game, the players were our neighbors, and the shortstop didn’t drive to the ball park in a Mercedes.
And I miss it.
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