Baseball is the Most Reliable, American Time Machine

I learned to tawk in Brooklyn, wheah we played stickball in the alley (trans. driveway) befaw we wuh old enough to play in the street.

And even though we moved up to White Plains when I was six (on the same day of Gil Hodges’ funeral at Our Lady Help of Christians, our parish and school), I still evoke my Brooklyn past as a way to establish a false sense of street cred with the young folk (gotta try to make yourself cool somehow when your hair gets all salty). While my brother defected his fanhood to the Yankees at some point, I have always remained true to my National League roots, though the Mets have gone through long stretches of passion dousing, save those four years in the mid-80s.

My daughters have an odd interest in my Brooklyn and baseball past, and last week they decided they wanted to sort through the old baseball cards boxed away in my mother’s attic. My mother, for her part, broke out something I don’t remember seeing before – my father’s boyhood Autograph Book. Now, I was the little kid, the baseball cards took on a whole new meaning, and we took the baseball cards home.

All of a sudden, I was sitting on the stoop outside Rocky’s Deli, ripping open a Topps pack, savoring the gum for the whole minute it retained its flavor (but thankfully not its texture), and uttering a chant that went something like this: “Got ‘im, got ‘im, need ‘im, got ‘im.”

If you needed ‘im, that meant you finally got ‘im. And if you got ‘im, that meant you had cards for flipping. We didn’t collect baseball cards for the sake of putting them under plastic in binders; we collected them for two reasons: one, to organize them one day by team, the next day by number, then by position (depth chart stuff) and so on; the other, to flip them during lunch and recess.

In Brooklyn, flipping was an art. You would hold your card waist high and, with a flick of the wrist, send it flipping front over back to the ground. If your card landed face up and his face down, you won the pot. When I moved upstate (that’s anyplace north of the Bronx to a resident of the boroughs or Long Island), I found a different flipping style; you held your cards like a dealer and flipped them over one atop the other. If your card covered your opponent’s card with the same color print, you won the pot. You’d be a fool to flip your single cards, so it was important to stockpile doubles so your losses wouldn’t hurt. The baseball card photos here are a little glimpse into the collection that has slept in my mother’s attic for so many years.

While my cards took me back to the playground at Mamaroneck Avenue School and the concrete benches behind the kickball field at Highlands School, the Autograph Book took me to a different kind of place, to my sometimes elusive connection with my father. His great-uncle was the team dentist for the Brooklyn Dodgers (don’t believe it? check out the letters from Branch Rickey and Chuck Dressen), and so he had a lot of exposure to the home team at Ebbets Field.

It’s amazing to me to see a single page with autographs from Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Cal Abrams, Rocky Bridges and Ralph Branca. Another with Carl Erskine, Carl Furillo and Gil Hodges, whose daughters went to OLHC with my older sisters; Mary Katherine even slept over at the Hodges house on East 25th Street.

Even cooler were the personal notes. If you look closely, you’ll see at the bottom of one page, “Hello Dan, Walter O’Malley.” There’s a typical “Best Wishes” note from Preacher Roe. On another page you can see a postcard that Pee Wee Reese sent to my father from the Dodgers’ spring training home in Vero Beach, FL. Inside the back cover of the book are some clippings from my father’s sandlot baseball career, which shows he was a darn good pitcher and hitter for whatever age group he played in. I don’t know if I ever knew that.

But who needs certainty? I have always loved my memory of my first baseball game, a Mets-Astros clash in the summer of ’71, in which Jim “The Toy Cannon” Wynn homered late in the game to lead the Astros to a 4-3 win.  A reality check, courtesy of ultimatemets.com, tells me that the game was a 5-1 Astros victory, and that the Mets were never in the game. But who needs facts when you’ve got memories?

So do a brutha a solid, and share some of your baseball card or autograph memories if you have a sec.