Baseball in the Dadtime: Our Pastime's Past Time

Editor's Note: Here at the House of Georges, Cecil and I recently decided that we'd grown tired of listening to Old No. 7 do all the baseball talking. Once we discovered our agreement on the matter, we wrangled up the idea that, sure, when he be talkin', we be shuttin' up; then he leave, we be talkin' again. And so we collaborated, and produced this gem of an e-mail exchange. If you have, or at one time had a) a father, b) a goose-bumpy feeling about the game of baseball, c) a yearning for Old No. 7 to stop talking about it, or some combination of the above, you just might dig on what we came up with.

Bankmeister: I've spoken with Old No. 7 about what, as kids in our generation, we grew up knowing as America's pastime. In our piecemeal conversations, we've agreed that, for the percentage of sports/former baseball fans of the world that soured with the '94 strike/non-existent salary cap/poor management of profit sharing/steriod use, some of them seem to be coming back around on the game. I'd include myself in that category, and I know that you grew up a big baseball fan, too.

What really got me thinking about this subject was your post on the House of Georges that mentioned how 2/3 of the House rolls fatherless. I played ball for 11 years, and came out of the womb a Kansas City Royals fan, 100 percent of which I attribute to my late father. I'd argue that most anyone that knows you would recognize your devotion to the Chicago Cubs. I assume, based on your Denver residency, that you follow the Rockies as well. Tell me about your love for the game, how it developed, and to what extent, if any, you'd pay homage to your late father for said love.

Cecil: I definitely fit that category.

My dad was a lot older than my friend's dads. He was 50 when I was born, in '74. He grew up in California, which at the time didn't have major league baseball, but listened to Cardinals games on the radio -- the Gashouse Gang were his favorites. Ducky Medwick, Pepper Martin, aka "The Wild Horse of the Osage," the Dean brothers, Leo The Lip. His style was dust-covered glovework, small ball, try-harders sliding with spikes up. It was appropriate, since that's how he was as a man -- not gifted athletically, small, but tough as a $2 steak.

As a young child, I loved to play more than watch. The Cubs '84 run was what really did it to me as a fan. I was born in Chicago, and Dad had grown to appreciate the losers on the North Side during our family's tenure there, despite his longtime appreciation of the St. Louis franchise. Before that, my connection to the pro game stopped at the minors with the Denver Bears. I was rooting on Andre Dawson and Tim Raines long before I knew anything about the National League.




He taught me how to play the game. As a tot I'd put on my brother's old Catfish Hunter model glove, which was about three hands too large, and Dad would wing a softball at me.

Once it just smacked me right in the face. Coordination wasn't my strong suit, and sadly, neither was playing baseball. But I tried. I played every summer until he finally went to the hospital for good, sick with Lou Gehrig's disease to the point he couldn't even smoke anymore. Then I just stopped playing altogether.

But oddly, my love and appreciation of the game grew. I would create imaginary players and concoct for them imaginary careers, complete with lifetime statistics. I'd stay up late calculating dream-world batting averages and ERAs. I'd watch every Cubs game, devour each breathless issue of Vine Line. I remember watching Rafael Palmeiro's first game, watching Greg Maddux as a rook. I cheered every one of Andre Dawson's 49 dongs in '87. As dad faded out, baseball faded in.

I went to one big league game with Dad. It was at the old Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego. It was a huge, empty concrete edifice and he was in his wheelchair at that point, so the memory itself is bittersweet.

But I can't go to a Rockies game -- and yes, despite my loyalties, I do root root root for the home team, as long they aren't playing the baby bears -- without thinking how much he would have loved that park. And remembering how much he loved the game.

B: What a picture. I had no idea you followed Andre Dawson and Tim Raines before they were in the bigs. Total bragging rights. Strangely, those names remind me of one of many baseball traditions I had with my dad. The first one that comes to mind is Topps Sticker Book albums. I loved baseball cards, too, but as a youngster, the cards took a back seat to the sticker books.

I was four and getting ready to thrill the ladies as a kindergarten, mixmastering -- I'm infamously known as the guy that (allegedly with deliberation and repetition) scratched Jill Henderson's Grease record as she played it for Show-and-Tell -- awkward ball of nerd when my folks announced they were splitting up. Part of their deal was that dad would pick me up from school. Most days, he'd take me to my buddy Jason Smith's house, but not before a trip to the Shop N' Go to pick up a packet of stickers.

