First Loves Last a Lifetime

Ah, spring!  It’s the perfect time for a young man to fall in love!

For me, it’s was more than just a mere spring fling.  I was a mere 8 ½ years old, but the spring of 1964 was just right for me to fall head over heels.

Getting an early start must be hereditary.  Love of baseball hit my dad in the early 1930s.  Since his name was Hank Greenberg, it was natural for him to become a huge fan.  His namesake, the original “Hammerin’ Hank” and future Hall of Famer, started shining for the Detroit Tigers in 1933.

Having Greenberg as a childhood idol helped my dad maintain his baseball interest, and our love for the game had similar births.

My dad was just seven when the 1930 baseball season began.  By the time it ended, he was hooked for life.  Managed by Charles “Gabby” Street, the hometown St. Louis Cardinals edged the Chicago Cubs by just two games for the National League pennant.

Leading the way were “Sunny Jim” Bottomley, Frankie “The Fordham Flash” Frisch, and Charles “Chick” Hafey.  Every member of the Redbirds’ starting eight lineup hit over .300, making things easy for pitchers “Wild Bill” Hallahan, Jesse “Pop” Haines, Charles “Flint” Rhem, and Burleigh “Old Stubblebeard” Grimes.  Talk about nicknames!

The Cardinals lost the World Series that year to the Philadelphia Athletics, but repeated in the National League in 1931, and knocked off Jimmy Foxx, Al Simmons, and the heavily-favored A’s.

The 1934 World Champion Cardinals, known as “The Gashouse Gang,” with the likes of Frisch, Joe “Ducky” Medwick, James “Ripper” Collins, James “Tex” Carleton, and especially Jerome Hanna “Dizzy” Dean and  Paul “Daffy” Dean, made it easy to be a baseball fan in St. Louis.

My mom, Delores, born in 1930, is also a long-time baseball fanatic.  She was a fervent rooter of the overachieving St. Louis Browns when they captured their only American League pennant in 1944 before losing four games to two to a Cardinals’ team that featured a young Stan Musial. It was our town’s only “Trolley Car” series.   The Browns always took a backseat to the Cardinals among St. Louis baseball fans, and moved to Baltimore after the 1953 season to become the Orioles.  Needless to say, Mom has been a Cardinals fan ever since, watching every single game!

Now, it was my turn!  I was not even seven years old when I attended the first game I truly remember. It was on Tuesday, June 12, 1962 at the OLD Busch Stadium I, formerly known as Sportsman’s Park, at Grand & Dodier.  I was there with my parents and my two elder sisters, Sherry and Debby. 

We started our descent from those wooden general admission seats shortly after the Phillies came to the plate in the eighth inning with a 2-1 lead.  Before we exited, the Cardinals’ 25-year-old second baseman Julian Javier had drawn a walk.  Suddenly, the crowd noise grew to a thundering ovation as rookie first baseman Fred Whitfield, who came up from the Cardinals’ minor leagues for the first time just 16 days previously, connected on a pitch that I still remember bouncing onto the street in front of us. That’s actually the only thing I remember about the game. 

I was actually able to track down the box score because I had recalled more than 50 years later that Whitfield homered late in the game as the Cardinals won.  He hit only eight all season, his only year with the Cardinals before being traded to Cleveland the following season.  This was the only game in which he homered late in a winning effort.      

In order to give Whitfield a chance at first, it was also was one of the few games Musial still played some left field instead of first base.  Ironically, Whitfield died January 31, 2013, just 12 days after Musial had passed away.

                 

The following season, the Cardinals, in Musial’s final season, made a late-season pennant run, winning 19 of 20 in September.  Then, St. Louis was swept three in a three-game home series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, who won the pennant by six games.

Sherry, Debby, and I grew up bleeding true red Cardinal blood.  Baseball was king in our house.  We went to some 15-20 games a year and never tired of hearing the colorful bellowing of St. Louis native Harry Caray and the then low-key, dry wit of Jack Buck on KMOX Radio.  Both are members of the broadcast wing of the National Baseball Hall of fame and Museum in Cooperstown, NY.

What went hand-in-hand with the game itself?  Baseball cards, of course!  That’s where one, big, inanimate object helped enrich my childhood love.  Outside our tiny house in the mid-county suburb of Olivette was a giant, red rustic wooden fence.

After living at that house for about four years, that red fence on one side had suddenly gained tremendous importance as a shortcut to fantasyland!  Sherry would take some of her allowance money, and together we would climb the five ladder-like wooden slats to the top, then climb down to the rarely-traveled side street that awaited us on the other side below.  Just about ¼-mile away was baseball card heaven—Sherman Brothers Delicatessen!

In season, baseball card time was one of the most anticipated times of the week!  Back then, it was just a nickel for a five-card pack of Topps cards that was accompanied by a flat, pink stick of bubble gum, measuring about one inch by two inches.  We would often get the special of six packs for a quarter!

How exciting it was taking turns opening these glorious packs, one at a time, as the other person waited anxiously to try and catch a glimpse of what was inside. 

“Wow!  We had a Roberto Clemente, Frank Robinson, or Cardinal great Ken Boyer!”  A few seconds later, we may have uttered, “Oh, no!  Not another Choo Choo Coleman!”

