Baseball isn't baseball anymore
It's that time of year again. Major League Baseball is in full swing. As for me, I think I'll just bunt.
Each spring a bit of that baseball spirit tries its damnedest to move me, for old time's sake. But it doesn't provide much more than a nudge.
I'm residing now in Lakeland, Florida....Winter Home of the Detroit Tigers! Yet I didn't make it out to a spring game.
Baseball just isn't what it used to be. For me, "used to be" was back in the late 1950's into the early 60's.
My father was a huge baseball fan. He devoured the box scores when the morning edition of the Des Moines Register arrived with it's trademark orange-tinted sports section.
My brother, Donnie, followed Dad's lead. He ate and drank baseball. He collected baseball trading cards and he slept in his baseball cap. He still owns a baseball that was given to him by an Iowa neighbor and was signed by Babe Ruth.
Donnie joined Little League as soon as he was old enough, back in the days when contests were played in late morning or early afternoon and there weren't a lot of vicious parents around to threaten the ump or ruin the game for the kids.
As we grew older, Donnie moved on to Pony League, then played American Legion baseball and as a young adult was pitcher for the Town Team in Fullerton, Nebraska. I always felt he had the talent to stay the course and eventually head for the big leagues.
Whether or not he had the desire has been left unanswered. During a Town Team game, a hard line drive shattered his pitching hand and retired him from the lineup. He didn't play ball after that.
My brother worshiped the Chicago White Sox. Dad's team was the Milwaukee Braves. When the franchise headed to Atlanta, Dad's heart went with it.
Some of that fanaticism was bound to rub off on the rest of the family.
Mom even grew to enjoy baseball and she got in the habit of listening to the local radio sportscast in the morning and writing down the scores of the previous night's games so when Dad came to the kitchen table for his coffee he could cop a fast glance at the outcomes of the late games that didn't make the newspaper deadline.
After Dad passed away, Mom continued to watch the Braves' games.
I never had the ability or the zeal to play organized baseball. But I always took part in the neighborhood sandlot games and loved it.
I knew by heart the batting lineups for the Braves, the White Sox, and the Minnesota Twins. That was in the days when the Twins was a young upstart team that was heir to the old Washington Senators club and had a power hitter named Harmon Killebrew and Jim Kaat was their pitcher. I remember when Kaat had his front teeth knocked out by a line drive.
Today, the only Major League names I recognize are the ones who have come under suspicion of taking steroids. Or those who just signed a multi-million dollar contract.
That's another thing, or maybe the biggest thing, that turns me away from baseball these days. The money. Not even so much the money, actually, as the greed that displaces the game itself.
In 1959, Warren Spahn was making something like $9,000 a year to pitch for Milwaukee. My dad was making more than that managing a fertilizer supply company in Emmetsburg, Iowa.
People like Spahn and Mantle and Drysdale and Aaron were every bit the household names that A-rod or Cabrera or Greinke is today. And they were known the country over without the benefit of cable TV or sports bars with satellite dishes that grab the signals from ESPN and ESPN2-222.
Those old guys just didn't make the deals that this generation's ball players are putting the ink to. But oh, how those fellas loved the game. They took what was offered and they played their hearts out.
For me, today's MLB has no grit, none of the glory of yesteryear. If you want to talk real baseball, you have to look up guys like Alan Brown, a friend of our family back in Nebraska. We call him Brownie and he used to play on the Oakland A's farm team with guys like Reggie Jackson and Gene Tennace.
Then there was a bartender over in Fullerton. His name was Bags Umstead and he played a lot of ball in his younger years and could instantly tick off just about any name and statistic relevant to baseball. Sporting a few drinks under his belt, he would show up on Sunday evenings for a Town Team game, just to offer his support.
Bags has been gone a long time now but if you hang around the home team dugout at Fullerton's baseball diamond on a breezy spring evening, you just might hear his normally quiet voice break into a rather inebriated bark: "C'mon, you guys! Look alive in there!"
Those were the days when love of the game was woven into the American fabric. That was when the voices of baseball were Dizzy Dean and PeeWee Reese and the still reliable Vin Scully. That's when it was a game.
It's just not like that anymore. Baseball is still referred to as America's Past time. But for true baseball fans, the emphasis is on that word "past".
Copyright by Wendel Potter