For those that don't know, the sticker books had the American and National Leagues split up; the sections contained an alphabetized arrangement of each team. Each team had a page, the page was arranged like a baseball diamond with stats and figures around it. The background, naturally, would be a cool image of a key player, like Mike Schmidt fielding a chopper at third on the Phillies page. Each packet came with five stickers, and dad and I would apply them to their appropriate spots, i.e. a shot of Terry Kennedy squatting behind the box on the Padres page. My first album was from the '81-'82 season. At the back of each volume, there were pages for the previous year's post-season. That year was a doozy because the previous post-season was Phillies/'Stros (in their old, bad-ass unis) and Royals/Yanks, the one time out of four in five years that the Royals eliminated the Bombers, and diligently I might add, with broomage.

But there were dramatic pictures of each series and, then a double-page layout for the championship. It was awesome. I almost never got Royals either, which, in hindsight, really helped me learn players from other teams, like Raines and Dawson, back when the Expos kicked ass. My dad built this trunk that I inherited. We plastered it with all the doubles I got and, ironically, there's a few handsome stickers on it like an old Texas Rangers third baseman, guy who calls himself Buddy Bell, not to mention Pete Rose, Phil Niekro, Steve Garvey, Fernando Valenzuela, Jose Cruz and Willie Stargell, just to name a few.

I'm interested to know about Vine Line. Also, what can you tell me about your progression of fandom, if any, once your father was gone? How did it fare in the 90s? Do sons and fathers today share the bonding that baseball awarded us with ours?

C: Sticker albums, huh? That's odd -- for some reason, I don't recall sticker albums at all. And that was the kind of thing I would have just devoured.

All my life I've liked making lists, looking at stats, the kind of brain-numbed semi-autism that marks a baseball fan -- or just a nerd, whichever. Sticker albums would have been right in my wheelhouse. I collected cards.

I still have almost all of them. I sold a few to a collector, a real fat scumbag piece of dogshit, who paid me the handsome sum of $8. Among the few I sold were the Bo Jackson and Mark McGwire Topps Future Stars cards, along with a whole passel of interesting and old stuff. I can't recall why I wanted the cash, but that was right around the time I discovered drugs, so...

Every once in a while I dig them out. They are all still in the two metal filing boxes that dad gave me to store them in. Somewhere, decades back, I scotch-taped Doug Bair, Skip Lockwood and Cliff Johnson -- names otherwise lost to baseball history -- to the inside lid of one box, and there they remain to this day. Skip, in particular, looks like a guy having a bad day. Maybe because he was a grown man whom people still called "Skip."

Ah, and Vine Line. The Cubs fan mag. It's still around, still spreading the hyped-up North Side gospel to eager little fanboys and fangirls who don't get enough puffery from WGN. I can only assume it's chock-a-block with testimonials from old heads who drive to HoHoKam from Saskatchewan, with breathless descriptions of the next minor league star! on the way to the big club (Alex Arias was one from my day -- give him a Google and see how that worked out, Hall of Fame-wise), with fawning personality profiles of this generation's Damon Berryhill or Rick Wrona. I kept my subscription until maybe '89 or '90. Then I told my Mom she could go ahead an cancel, because I wasn't really reading it anymore.



Those were the dark days of my baseball fandom. The Cubs run to the division title in '89 was the last real baseball series I got into for several years, and definitely the last one I consider having shared with Dad. He was fully immobile by that point, dependent on machines for each breath. Both of us watched Will Clark hit that goddamn grand slam, but neither of us let it really hurt the way it might have, I don't think. Partly because, unlike '84, there was never a sense that that team was somehow charmed...and partly because, well, real life was doing a good enough job of hurting everyone by then.

Throughout the '90s I paid attention...but not so much. I enjoyed talking and reading roundball history, going to Rockies games and harassing Lou Piniella with ol' No. 7 and his then-girlfriend following a 3-hour rain delay at Coors, but I didn't feel the soulful connection I once did.

My rekindling came post-strike, but very, very slowly. And, despite his personal ridiculousness, I can thank Stanolzolol Sammy for that. His run against McGwire in '98 not only gave me -- along with everyone else in the damn country -- a "hero" to root for. A non-McGwire, who even then I thought of as nothing more than a bulked-up Dave Kingman. Sure, everyone was dirty. But just spending that one summer getting back into the timeless rhythm, trading 'did you see what Sammy did last night?' with friends and co-workers, that was enough. And you know what else? Fantasy baseball. Seriously. I remember reading about the first rotisserie leagues and thinking: "that's me." And it was. I would have murdered fools in those things as a youth. Stats were my allies. Adulthood has weakened my grip on each and every major league player, but the simple act of researching and building a team is kind of a childhood dream made real. Kind of real, anyway.

