For the Love of Baseball
by
Cynthia Close
“You don’t have to be a giant to
play baseball,” so says Joe Castiglione, Boston Red Sox play-by-play
commentator on WEEI radio this hot July afternoon. His remark followed the
revelation that Mookie Betts, one of the team's star players, is only 5’8”although
his “official” stats claim 5’9”an inch shorter than my 17-year-old
granddaughter.
How
can you not love a team with players named Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts? Their
names roll off the tongue like the taste of a newly discovered candy bar. In
2018 the Boston Red Sox had ignited a fire in the heart of every fan. Halfway
through the season and they blew every team in every league out of the water,
shattering records so fast even the usually well-informed on-air sportscasters were
having a hard time keeping up. They left their archrivals, the second place New
York Yankees,shaking their heads in open-mouthed disbelief. At mid-season “the Sox”
were more than fifty games over the five hundred mark and had secured a place
in the World Series playoffs that they eventually won. Longtime fans know well
enough not to take anything for granted. This year, 2019, their fires were still
burning but not quite so bright. Baseball, like life, operates in the random
collision of things.
I
have always loved baseball. Specifically, Red Sox baseball. The love happened around
the same time I arrived in Boston as a college freshman and with the sudden joy
of newfound freedom adopted the city as my official hometown. Sport in Boston
is a way of life for most of the population,extending far beyond the city
limits. It cannot be escaped since these iconic teams follow you year round
from Patriots football in the fall, through Bruins hockey and Celtics
basketball in the winter, but it’s the boys
of summer who captured my heart.
Not
that I came from a particularly athletic or sports-participant type of family.
No touch football before Thanksgiving turkey dinners. No leisurely golf before
martini’s at the country club in the afternoon. Dad was indifferent when it
came to sports. Although he was fit and loved the outdoors, he preferred
tooling around the Long Island Sound in his boat, or working to restore one of
his classic cars in the garage rather than sitting in front of the TV watching
men (and it is usually men on sports TV) competitively clobber each other.
Mom
was another story. She was a voracious consumer, a vicarious sports fanatic.
Football was her passion after dad died. She knew the records of all the
quarterbacks, and could tell you who the good coaches were and why. She
especially loved the Patriots own Tom Brady when she heard he was a Republican.
She could recite statistics well into her 8th decade even when she
had trouble remembering which medications to take. As a young woman when summer
came around mom’s attention switched to baseball and her radio was always tuned
to the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 1957 she was devastated when her New York favorites
abandoned the city of her birth and hightailed it out to California where they
became the Los Angeles Dodgers. My mother never forgave them, switching her
allegiance to the New York Yankees without shame.
We
didn’t have air-conditioning in our house in the 1950’s – so the windows were
wide open in the summer. The exciting play-by-play punctuated by the roar of
the crowd drifting out on to the street provided the underlying rhythm to my languid
childhood summer days. Baseball was synonymous with the freedom of summer. Free
from the obligations of homework and housework I could stay outside from
morning till dusk and no one thought to inquire where I was going or what I was
doing as long as I was home before dark.
My
mother never actually threw a baseball. I never even saw my mother run or ride
a bike. She moved purposefully through life, feet on the ground, restricted by
the unwritten rules foisted on women who came of age in the 1950’s. Much of her
life experience came via projection of her desires on to others. Concern for
her physical safety motivated by unfounded fear of the unknown kept her in
front of the TV or at her ironing board, listening to the radio.
Mom
was born in 1924 in the borough of Queens, close enough to attend games with
her friends at Ebbets Field in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn where the
Dodgers played from 1913 to 1957. This was before she met my dad in 1944. He
was a tall, blond, self-confidently handsome, uniform wearing B17 pilot home on
leave from WWII. I doubt they talked much about baseball. They had little time
to do much talking at all since they knew each other a grand total of seven
days before they became engaged, and soon after married.
By
late 1945 the war had ended and my mom and dad moved into my grandparents house
in Queens. I was born in that house, just as my mother had been. I have no
doubt that my mother had the radio tuned to a Brooklyn Dodgers game in spring
of 1947 when they announced the signing of Jackie Robinson the first African
American player to crash through the baseball color line. I’m sure she cheered
him on with the rest of the team when he won the National League Most Valuable
Player Award in 1949 and continued to play in six World Series games in his ten
year Major League Baseball career, including when the Dodgers won the 1955
World Series Championship, the year I turned ten.
The
house in Queens that accommodated four adults and me in 1945 had three bedrooms
and a bath upstairs and looked most like the one in that much-loved long
running TV sitcom, All in the Family,
led by the openly bigoted but not dangerous, Archie Bunker.My grandparent’s
house was cozier inside than the Bunker household and had more elaborate
furniture. It was the only house I’ve ever lived in with an attic. There was a
door in the upstairs hallway opening to a narrow staircase leading to the place
under the eves where mom’s white satin wedding dress was folded neatly in a
trunk. As I got older, but still before school age, I’d sneak up those stairs
to explore.I found a box with a slice of fossilized wedding cake on top of
yellowing love letters written by my dad to mom. There were 2 tickets to a
Dodgers game in an envelope with some faded pictures of my mom and a man I
didn’t recognize. Although grandma knew where I was she pretended to be
surprised when I excitedly dashed into the kitchen yelling,“grandma, guess what
I found!” I’m not sure what happened to that piece of wedding cake, or the
dress, or anything else that was in the trunk.
