"You'll play better if you're clean."

In June, 2006, I retired from a thirty-two year career as an English teacher.  In August of 2006, I became a museum educator at the Baseball Hall of Fame.  That seemed a logical, and incredibly fortuitous, extension of my then fifty-three years on a baseball field, years that included time as a player and coach at Syracuse University and  a high school, college and international baseball umpire. The position with the Hall of Fame was a fortunate juxtaposition of the two things I know most about – education and baseball.

Most men who have been involved with baseball trace their knowledge of the essential elements of the game to their fathers, and I am among that number.  My father taught me respect for the game and respect for myself as a player. He taught me how to do a pop-up slide and how to catch a ground ball properly with two hands.

He taught me that throwing my glove on the ground after an error (this as a college freshman) not only made me look ridiculous, but also was insulting to the game itself. Respect for the game was an important theme in our household, more important than statistical values by a long shot.  That class, on and off the field, was essential  was one of the “life lessons” of baseball. 

The revelation of the existence of baseball traces to my grandmother, who, when I asked “what’s that?” pointing to a group of young men in the far distance from our front yard,  simply said that it was a baseball game.  I had no idea what that actually meant, though it would become abundantly clear in time.

The spiritual connection, the tie between baseball, me and some greater reality, stems as much from my mother as from any other source.  If the poetic subtlety of the game, the simplicity that defines the game and should define life, could be condensed in a few words, those words might be my mother’s, telling me that because I was dirty from playing baseball all day, I needed to take a shower before putting on my freshly washed  uniform for that night’s little league game – “You’ll play better if you’re clean.”

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As a part of my association with the Baseball Hall of Fame, my immediate supervisor, James Yasko,  suggested we museum educators form a book group.  His first suggested reading was Praying for Gil Hodges, Thomas Oliphant’s memoir centered on the 1955 World Series.  It didn’t take much reading for me to recall the significance of 1955, a year that included two events that I had never tied together but were clearly part of  my baseball “essence.”

On a spring day in 1955, I was walking home from school at lunchtime when my father pulled his car alongside me.   He was seldom home at lunchtime, so I was startled when he pulled over and signaled me to get in. This was not good, I thought.  My foreboding worsened when I saw  the serious look on his face.

At his first words, “Your mother,” my heart thumped a couple of times.  What followed, “ran your baseball cards through the washer,” was bad news, but  my mother, at least physically, was OK.  While the destruction of my cards was a severe blow, even at 9-years-old  my priorities were well ordered.  I was relieved that she was OK, though distressed at the loss of my baseball cards.

The cards that had been lost were my A-list cards – the ones that we “baseball guys” carried with us -- Yankees mostly, with a Ted Williams, Stan Musial and some others in the bunch for high level trading purposes. There were a couple of cards, Mickey Mantles in particular, that today, in mint condition, would be worth a fortune. Even in “carried around in the pocket” condition, they would be very valuable.  At age 9, their value was not as a future investment, but as a connection to “them,” the god-like idols of young America.

The rest of my cards, the run of the mill ones – including a dozen or so Arnold Portocarrero cards, for example, were still safe in their shoe boxes, and would not fall victim to my mother’s donation to the church rummage sale, that rite of passage suffered by many boys turned men, for another dozen years or so.

Once I was in the car and aware of the situation, we drove to the local variety store-smoke shop where Pop bought me two  cartons of the new Bowman color TV cards.

The collection of Bowmans (new, bright, stiff) considerably enhanced my ability to trade, and I would never lack for cards to clip into my bicycle spokes as noisemakers ever again.  There were 320 cards in the complete set.  I doubt I had a complete set, but I had A LOT.  What I later found out was that the set was Bowman’s last – and most valuable. 

More important, and more meaningful  than that, the Bowman cards symbolized great love and caring by my parents, something I probably did not catch on to for a long time

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The year in baseball got better for my mother.  The 1955 World  Series turned out to be the highlight of her long time relationship with the Brooklyn Dodgers.  Eventually, she would sever her allegiance when they deserted her (and Brooklyn) to move to the West coast, but for now, she was still a rabid fan. 

