My Baseball Blog

I had a friend was a big baseball player, back in high school. He could throw that speedball by you, make you look like a fool. Bruce Springsteen (song “Glory Days”)

November 15, 2021

Welcome to my blog.  You may wonder: “Why have I decided to write a blog about Baseball?”  The answer is that I have spent a good part of my life first playing and then thinking and dreaming about baseball.  At one time, I even briefly fantasized about trying to make a living researching and writing about baseball.  But marriage, children, work and other commitments pretty much killed that idea in its sad crib.  I settled for simply being an amateur baseball writer and sometime researcher.  Now, as retirement beckons, I would like to spend more of my time writing about baseball… just for the good old fun of it. Like every writer, I hope my thoughts and ramblings about baseball entertain somebody, somewhere. But mostly, I just want to amuse myself.

I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, long ago.  Growing up, the boys in my neighborhood and the surrounding areas played every game known to man.  Over on the school blacktops, we played basketball and street hockey.  In the backyards, we played football and capture the flag (which we strangely called manhunt).  But, more than any other sport, we played baseball, in all its many variations. There was softball and stickball. There were many games with just a rotating pitcher and hitter (occasionally a catcher and outfielder too). And there were neighborhood games that featured sometimes 5 to 11 players per team. Eventually, we were organized by the adults into Little League clubs or played on the school teams in Junior High and High School. I remember it all now with the hazy glow of childhood nostalgia.

Growing up in New England, my favorite team was the Boston Red Sox of the American League.  When I was quite young, the 1967 Red Sox team had their “Impossible Dream” season.  My father, who cared about Baseball not one bit, took me and some of my friends to a couple of games at Fenway Park during that glorious year.  My favorite player was Tony Conigliaro.  Like me, “Tony C” was a right-handed hitter. When up at bat, I mimicked his solid stance. My best friend idolized Carl Yastrzemski and copied his much odder stance with the bat held high. We both wanted to have cool and interesting last names like Conigliaro and Yastrzemski. We were too young to understand that the names were simply of Italian and Polish origin. In my imagination, I dreamed of myself as a modern day Babe Ruth, both a power hitting outfielder and a hard throwing strikeout pitcher. Almost anything seems possible when you are young. 

The unforgettable 1967 season made me a Baseball (and Boston Red Sox) fan for the rest of my life. But it also introduced me to heartbreak, sadness and loss. The “Impossible Dream” Red Sox eventually went down to defeat in the season’s penultimate game. In the World Series, the BoSox simply could not overcome Bob Gibson, the African American ace of the St. Louis Cardinals. He defeated the Red Sox in the first, fourth, and seventh game of the Series. My hero, Tony Conigliaro, didn’t even play in the World Series. His season, and eventually his career, had already been horribly ended by a pitch that hit him right in the eye. I loved Baseball but had no idea of the bigger picture. Babe Ruth was just a myth to me. The stories about him seemed like tall tales told on the TV. I had no idea about Jackie Robinson or the integration of Baseball. I saw Mickey Mantle playing out his career on his ruined knees. I had no idea who he had been. I did not even dislike the Yankees which seems like a right of passage for all good Red Sox fans. At that time, the Yanks were just a sad and pitiful last place team.

But I soon began buying packs of baseball cards. I would then destroy them by attaching them to the spokes of my chopper bike. I was fascinated by the player statistics on the backs of these cards. Through baseball card statistics, I finally connected with the fading glories of Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays. Eventually, I went to the library and began reading about the game. In 1972, to my everlasting shame, I checked out two books from my local library and then never bothered to return either one (and I still have them). One of the books was the 1969 edition of the “MacMillan Baseball Encyclopedia.” This book was the first real attempt at a complete statistical encyclopedia of the game of Baseball. The second book was Robert Peterson’s “Only the Ball was White.” This book was the first history of the long forgotten players from the Negro Leagues. These two books are still the touchstones of basically all my Baseball obsessions. Like almost everyone else, except for those gifted few, my dreams of actual Major League stardom ended on the baseball fields of my High School. But the residue of those hopes and dreams has enriched my life endlessly.

In my next post (or posts), I will continue on by:

1. Dedicating my blog to Grant “Home Run” Johnson; and
2. Talk briefly about the topics that I am interested in writing about.