The
house with the attic sat in the middle of198th Street, separated from
the neighboring houses by driveways on either side. There was an intimacy, a
sense of community when you could look out your kitchen window, directly into
the house next door. Loud conversations were easily heard through those open
windows. In the summer elderly women leaned on their elbows resting on the sills
while their chatter floated across the narrow strip of concrete pavement
separating them.
Queens
today is a very different place in some respects and not so different in others.Based on 2017 estimates,
Queens is home to one of the most diverse populations on the planet.Approximately
48% of the roughly 2,358,582
residents are foreign born. Jamaica, the largely middle-class subsection of
Queens where my grandparents lived now accommodates a large African American
and Caribbean population. That was not the case in the late 1940’s and early
1950’swhen it was predominantly white and European. I can’t pinpoint exactly
when a vague uneasiness seeped into my grandparent’s house. There were hushed
references to “certain kinds” of people who had started to buy houses at the
far end of 198th Street. Racism was not part of my vocabulary or
consciousness when I was a child. It took a confrontation with James Baldwin
years later when I read The Fire Next
Time in my freshman year at Boston University to awaken my sluggish
intellect to what was hiding in plain sight. Even today, I am embarrassed to
admit that the grandparents who loved me, the two people in the world I most
adored, were racist.
The word
“nigger” was never uttered, but it was soon after those “certain kinds” of
people bought houses on 198th Street that my grandfather chose to
retire from his city job. A For Sale sign went up on the front
lawn and my grandparents moved out to the far reaches of Southold on the North
Fork of Long Island. By that time, my dad’s job situation had improved and I
along with my parents moved into a duplex in Montclair, New Jersey. My elementary
school was integrated. There were several black students in every classroom. At
recess we played together in the schoolyard on the swings and on the baseball
diamond. When the final bell rang at the end of the school day and we kids
fanned out walking home in separate directions black folks disappeared from my
line of vision.
I never saw
a black person inside my grandparent’s house. My parents had no black friends.
We never had a person of color, any color, male or female included in holiday
celebrations. This was the norm in my family circle and in all the circles of
all the families of the friends I knew. Yet, in 1947, Branch Rickey, general
manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, recognized the talent of 28-year-old Jackie
Robinson and invited him into the house of baseball, knowing he would be
subject to the inevitable racial abuse that was rampant in nearly aspect of
American culture and only thinly veiled in polite middle-class homes on 198th
Street.
Jack Roosevelt
Robinson was born on January 31st, 1919 in Cairo, Georgia, and died
October 24th, 1972 in Stamford, Connecticut. His journey from south
to north mapped a critical period in our countries tortured path of race
relations that continues unabated today. Robinson’s all-around athletic prowess
was recognized when he was a student at UCLA. He was a star on the football
field, on the basketball court, on the track as well as on the baseball
diamond. In 1942 he entered officer candidate school, was commissioned as a
second lieutenant in 1943, just as my dad had been. But unlike my dad, Robinson
faced court-martial in 1944 for refusing to follow an order that he sit in the
back of a military bus. This was 10 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up
her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama city bus to a white man. Ultimately the
charges against Robinson were dismissed and he received an honorable discharge
from the military. Things could have been worse and they were worse for other
black folks who were not Jackie Robinson.Before he caught the attention of
Branch Rickey, Robinson played for the Negro American League. Rickey deserves
some credit for his very conscious plan to integrate baseball, and for his
concern for his star players well-being in the light of racist attacks he knew were
sure to follow when Robinson walked out on the field. And come they did. Even
from some of his team members. I wonder what my mother was thinking during a
game when she may have seen other fans hurl bottles at Robinson or when
opposing teams deliberately pitched balls at Robinson’s head.I imagine these
things were conveniently ignored, over shadowed by her love for the game and a
willful blindness to strife, both inside and outside our home.
On the day
my mother died at the age of 92 the TV in her apartment at the south Florida
assisted living complex where she spent her last three years of life was tuned
to a preseason football game. It was the year before San Francisco 49ers
quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the playing of the national anthem,
sparking a cascade of similar silent protests calling attention to the ongoing
oppression of people of color and their nearly unchecked murder by police in
the United States. In the next two years “taking a knee” became more widespread.
It was associated with the motivating forces behind the #Black Lives Matter
movement and culminated in several hundred players joining the protest in
response to President Donald Trump’s calling on NFL owners to “fire” the
players who refused to stand for the anthem.
I don’t
know how my mother would have felt about “her players” protesting against
racism. Had she lived long enough she may indeed have been one of those silent
but seething white middle-class folks who voted Trump into office. For me, I
choose to remember the finest examples of how human beings can act towards one
another, people like Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson, two “boys of summer”
who knew the pain of racism firsthand and did not allow it to infect their
lives. Admittedly, the Red Sox journey initiated by Rickey and Robinson has
been down some rocky roads. But there have been gratifying moments, notably the
outpouring of love shown to David Américo Ortiz Arias – affectionately known as
“Big Papi”– upon his retirement in October 2016.And now, Alex Cora, the only
Puerto Rican manager in the major leagues, coaches his Red Sox team on this hot
July afternoon as the din of the crowd rises and falls to the rhythms of the
game acting as a soothing panacea in this politically and culturally fevered
moment in time. Seasons change. The Red Sox’s fortunes rise and fall sometimes
in unpredictable ways.But wins and losses don’t affect my love of baseball where
the seeds of possibility still reside for a fully integrated future when race is
ignored and talent rules the game.
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