The season unfolded, and baseball recovered from the anomaly of the 1954  World Series, one that did not include the Yankees and Dodgers.

Thanks to a miraculous catch by Sandy Amoros to cap off Johnny Podres’ 2-0 shutout in game 7, the Dodgers became, for the first time, World Champions.  My mother, therefore, had, for the first time, bragging rights.  She did not abuse the privilege.  Perhaps she held herself responsible, through some cosmic influence unleashed through her metaphorical drowning of the Yankees earlier in the year, and unwilling to bear the guilt of profiting from my loss.

Looking back from some 57 years in the future, the series is just a rich chapter in baseball’s story, a chapter that would have lost something if Yogi Berra’s opposite field fly ball had dropped in safely and the Yankees had won, as expected.  Had I known better at the time, I might have argued that things might have been different if Mickey Mantle had not missed four games with injuries. But I was not yet the huge Mantle fan I would become, nor did I know much about how such things might make a difference anyway.

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In 1996 I received a letter from a fellow poet asking if I had any Jackie Robinson poetry I might like to submit for consideration for a reading at the Jackie Robinson: Race, Sport  and the American Dream conference to be held the next year at LIU-Brooklyn. The conference would commemorate the 50^th anniversary of Robinson’s major league debut, and would include a poetry reading of related works.

I doubted that many people actually had poems they had written about Jackie Robinson, but I was intrigued enough to write one.

I wasn’t sure exactly what such a poem would be “about.”  There was some probably apocryphal information about racist actions undertaken in Syracuse when he played here in 1946 for the Dodgers’ Montreal farm team in the AAA International League, but nothing I could become interested in poetically.

The fact that his debut as a professional player occurred in the year I was born  intrigued me, but mostly I was struck by the metaphor of plantations and “farm” teams, and the Underground Railroad and the railroad that was the common mode of transportation for the higher levels of professional baseball.  That became the focus of the poem I wrote and submitted. I was pleased with the finished product, and apparently the committee was as well, because I was asked to come to the conference and read the poem.

It seemed that driving from Syracuse to Brooklyn to read a poem for two minutes was a bit on the extreme side, and I opted to not do it.  Fortunately, my wife had another, and better, slant on it, reminding me that my overriding connection to this project was that Jackie Robinson was my mother’s favorite player.  This should have been obvious to me.  There was an overwhelming sense of “what-would-your-mother-say” logic to this, so I changed my mind and accepted the invitation.

It was a remarkable experience.

The reading, held in an auditorium slightly over 2 miles from where home plate at Ebbets Field had been, was attended by about 100 people…a collection of poets, journalists and Dodger fans.

The readings included Ed Charles’ recitation of a poem he wrote the day he heard of Jackie’s death.

I introduced my reading with a bit of biography of my mother.  She had been born in Ironton, a tiny mining town in southern Ohio, and moved across the river to Huntington, West Virginia. In the early 20s, racial tolerance was not an extremely popular concept in West Virginia, definitely not a way of life.  Her innate Christian ethic prevailed however, perhaps most obviously exemplified by the fact that Jackie Robinson, for reasons unknown to me, became her favorite player. How she had become a Dodger fan in the first place is likewise a mystery, but I suspect that she was a Robinson fan first. 

I followed up with a tale of October 8, 1956, the darkest of days for Brooklyn, at least in the Dodgers/Yankees World Series rivalry -- the mention of which elicited a round of what I took to be good-natured, thought heart-felt, booing.

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The 50s was still a time of day baseball, and of gym teachers who allowed their classes to watch the World Series on a television in the gymnasium.  Also, my mother was willing to allow me one “sick” day per World Series, always writing a note to school that did not specifically lie, and under close scrutiny would be logically sound.  

I had already used my designated day, so I watched the first batter (Jim Gilliam, called out on strikes) at home and my father then drove me to school (another  annual  concession at World Series time) before  the  afternoon late bell.   It was not a gym day, so that was all I saw of the game.

