World Series evokes many fond memories

There was no such thing as a Super Bowl. The Grey Cup was nationwide inducement for a party for adults. The Stanley Cup was a thrilling but short, four-team tournament not fully televised and almost no one paid attention to basketball. Soccer was somewhat exotic but decidedly distant.

But even in Canada, we always had the World Series as a sporting beacon, the same World Series our fathers had before us and our sons will have after us.

When the Kansas City Royals welcome the New York Mets Tuesday night in baseball’s 111th World Series, all players will be instantly familiar to all fans, their statistics and measurable trends archived forever in data streams and their personalities Twittered into submission. But the World Series meant something different back when this fan was a kid, a truly meaningful week of all-afternoon television that often represented the one chance to see stars usually available to us only in papers and magazines.

The first World Series memory here is running out of school at final bell, reaching home minutes after Bill Mazeroski did when he hit his walk-off home run to beat the Yankees in 1960. My father passed along the news. His first World Series had arrived, via radio, in the late 1920s. Now, his grandson’s arrives in HD on his hand-held device. It’s the same show, though; it’s still 90 feet to first base and a ground ball in the hole still requires a strong throw to get the runner by a step.

It didn’t register at the time, but waiting at home plate that day in Pittsburgh, among the joyous Pirates intent on pounding congratulations into Mazeroski’s back, was a backup infielder named Dick Schofield. Now fast-forward 33 years, as the Toronto Blue Jays prepared to play host to the Philadelphia Phillies in what somehow remains the most recent local World Series. A part-time Blue Jay infielder named Dick Schofield — the son of that one-time Pirate — was asked about his dad and 1960.

“I don’t know how many times I’ve seen that tape. I expect I’ll see it again this weekend,’’ Dick II said. “If you look closely, down in the corner, one of the guys waiting for Mazeroski is my dad. He’s No. 11. I see him every time I see that tape.

“Who knows?” Schofield added. “Maybe someone will hit a home run in the ninth inning and I’ll be out there and in the picture.”

Eight or nine days later, after Joe Carter had touched them all, who was out there in the knot of happy humanity at home plate? Dick Schofield Junior, who had suggested that very possibility in a throwaway line, then watched it come true.

What was it someone said about the World Series and fathers and sons? Try another chapter from that book, albeit one that doesn’t quite possess the same happy ending. It features a colourful right-hander named Louis Newsom, known only as Bobo, mostly because he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) remember names and referred to any and all of his fellow citizens as just that: Bobo.

Bobo was traded five times, released and/or purchased 14 times, pitched in the big leagues until he was 46 and won 211 games (and lost 222). He mostly pitched for lousy teams; he had five separate stints with the Washington Senators, which caused him once to remark, “I’ve had more terms here than President Roosevelt.”

In 1940, with Detroit, he imported his father, a farmer from Swift Creek, S.C., with the glorious name of Quilline Bufkin Newsom, to see him pitch the first game of the World Series. Bobo’s Tigers beat the Reds 7-2. It was the second game Quilline ever saw his son pitch. Alas, it also was the last. Quilline suffered a heart attack that evening and expired in his hotel room.

Heartbroken, Bobo shipped Quilline home and, through tears, shut out the Reds on three hits to win the Series’ fifth game. So good was he that the Tigers then summoned him back on one day’s rest to pitch the seventh game. He threw a complete game but lost 2-1. (And some people contend David Price was abused because he was asked to pitch a little bit of relief between starts.)

Not to leave Bobo on such a down note. By the early 1960s, he had wrangled himself a job as a colour commentator for the San Francisco Giants, who engaged the Yankees in the 1962 Series. After one game in New York, Bobo was invited to join a baseball crowd at Toot Shor’s legendary saloon. In attendance happened to be baseball writers Red Smith from New York, Lyall Smith from Detroit, Harry Jones from Cleveland, plus Pirates general manager Joe L. Brown and his Hollywood comedian father, Joe E. Brown.

When Bobo joined the party his travelling companion, recognizing the opportunity, set up formal introductions with tongue in cheek: “Bobo, I’m not sure you know all these gentlemen. This is Mr. Smith, Mr. Smith, Mr. Brown, Mr. Brown and Mr. Jones.”

“Oh, hell,” Bobo said. “If there ain’t nobody gonna give their right names, I ain’t neither.” Retired Star sports columnist Dave Perkins blows the dust off his keyboard occasionally.