When I was in college back in the early 1970s, I knew a student who was a real left-wing radical, an admirer of Chairman Mao. He talked about wanting to live in Cuba, and hoped he’d live long enough to see a Communist revolution in the United States.
His father was a Republican, and you won’t be surprised to learn that he didn’t get along very well with his parents. But he told me he could still talk to his Dad about Willie Mays, who they both admired. I have no idea what happened to him.
But I don’t find it the least surprising that he could still relate to his father over baseball. There was something about the game back them that somehow made it part of our DNA.
People, even very casual fans, often have moments seared into their memories like iconic photographs. I don’t remember the names of all my high school teachers, but I will never forget skipping school as a senior half a century ago and seeing Denny McLain, pitching his 31st victory that year, deliberately allow Mickey Mantle to hit a home run.
That was the last time Mantle ever batted in Tiger Stadium. I think everyone in the ball park knew what happened, though sportswriters at the time were too shocked to write it.
That was just not done in baseball. But every fan has some such moment. Detroit’s Bernie Carbo, who later became a hairdresser in Wyandotte, was a minor player on the 1975 Boston Red Sox. But in the sixth game of that year’s World Series, he got a pinch-hit home run which sent that game into extra innings. Today, many think that was the single greatest baseball game of all time. Baseball has its dramatic moments and heroes, but it really is a mirror of American life.
Many games have long stretches of time in which they are relatively uneventful, even boring. Bernie Carbo’s abilities were lessened and his life ruined by drug addiction – though he later straightened out, became a religious Christian and started a baseball ministry.
Denny McLain, the only pitcher in the last 84 years to win 30 games in a season, got involved with gamblers, had his career cut short, and later went to prison twice.
There have been baseball players who were fine people, and others, like Ty Cobb, who was great on the field but who was a vicious racist and a rabidly nasty human being.
Baseball always has changed with the times, but I worry that the game is losing many of the things that made it great. There are too many teams and too many rounds of playoffs, which tends to make the regular season more and more irrelevant.
Teams don’t keep the same players long enough for fans to really relate to them. The Detroit Tigers who won that 1968 World Series essentially were together more than a decade. When that team first offered Al Kaline a salary of $100,000 a year, he said he didn’t deserve that much. Today, the average player makes $4 million a year. Something’s wrong here.
These days, I go to maybe one game a year. But when I get up in the morning, I look to see how the Tigers did the night before. They are pretty lousy now. But they are still in my DNA.