Word of the score occasionally filtered through the building and it was a bit over two hours later on the school sidewalk during a last-period fire drill that I learned of Don Larsen's perfect game.  Mickey Mantle's heroics, his homerun and spectacular running catch ("the best I ever made" he called it), made it all the better for me.

I raced home, in the excitement forgetting that it was haircut day, and in a fateful bit of synchronicity met my mother at the front door. 

"How about that game!"

"Why didn’t you get your haircut?"

As I stood in the doorway, she turned, crossed the living room and climbed the stairs to the second floor.  I heard her bedroom door close, not exactly a slam, though more of an exclamation point than a period.   She did not return.

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I was sitting in the living room when my father came home from work.  I'm sure we talked about the game, the two Yankee fans, before he asked where my mother was.

"Upstairs."

He went upstairs, but not for too long.  When he returned he said simply, "We're going out for dinner."  And we did,  the two Yankee fans.

The dinner, the restaurant, the conversation, are all forgotten except for one thing.  At one point, he leaned over the table, a bit more lawyer than father I thought, and gave me a piece of advice, more directive than suggestion.

"Tomorrow, after school, get your haircut.   And don't ever mention that game to your mother again."

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The story received a round of applause, clearly more for my Dodger-fan mother than for me.  The poem, a tribute to Jackie Robinson's role as baseball's modern day integrator, was well received, enthusiastically as I remember,.    When the reading ended, I was approached by a number of people to say thank you and chide me a bit for Yankee roots.   A professor from Marshall University in Huntington WV chatted with me a bit about my mother’s interesting “transformation.”

Later, I was approached by  Peter Golenboch, who engaged me in conversation that started with how much he enjoyed the poem.  His name sounded familiar enough that it would be too awkward to ask if he was THE Peter Golenboch.   When a man stopped to ask him to autograph a copy of Bums, I was suitably impressed.

We talked for about an hour, much of it about Jackie Robinson, my mother, the Dodgers and  the state of the sports world in general.  A man stopped, opened his wallet and produced two well-worn ticket stubs from Ebbets Field, a  1946 game during which he had proposed to his wife – the year Jackie Robinson entered my poem,  the year I was born,  the year my mother began to make everything possible.

She was a baseball mother – a mother who threw batting practice to me.  The day I asked her what a line drive was, I hit one back at her. Just after it glanced off her hip, away from her glove side, a baseball sized black and blue mark to follow, she affirmed “That was a line drive.”

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In 1972, I gave her a copy of Roger Kahn’s  Boys Of Summer for her birthday, the definitive work on those 1955 Dodgers, but to her, something more.

A year or so before she died she returned the book to me, perhaps so it would not get lost in the parting, but also a message of reconciliation of sorts for some trying times between us, with a loving statement that the book helped her understand what I was all about. For the 30 years between the perfect game and her passing, I had, per my father’s advice,  never mentioned it and, in fairness,  she had never mentioned the 1955 World Series.

She had once said that on that long ago day at the washing machine,  when  Phil Rizzuto floated to the surface, it was the worst moment of her life.  If that was actually the worst moment, then she had truly lived a good  life.

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While, working on this piece, looking for inspiration, I sat alone among the displays in the Baseball Hall of Fame – Lou Gehrig's locker to my right, Mickey Mantle's jersey to my front, Ted Williams’ bat to my left. I marveled at the history that surrounded me, and how much a part of my life it had been. I realized that I have spent an enormous amount of time on baseball fields, and though some of  that time might have been better spent, I have no way to know how. 

From the moment at age 4, when my grandmother pointed out a baseball game to me in the distance, I have been drawn to the game that bound my family together in a context far beyond the Yankees vs. Dodgers rivalry.

In the deep baseball-sacred silence, surrounded by the ghosts of baseball, I struggled to discover the words to use, and a context from which to write. Then, from across the street from my childhood baseball field, I could hear my mother's voice calling me in for dinner…