Family night on diamond
Oldtime game honors Herald’s Harris
Editor’s note: Herald columnist Steve Buckley is one of the organizers of the Oldtime Baseball Game, the 25th edition of which was played last night at St. Peter’s Field in Cambridge.
I have this vague memory of Steve Harris standing near the right field corner at St. Peter’s Field, looking more like he was waiting for a bus than watching his son play in the Oldtime Baseball Game.
“Yes, that’s what he always did,” said Jack Harris. “He’d stand way off in the distance. That’s just how he was. He was always easy to find.”
No screaming at the umps? No arguing with the coaches about playing time? No awkward conversations with other parents?
“No,” said Jack. “He wasn’t one of those hockey dads.”
Steve Harris was a hockey writer, and a darned good one. He covered the Bruins for the Herald for some 30 years, always as a throwback, just-the-facts beat guy who preferred the on-ice ballet to the off-ice soap operas. As a dad, then, watching his sons Jack and Mat play baseball, football and hockey, he’d find a corner and stay there.
Back in 2008, Steve asked if Jack could play in the Oldtime Baseball Game, our quirky, Cambridgebased summertime hardball cotillion. Sure, we said. Jack would go on to play in three editions of the game — 2008, ’09 and ’10 — before moving on to Merrimack College, where he concentrated on football. But those three appearances in our game made it his game, for keeps.
So when Steve died earlier this year, the decision made itself: The 2018 Oldtime Baseball Game would be played in his memory, and as a fundraiser for the American Heart Association.
And since this game is Jack’s game, we invited him back to play last night — and to wear the 1967 St. Louis Cardinals, No. 32 Steve Carlton uniform he wore in 2008. As for Steve’s younger son, Mat, now playing hockey at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, we invited him to play as well, decking him out in a 1957 Milwaukee Braves uniform with Warren Spahn’s No. 21 on the back. Kathy Harris, Steve’s wife and the mother of their two boys, threw out the first pitch.
That’s the story, right there, of the 2018 Oldtime Baseball Game.
Make no mistake: It was a huge thrill to see Bruins legend Rick Middleton, whose No. 16 will be retired this season, show up at St. Peter’s Field just to catch that first pitch from Kathy Harris.
Make no mistake: It was a huge thrill to see ageless Lou Merloni, the former Red Sox infielder, climb into an 1890s Boston Beaneaters uniform and make his 11th appearance.
Make no mistake: It was a huge thrill to see former Red Sox knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, garbed in the uniform of a fabled Negro Leagues team called the Chicago American Giants, make his first mound appearance since 2011.
Make no mistake: It was a huge thrill to see NHL Hall of Famer Ray Bourque, who was also quite a baseball player growing up in Quebec, take the field wearing the uniform of the 1930s Boston Royal Giants, an independent Negro Leagues team.
Bourque was given a uniform with No.7 on the back, because it’s the number he wore during his early days with the Bruins before handing it over to Phil Esposito during one of the most famous pregame ceremonies in Boston sports history.
The plan was to have Bourque wear his old-time uniform number in the Oldtime Baseball Game. And he did, until he undid his shirt during last night’s pregame ceremony at St. Peter’s Field and revealed a second shirt — this one flashing No.77. For the second time in Bourque’s life, he made a very public transformation from No.7 to No.77, the difference this time being that he didn’t hand the old number to Espo. He handed it to an on-the-field live auction, with proceeds going to the American Heart Association.
And then Ray Bourque stepped up to the plate to face Tim Wakefield, and ripped a single off the knuckleballer. That could only happen at the Oldtime Baseball Game.
Again: All that stuff was cool. It’s stuff people who were in attendance last night will remember for a long, long time.
But this game was all about the Harris family, and for the simple reason that they’ve had an ownership stake since that night in 2008 when Jack took the field in that ’67 Cardinals uniform.
That’s how we roll.