Take me out to Opening Day
My grandmother Kotryna, or Katherine, with her rosy cheeks and whitehaired bun, was a warmhearted and pious woman who lived for holy days of obligation, circled on her religious calendar, and for the early Sunday Mass celebrated in Lithuanian at St. Casimir’s church on Pittsburgh’s South Side.
I loved and respected my grandmother, but in the early 1950s I buried her twice even though she was still alive. Needing an excuse after playing hooky to watch the my hometown team play on Opening Day, the next day I returned to school with an obviously forged note from my mother, asking my doubting home room teacher to excuse “Dickie, because he had to attend his grandmother’s funeral.”
My father took me to my first Pirates game in 1948 when I was nine years old, but I didn’t go to my first Pirates home opener until 1953, when I was old enough to go by myself. I also had the good fortune of being born on April 14, or about the date the Pirates opened the season in those days, so I had my birthday money to buy a ticket. I usually spent a dollar to sit in the left-field bleachers — but for Opening Day, I splurged and spent a dollar-forty for a general admission ticket.
My first Pirates home opener was on April 16, 1953, against the Phillies. To my good fortune, it was one of the wildest home openers in Pirates history and, to my misfortune, one of the coldest and wettest. The recorded attendance for the game was only 16,220, the lowest since World War II.
As snow fell, the Pirates trailed 2-1 early, scored seven runs in the bottom of the fourth, then gave up nine runs in the top of the fifth. Down 11-8, the Pirates scored six runs in the bottom of the fifth and held on for a 14-12 victory. It was an error-plagued game where the Pirates and the Phillies tried to field and throw balls with frozen fingers, while the few hundred of us who stayed to the end of the game wondered if we would ever regain feeling in our toes. There was a photo the next day of a Pirate player lifting a snow-covered tarp to look at the grass underneath.
The Pirates were horrible in 1952, losing 112 games. But as Hall of Fame pitcher Early Wynn once said, “You know that when you win the first one, you can’t lose them all.” That was especially true for the Pirates, who went on to lose 105 games in 1953.
I went to the Pirates home opener the next year under sunny skies and watched the Pirates, trailing 2-0 in the bottom of the eighth, rally against the Phillies’
Hall of Fame pitcher Robin Roberts for four runs and a 4-2 victory. That was my last home opener because in 1955 and 1956, my junior and senior years in high school, I was busy practicing with the South High Orioles baseball team on my way, so I thought, to playing for the Pirates on Opening Day.
I didn’t attend another home opener for over 50 years, but I’ve always looked forward to Opening Day. Yankee great Joe DiMaggio said that Opening Day is an annual celebration, like a “birthday party.” It’s also a day rich in tradition. One hundred years ago there was no NFL, no NBA, no March Madness, and no American teams in the NHL — but baseball had established Opening Day as an informal national holiday thanks to an enterprising business manager and the corpulent 27th President ofthe United States.
In 1895, Frank Bancroft, business manager for the Cincinnati Reds, decided to celebrate Opening Day with a parade and he mayor throwing out the first ball. The celebration, designed to honor the 1869 Red Stockings — the first all-professional baseball team — caught on, and it eventually became a tradition that the Reds would open every season at home.
Then on Opening Day for the Washington Senators in 1910, President William Howard Taft threw out the first ball to famed pitcher Walter Johnson, and starting another tradition that extended into the 21st century. When I saw my first Pirates home opener in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower threw out the first ball in Washington — but the president I most closely identified with on Opening Day was the ambidextrous Harry Truman, who attended the most Washington home openers of any president and in 1950threw out two balls, one with each hand.
But the most compelling reason of all that we celebrate Opening Day may be the simplest: It happens every spring.
While football, basketball and hockey begin in the fall, when the days are getting shorter and a cold winter is approaching, baseball begins when the days are getting longer and life is beginning to renew itself. Every spring baseball fans head out to ballparks on Opening Day with the hope that this season their teams will fulfill their winter dreams of winninga pennant and a World Series.
Of course, if you’re a Pirates fan, you’re likely dreaming of a season when the Pirates don’t lose 100 games. Joe Garagiola, who was the Pittsburgh catcher in that frigid 1953 home opener, claimed that the his Pirates were the worst team in baseball history: “We clinched last place on Opening Day ... duringthe singing of the national anthem.”
This year will mark the tenth anniversary of the season the Pirates broke a major-sports record of 20 consecutive losing seasons, on their way to their first post-season games since Sid Bream’s slide in 1992. Former Pirate A. J. Burnett will throw out the ceremonial first ball to former Pirate Russell Martin, both instrumental to the success of that 2013 team.
This home opener will also sadly mark the 50th anniversary of the first game the Pirates played without Roberto Clemente. Then Manager Bill Virdon said, “you kept looking in right field and he wasn’t there.”
The pre-game ceremonies, usually festive, were a somber affair in 1973, with National League President Warren Giles presenting Clemente’s Gold Glove award to his widow, Vera, who attended with her three children and Clemente’s mother. Pirates announcer Bob Prince then gave Clemente’s number-21 jersey to a tearful Vera — a number that would never be worn again by a Pirate.
The bleakness of the ceremonies carried over into the game, with Steve Blass giving up five runs in the first five innings against the Cardinals and their ace, Bob Gibson. But, trailing 5-2 in the bottom of the eighth, the Pirates scored five runs with two outs and went on to a 7-5 victory.
The 1973 season would be a disaster for the Pirates, but on that Opening Day of April 6, 1973, 51,695 fans — the largest recorded attendance at that point in Three Rivers Stadium history — had their spirits lifted after a a winter marked by tragedy. And you couldn’t blame fans if they claimed that they saw an angel in the outfield helping the Pirates win that day.