I don't think there's that connection with kids, their dads and baseball anymore. Football is where that father/son connect went, from afternoons at the ballyard to watching the NFL at home on Sundays. My guess as to why is the same one I've heard all over: that baseball is an older game, from an older generation, and the guys that love it the most now are the children of the WW2 and Korea vets, the boomers who remember the last catch they had with their Dad. I'm no boomer, but fit that general stereotype...so, I dunno. Whatever the reason, it feel sad that this American legacy -- kids and their dads and baseball and the infield fly rule and popcorn and that glorious, treasured history -- is slowly turning ghostly. But at the same time, I feel duty-bound to do my part as a potential future parent to carry it on.

B: Interesting. I love your take on baseball in the 90s, mostly because you summed it up well, the soulfullessness, etc. That was me all over the place. I'm not sure how long sticker albums were around. I only had two volumes; the next year was such a disappointment, what with Yankees/As and Dodgers/Expos gracing most of the post-season pages, the Royals eliminated early by Oakland.

There were still some badass stickers in those pages, though: Dusty Baker, Ron Cey, Pedro Guerrero, Steve Sax, Fernie V. (damn, those guys were loaded), not to mention Goose Gossage, Ron Guidry, Rickey Henderson, Raines, Dawson, Chris Speier, and, one of my all-time favorite catchers, Gary Carter. That would be the end of sticker books, and immediate baseball with dad, though, as my mom's new marriage took us to Atlanta, where my pops and I prayed for three years for a Royals/Braves World Series.

That's when I started playing ball, though. I was tiny, and I was terrible. By the time we moved back (three years later), dad and I began frequenting the cages where I was finally convinced about keeping my head down and my eye on the ball. He also helped me master the trapping of grounders and perfecting my slide -- I'll never forget how ridiculously proud he was of my first steal, and consequential strawberry.

Ironically, our first year back in KC was '85. He took my sister and I out of school and we had front-row standing spots for the ticker-tape, championship parade. The following year, he took me on a tour of the dugout; I got to meet George Brett, Bret Saberhagen and Buddy Biancalana. That summer, lots of the players would come into the bar he tended (one of three jobs he had at the time), and I would skateboard up there on Saturday afternoons, one of which I shared nachos with Charlie Liebrandt and Joe Beckwith.

In the early/mid 80s, we saw lots of games together. He had this ridiculous, gruff cheer for Willie Wilson that involved him hollering Wilson's first name six times, real fast and real loud. We used to make fun of fat Willie Aikens, chuckle at U.L. Washington's toothpick and stare awestruck at the bats of Brett, Amos Otis, and the glove of Frank White, whom he so unpolitically correctly called "Ain'tso." Dad wanted so bad to get me a souvenir game ball, he once dove over two rows of seats (a real treat on the ol' rib cage) and caught a foul ball in the pit of his elbow. As he was trying to gather himself, some punks snatched it from his arm. He was so pissed that he tried to chase them down, got a beer thrown on him and wound up getting ejected from the stands. Good times. Those days were certainly my baseball haydays.

I still followed ball a bit as the 90s rolled around, but my interest faded quickly. The Royals were terrible, the Yankees and the Braves were boring, and I too, had discovered drugs, and women, and football had all but taken over as my main passion. It wasn't until I returned to Kansas City again (six-plus years in the Centennial State) and again reunited with my father and with baseball. I barely knew anyone on the roster, but I quickly learned as we again resumed attending games.

I'll never forget my last game at The K with my dad. I was panicking in my basement as he honked in my drive way. My Royals hat, the only one I'd ever owned, was missing. To this day, I have no idea what happened to it, but he bought me a new one that night, and it was a magical evening, too. A team known as the Baltimore Orioles was in town, Cal Ripken, Jr.'s last game in Kansas City. There was a massive pre-game deal, extra programs, tributes, etc. I'm sure other parks did the same, but this one was pretty darn cool. The stands were full, and they flickered and flashed with every pitch he faced.

I never in a million years would've imagined that would be my last game with my dad, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. I suppose being back in Kansas City and experiencing baseball with my dad again is what rejuvenated me on the game. I can't help but recall the countless afternoon and evening games of mine in which he corrected my hitting stance from behind the backstop, how elated he was to witness my one career homerun, my lone all-star game appearance (separate occasions, of course).

It does feel sad that it's turning ghostly. I too, feel duty-bound, though, and look forward to continuing a tradition I'm proud to have been a part of.