We never thought about any monetary value of baseball cards.  But we did want the best players and our favorite Cardinals.  After all, we often played war with the cards.  Aces were guys like Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, and Sandy Koufax.

Considering how much money old cards can currently bring, it’s unfortunate that most of the cards of the top players received the most creases from handling.  Well, at least I still have some 7,000 baseball cards with loads of sentimental value!   My dad’s mother threw out his shoe boxes filled with cards from the 1930s and 1940s while he was in France late in World War II.

Those trading cards certainly helped fuel my love for baseball, and that fence provided a great means to that end.  But the fence meant a whole lot more.  It was the entire fair ball outfield wall for neighborhood whiffleball in our own “Field of Dreams.”  A large drum lid was home plate, an old tire was third base, a broken chair that lay flat was second base, and I don’t recall what we used for first.

Our own “Green Monster” stood down the left-field line.  Unlike the one at Boston’s Fenway Park, this green fence didn’t earn its nickname because of its height.  It was only about five feet high.  What we thought lay behind it was what terrified us!

We lived at the very end of the street and there were no houses behind us.  Instead, the green fence separated us from an enormous field with weeds and very tall grass that never seemed to get cut.  We imagined there were loads of snakes and rats lurking there. 

We wouldn’t dare venture into that field to search for the hundreds of whiffleballs we fouled off.  Luckily, our parents didn’t care how many balls they had to buy.  They would often join us, and we were all doing what we loved.  But we did make a rule that if you hit the ball over that green fence, it was an automatic out.  So, we righthanded hitters learned right away about hitting the ball to the opposite field.  There was a lot more open space down the rightfield line, anyway!

The magic of those baseball cards and our own backyard playing sessions were intensified by what was happening on National League playing fields in 1964.

The Cardinals, who two weeks earlier had acquired a young Lou Brock in a trade with the Chicago Cubs for starting pitcher Ernie Broglio and a couple lesser talents, began July in seventh place, 9 ½ games out of first.  St. Louis was still 7 ½ out in September.

Meanwhile, Philadelphia had been in first place since mid July, building a seemingly insurmountable lead as the season headed into that final full month.  Then something strange happened to the Phillies.  After being used to winning more than 70 per cent of its games for two months straight, Philadelphia began September playing .500 ball.  Later in the month, the Phils lost 10 games in a row!

With the season in its final week, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and San Francisco were all within three games of one another!  The Cardinals then completed a three-game sweep of visiting Philadelphia.

My family went to the middle game of that series, for which I still have the scorecard.  It was Ray Sadecki pitching for the Cardinals against Dennis Bennett for the Phillies.  Cardinal first baseman Bill White homered near the scoreboard clock for an insurance run in a 4-2 victory.                                                     

I still remember sitting near the top row of the grandstand and still have many ticket stubs from that era--$1 for those general admission seats and 50 cents for bleacher seats.  We all stood up and made noise by banging the wooden seats up and down!

I’ll also always remember scoreboard watching as then first place Cincinnati hosted Pittsburgh. Because of all the transistor radios around us, we were well aware of the situation. 

All of a sudden, Caray shouted, “Pittsburgh has won!  Pittsburgh won its ballgame, 2-0!  It’s over!  Pittsburgh has just beat the Reds, 2-0!  Holy cow!  Within 15 seconds of the Cardinals win, (Bill) Mazeroski threw out (Chico) Ruiz, and the Pirates beat the Reds, 2-0! The National League race is in a tie!  And the Phillies in third place stay only a game-and-a-half out!”

The following night, another eventual Hall of Fame broadcaster, long-time Cardinals catcher Tim McCarver belted an early home run to help the Cardinals to a series sweep and the National League lead!

However, the Cardinals then dropped the first two games of that final homestand against a New York Mets team that finished the season dead last with a 53-109 record.  Meanwhile, the Phillies broke out of that long losing streak just in time to knock off Cincinnati on Friday before their rare Saturday open date.

Entering the final day of the regular season, Sunday, October 4, 1964, it was the Cardinals 92-69, the Reds 92-69, the Phillies 91-70, and the Giants barely eliminated at 90-71.  The Reds could have won the pennant that day, the Cardinals could have won it, or the season could have ended in a three-way tie!

That last scenario looked even more plausible after Rookie-of-the-Year Richie Allen’s second home run of the game gave Philadelphia a 9-0 lead over Cincinnati, and Bobby Klaus’ two-run double gave the Mets a 3-2 fifth inning lead in St. Louis.  But Boyer, Dick Groat, and Dal Maxvill drove in runs in the bottom of the fifth.

The Cards led 11-5 in the ninth inning when Caray stole a line from Giants’ announcer Russ Hodges.

“A high pop foul, McCarver’s there, the Cardinals win the pennant!  The Cardinals win the pennant!  The Cardinals win the pennant!”  

All the kids from our neighborhood gathered to rejoice with an impromptu celebration on our front lawn as the Cardinals won their first pennant since 1946 before later topping the Yankees in a seven-game World Series.

Just seven months later, my family moved.  I missed that red fence, but still love my baseball cards, the sport itself, and of course, the Cardinals!