Baseball as it used to be

My father was a Dodger fan.

A Brooklyn Dodger fan, to hear him tell it, though I never understood why the team’s move to Los Angeles in 1958 mattered to him so much. He never saw a game at Ebbets Field, and the only radio broadcasts he picked up in North Carolina in the early ’50s were courtesy of the Mutual Broadcasting System’s Game of the Day.

I don’t know that he ever heard Red Barber call a Dodger game; the voices he would have heard belonged to the Mutual announcers Al Helfer, Art Gleeson, Dizzy Dean and Gene Kirby.

But he heard Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett, and we went to five or six Dodger games every year when we lived in southern California. My dad saw a lot of Dodger Stadium in the ’60s, but the team never captured his heart. He was sentimental for Pee Wee Reese (that nickname came from shooting marbles) and Jackie Robinson and Carl Furillo (who probably should be in the Hall of Fame; he was at least as good as Enos Slaughter). And Dolph Camilli, who he remembered from before the war.

The Dodgers I watched had Maury Wills and Wes Parker, Koufax and Drysdale. They were magnificent in their way, a small-ball team built on pitching and speed, but they weren’t my favorite.

Maybe to break my father’s heart, I embraced the slugging Giants, who moved west to San Francisco the same year as the Dodgers, leaving New York City bereft, with only the Yankees for which to root. The Giants had Willie Mays and Willie McCovey and Orlando Cepeda and all three Alou brothers for a while. They had high-kicking Juan Marichal and a young pitcher named Gaylord Perry who I only knew about because my father had played American Legion ball with him and his older brother Jim in North Carolina.

That team also included an outfielder named Jimmie Hall who, when he came up to the Minnesota Twins in 1963, hit 33 home runs in his rookie season. My father always told me he broke the record held by Ted Williams, but there’s an asterisk to that: Rudy York (1933) and Hal Troksky Jr. (1937) had hit 35 in their first seasons, and Walt Dropo hit 34 as a rookie in 1950.

Hall set the record for a rookie who had no prior major league experience before the season in which he hit his home runs began. The other players had played a handful of major league innings before their official rookie years. (When your father tells you it’s a record, check it out.)

My father never presumed it, but I might suggest that if anyone is looking for the greatest American Legion of all time, they might start with the Williamston, N.C., team. Aside from the three future major leaguers, my father, who was the shortstop on that team, elected to join the Air Force rather than sign with the Phillies or the Yankees. For the first 10 years of his career his main job was to play for an Air Force team that traveled the world playing exhibitions.

Military baseball programs were gutted during the Vietnam era, but I still remember watching my father play shortstop for the Strategic Air Command. Much later I would play first base on a industrial league team

on which he was, in his 40s, still the star, a bit of a hot dog. I remember how he would hold the ball a split second longer than was necessary before firing it across the diamond. And though I know it is a physical impossibility for a thrown ball to rise after it’s attained the peak of its trajectory, I remember the snap in my triceps as I snagged those throws in the webbing of my mitt. He had an arm to the end.

I played until I found my level, and the step was too high. Then I mourned the career I was not to have and looked around for something I could do well enough to make my way in the world.

But like my dad, I never quit baseball, even though I don’t watch it much on television, and when we go to the Travelers games it’s on the nights they let the dogs come in. We sit on the berm and drink a beer and I mansplain to my patient wife, telling her to watch the second baseman when a ball is hit into the gap, while she holds the leashes. But there is something to the crack of wood and the dynamic geometry of the game (which you can’t get off TV) that seems to matter in ways that most human endeavors don’t.

Baseball has not been improved by efficiency experts. Sports science and analytics has obliterated the old superstitions and left us with a characterless game based on power and speed. Our old numbers have been exposed as meaningless metrics, the bunt and hit-and-run as frippery. There are but three true outcomes of an at-bat: the strikeout, the walk, and the home run. Bat speed and launch angle are more important than batting average.

And so the game is played more intelligently, but the product is inferior. Baseball was better un-distilled, when it was cloudy with vagaries, when we believed in black cat hexes and rising fastballs.

I have messed this up because I meant to write about a book, “The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City” by Kevin Baker, who wrote the text for the graphic novel “Luna Park,” and who has written extensively about the history of New York City.

For the past couple of weeks, I have steeped myself in this book, which is as much about the way New York became itself as it is a history of metropolitan baseball. Whether you buy into Baker’s conceit that New York has always been the center of the baseball universe, the book serves as a deep dive into the game’s first century or so, limning 19th-century baseball as a rough and provisional profession and giving us indelible mini-portraits of some of the game‘s most memorable characters, from box score inventor Henry Chadwick to the Thomas Chatterton-like James Creighton, a 19th-century player who was the first pitcher to “weaponize the ball” and who may have died at 21 as a direct result of his hitting a game-winning home run. (Probably not, Baker decides, but the legend abides.)

The stories of John McGraw, Babe Ruth, Casey Stengel, World Series fixer Arnold Rothstein and his business partner, Giants’ owner Charles Stoneham and dozens of others (not just baseball figures but politicians, Tammany Hall functionaries, Robert Moses and would-be German saboteurs so intoxicated by the city during World War II that they rat out their fellow operatives) are gracefully intertwined in a book that had only one major flaw: It stops short of those Dodgers my father loved, running out just before Jackie Robinson and the dominant ’50s Yankees teams of Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra come onstage. It covers the baseball I’ve only read about, and it has some revelations (I never realized the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium were just across the Harlem River from each other), but it’s mostly balm.

I wish my father could read it.