City Champs - Part I

I grew up in a world of baseball, the Lone Ranger, cars with enormous fins and idyllic summer evenings where the most wonderful words ever to be heard were "Who'd like to go down to the Altamont for some ice cream?"  I grew up in a small town in a small neighborhood in a very large family.  Like most families, we had our rituals and routines, and one of my favoritie routines was throwing a baseball aganst a concrete block and catching the rebound while I waited for my father to get home from work. I developed a very robust game from that routine, where I could call balls and strikes, get hits and outs, and generally play a full baseball game. Which allowed me to replay the disastrous final inning of Game 7 of the 1960 World Series over and over again until the baseball gods got it right.  Even though I do not root for the Yankees, and haven't since about 1966 when I discovered that Brooks Robinson was quite simply the best player in baseball,  I still get riled up when I hear the name Bill Mazeroski. It was at an old-timers game in Washington, DC in the late1980's that I happily and lustily booed Mazeroski when he, by then in his 50's, appeared in support of baseball in DC, a cause that I supported whole-heartedly.


As the school year began to wind down each spring, the boys in our neighborhood would rummage through the backs of numberless closets to retrieve the glove and ball that had been so carefully wrapped and tied at the end of the previous summer.    Little league baseball buddies start getting together for pickup games at local sandlots (we actually called them that).  This ritual was quickly followed by tryouts for minor league, little league and Babe Ruth League teams.  Once you had been selected for a team, you remained with them for your entire career in that league.  Teams crossed over cultural, school, religous and social barriers, but never the important geopolitical boundary of Broad Street.  Someone from the "south" side of Broad Street was never placed with a team from the other side of town, and I lived on the south side of Broad.  So I was assigned to the "Fox Hill" (south side) gang for baseball.  All local teams were sponsored by local businesses and some rivalries developed among them, although these rarely meant anything more than good-natured jousting about previous year standings. And the little league teams were not feeder systems for the Babe Ruth teams - today's enemy on the diamond could very well be your teammate next year.


Some of us, though, had a little more "luck" in team assignments than others.  As a little leaguer, I was selected by the team sponsored by Champlain Valley Savings & Loan whose bright yellow uniforms were sure to scare you off if it's abysmal record didn't.  In my first year on the team (at 8 years old) we lost 20 games  and won 0; in our second year we celebrated our first and only win with a pizza party at our young coach Popcorn's house (he had a greek first name that I cannot remember, but we aways called him Popcorn anyways so it didn't matter.)  In my third year we went 3-17, and we were clearly improving!  By the time I reached the ultimate season with "S&L" as we were called, we had almost no teams quivering in their boots at meeting our offensive juggernaut, and only a few batters (mostly scrawny 8- and 9-year-olds) who feared our left-handed pitching ace (me).  So it was clear to the baseball gods that I needed a break...I needed to be with a contender! And so, I became a first-round draft pick for the Wise Potato Chips team - a team at the top of their division. It helped somewhat that my father coached this team, had coached it for years, and that all sons were assigned automatically assigned to their fathers' teams.

Babe Ruth league was where the wheat and the chaff began the process of separation from each other in our little portion of the baseball world.  The pitcher's mound was suddenly 60 ft. 6 inches from  home plate, we wore real metal spikes, we were learning to steal bases with our cleats up, the basepaths were 90 feet long, a homerun to right field would have to carry 375-400 feet, and the windows in the nun's house behind the left field wall took a regular pounding.  The nuns of Our Lady of Victory always loved to hear the crashing of the glass as another homer struck the school since it was one more indicator of how strong the boys' high school team would be this year!

That first year, when I as 13, was magical.  And surprisingly, at least two readers of this blog shared that season with me.  I'm sure everyone will identify my Dad as one of the current readers who was there...but a rea challenge is telling me who the second was!  I'm hoping to describe more of our championship season tomorrow, so unless the person wishes to reveal himself before then,you'll have to wait to find out who it is.