The week after my father bought me my first mitt, he took me to my first ballgame at the Polo Grounds to see how Major Leaguers played the game. I was hooked by the sheer beauty of the place before the game even started—the perfect green diamond of infield grass, the geometric base-paths, chalked baselines, just-groomed pre-game perfection of the infield dirt, the vast green outfield, 505 feet to dead center—the biggest center field there ever was.
The other thing that hooked me was the effortless way the Giants, in their cream-colored uniforms, loosened up playing catch with one another, flicking their wrists, sending the clean white balls arcing seventy or eighty feet through the air to teammates who plucked them down, transferred them to their throwing hands in one continuous motion and sent them sailing back with another little flick of the wrist. The ball my father and I played catch with had turned yellow and neither of us could make it sail through the air the way the Giants did.
When the game started, the batters stroked the ball, again with no apparent effort, and it sailed three hundred and three hundred fifty feet through the air, with a life of its own, to where some outfielder chased it down, caught it and tossed it back. Baseball is the most complex and interesting game to play, and the most beautiful to watch.
That day the Giants were playing the Pittsburgh Pirates with Arky Vaughan, Vince DiMaggio, Debs Garms and Lloyd Waner. I think Rip Sewell pitched, but it was before he got shot in the toe hunting and had to invent the “eephus ball.” My father thought ‘King’ Carl Hubbell would pitch for the Giants, but it was ‘Prince’ Hal Schumacher with Harry Danning catching, Babe Young on first, Mickey Witek on second, Billy Jurges at short, Burgess Whitehead at third and Mel Ott, JoJo Moore and Frank Demaree in the outfield. The Pirates won on a homer by Elbie Fletcher, as I recall.
That was just the first of over two hundred games I saw the Giants lose between 1940 when they finished sixth out of eight teams and 1951, when they won the pennant. Then in mid-1948 they fired Mel Ott (R.I.P. 1958) and brought in Leo Durocher (R.I.P. 1991) as manager. That was when things began to change.
To be continued in The Polo Grounds
Herb L
oldtimewriter.com
