Take me back to that ballgame
No sport relies on memory more than baseball. Our love of the game is rooted in seemingly perfect memories from ballgames past. There’s that first game we saw at Forbes Field, Three Rivers or PNC Park and that opening day when we played hooky and returned to school the next day with a fake note claiming we had attended our grandmother’s funeral.
And there are those wonderful memories of watching slugger Ralph Kiner launch home runs into Forbes Field’s Greenberg Gardens when there was little else to thrill us, and dramatic World Series home runs by Bill Mazeroski, Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell that transformed Pittsburgh into a baseball heaven.
My own memory of going to my first Pirates game with my father is so emotionally powerful that, several years ago, on a visit to the BaseballHall of Fame, I asked Tim Wiles, the director of research at the National Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown, New York, if he could find the box score of my first game. In my memory it was played between the Pirates and the Cincinnati Reds in the spring of 1948, when I was 9 years old. The Pirates won that game 8-4, and Ralph Kiner hit two home runs off Reds’ ace pitcher, the side-windingEwell Blackwell.
When I opened an envelop from Tim Wiles a few weeks after my visit to Cooperstown, to my amazement, I found a summary and box score for a game played May 2, 1948, at Forbes Field between the Pirates and the Reds. In that game, Ralph Kiner hit two home runs in his first two times at bat off Ewell Blackwell in a 6-4 Pirates victory, not 8-4 as I had remembered it.
With the summary and box score in front of me, I became that 9-year-old kid again waiting with his father at the South Side entrance to the Brady Street Bridge until we boarded the 77/54 Bloomfield to take us out to Forbes Field. In my mind’s eye, I could see that kid looking out at the river as the streetcar clattered its way across the bridge and turned onto Forbes Avenue and feeling that the “Flying Fraction” was moving in slow motion and would never get to the ballpark.
I could see, once the street car finally let us off at Bouquet Street, my father taking me by the hand as we crossed over Forbes Avenue and joined the crowd approaching the towering façade of Forbes Field. But that’s the moment when my memory takes an odd turn. Instead of getting in line, buying our tickets and entering what would become the pleasure palace of my youth, I remembermy father taking me across thestreet to the Home Plate Cafe.
My memory of sitting on a bar stool in the Home Plate Cafe, nursing a Coke and gazing in awe at photos of Pirate legends while my father drank his draft of Iron City Beer is as clear and vivid to me as watching Kiner’s home runs. But that summary and box score, that Hall of Fame validation of my nearly perfect memory of my first game tells me I’m wrong, that I may have sat with my father at the Home Plate Cafe but not on May 2, 1948, because it was Sunday and Pennsylvania “blue laws” prohibited the sale of alcohol on Sunday.
I also discovered my memory of seeing Kiner’s home runs sail through a perfectly sunny blue sky was also wrong. The game summary told me that Kiner hit two home runs in the first game of a doubleheader that was played under gloomy skies and a steady rain. As for that second game, it was rained out. My memory of my first Pirates game was perfect when it came to Kiner’s home runs, but not so perfect when it came to the rain falling as those home runs sail out of Forbes Field.
Several months after seeing Kiner hit those two home runs at my first Pirates game, I found a 1948 A.J. Raff baseball board game under our Christmas tree. That game brought me so much joy as I waited until next year and a new baseball season that, several decades later, when the Post-Gazette’s goodness section invited readers to send in stories of the greatest gifts, I sent my story of that baseball board game because I believed my memory of the details of that game were as intense and pure as my memory of going to my first Pirates game.
I remembered my long lost game was made of wood, was about 2 feet square in dimensions and was painted to resemble a Major League field. The outfield was ringed off with diminishing areas for singles, doubles and triples and had small pockets of green marked off in deep left and right center for home runs. I also remembered the foul areas, where the autographs of National and American League players, including Ralph Kiner, had been printed in white.
I had no Tim Wiles to validate my memory of that board game, but goodness editor Bob Batz Jr. searched and found one of those board games for sale online. When my story appeared in the Post-Gazette, he included a postscript and a photo of that game.
This past Christmas, my cherished board game, thanks to my family, was under the tree, as it was more than 70 years ago. Much like my memory of my first Pirates game, I had a near-perfect memory of the details of the game, but, with one stunning exception. When I looked for Ralph Kiner’s autograph, it wasn’t there.
Instead, there were autographs of two other Pirates, shortstop Stan Rojek and third baseman Frankie Gustine, both in the lineup May 2, 1948. Known as the “Happy Rabbit” because of his protruding front teeth and his quickness, Rojek was in his first year with the Pirates after coming from the Dodgers.
An All-Star in 1948, Gustine was regarded, at the time, as the most popular player in Pittsburgh since Pie Traynor, although he was traded at the end of the season to the Cubs. Two years after he retired in 1950, Gustine opened a popular restaurant and bar just blocks from Forbes Field.
Lawrence Ritter, in the preface to his classic oral history, “The Glory of Their Times,” wrote that he was skeptical of what ballplayers from the early days of baseball told him about their glory days. so he poured through record books and newspapers and found that the events they remembered took place exactly as described, almost without exception. And where something had been added, “the embellishments were those of the artist. They served to dramatize a point, to emphasize a contrast, or to reveal a truth.”
Ritter’s belief that memory is creative also holds true for my life as a baseball fan.
The reason my memory changed rain into sunshine that day at Forbes Field and added Ralph Kiner’s autograph to my board game is that it enhanced two of the most important events in my life as a fan and dramatized and enriched those moments.
I think the same holds true for baseball. While much has been written about the boring play of today’s game, baseball’s appeal, with apologies to Analytics, goes far beyond statistics and tendencies. It’s also a game with a mythic origin and a history of epic rivalries and tales, sometimes tall, of the triumph and tragedy of heroes.
But, more than anything, baseball is the story of generations of parents passing along their love of baseball to their children by taking them to their first games — a story that is being repeated this spring at ballparks around America.
Richard “Pete” Peterson — peteball2@yahoo.com — is a native of Pittsburgh and a retired English professor at Southern Illinois University. He is the author of “Growing Up With Clemente and Pops: The Willie Stargell Story” and the co-author, with his son Stephen, of “The Slide: Leyland, Bonds and the Star-Crossed Pittsburgh Pirates” and “The Turnpike Rivalry: The Pittsburgh Steelers and Cleveland Browns.