By Eric Le Roy
I did something last night that I guess only a person with my off-center mentality would do. Before I went to bed, I checked online to see if there were any old radio broadcasts of long-ago American baseball games available that I could listen to.
Why would I want to do that?
Well, maybe for the same reason people still go to Rolling Stones concerts. It reminds them of something they valued deeply, which was more than just Mick Jagger snarling, “Ah cain’t git no satisfaction.” It transports them, for a couple of hours at least, back to a time and place they miss. Nothing could be more human, more understandable.
Probably, they also remember those bygone times as having made more sense than what they have now. It’s kind of predictable, and I see that I am cast the same way. Even if I didn’t have all that much fun back then, I still miss those days.
What I really don’t understand is why I miss the 1950s as much as the ‘60s. I was born in 1949, and so the ‘50s were the years of my early childhood and adolescence. At that age, I could have passed for nothing less than an ‘innocent little tyke’ because the fuck-up seeds hadn’t had time to sprout. Of course, the ‘60s were turbulent in a way that all the crazy shit going down in America today has little in common with. As a teenager in that decade, I was definitely a blue-eyed boy of the counterculture, but it was hopeful back then. I guess you could say idealistic. I know this: everybody didn’t hate each other. The 2020s are the decade of accusation and vilification. I doubt there will be much nostalgia later on.
In the ‘50s, life was staid, boring, and populated by metronome men at the office, monochromatic women without nail polish at home. Frank Sinatra was too young and full of bourbon and cum to start crooning, “I did it myyyyyyyy way,” because at that point, he was still doing it with Ava Gardner and a gaggle of others. Those were the last days when a high school education all but guaranteed you a decent job. All of the great male movie stars looked like giants, even if in real life they were barstool squirts, and the glamor girls had boobs like Sydney Sweeney and full figures like comfortable armchairs. Comedy was clean if you had never heard of Lenny Bruce. The Yankee ‘Dynasty’ ruled baseball. The beaming notion contained in the word ‘Progress’ repeated itself like a mantra, and housewives everywhere thrilled to the whir of a new vacuum cleaner and maybe even a washing machine if they were lucky. H.I.V. and A.I.D.S. were far in the future; syphilis and gonorrhea ruled. Richard Nixon was a young asshole instead of an old asshole. J. Edgar Hoover was not out of the closet. Maybe, above all, JFK had not yet been elected or assassinated.
So why would anyone miss a ‘decade’ like that? Well, I guess we all have imaginary wombs to assume fetal positions in when the going gets too tough; some even have private nocturnal rooms where the strange part of their souls that defies understanding knows to go, cold turkey. They also know of a peace there, also indefinable and unshareable by explanation. We of the abyss recognize it in others. It is where we can look out the window and see the Pirate Black Hood of Extinction waving from the field, and feel no sense of fear at all, and so wave back with laughter. It’s 4 o’clock in the morning. I’ve had a lot of those. I can tell you that getting to the laughing part is a bitch.
It is probably why I love Edward Hopper’s paintings. I am akin to his frozen moments of stillness in places that exist seemingly in a time frame – but not really – rather in open, dreamlike rooms that one could surely leave at will but somehow remains suspended in, immersed in cosmic custard that at first is mistaken for air, permafrost one initially misjudges as a fluidity of chance. The view from the window: loneliness staring out at loneliness. A vague suggestion that one could ‘wake up’ at any moment. But one doesn’t. Tired city people, and animated women staring from houses in the bulrushes, gazing out expectantly at a maze of trees, waiting. Waiting.
And waiting. When I think of the 1950s and 40s and 30s, and further back, I (who wasn’t there) seem possessed of a vague memory of it all: a world in black and white. Train stations. Rainy nights. Billboards advertising things you can’t buy anymore. Typewriters clacking in backstreet offices. Couplings in obscure rooms in apartment buildings and transient hotels. Private detectives. Starkey from Brooklyn; Tony from the Bronx.
By contrast, the ’60s burst out in living color, tie-dye splashes on T-shirts, psychedelic explosions, pyrotechnic flashpoints.
So last night, Christmas came early. I found two full games (radio, of course) from 1950, pitting the Brooklyn Dodgers against the Pittsburgh Pirates and another with the same Dodgers and the Cincinnati Redlegs. I also found Waite Hoyt’s last game as an announcer when the ‘Reds’ of Cincinnati (the ‘Legs’ had gone by then) finished the 1965 season against the San Francisco Giants at Candlestick Park. Hoyt was the guy I listened to secretly at night in my upstairs bedroom in Charleston. That radio was my miracle hideaway. Or maybe it wasn’t a radio after all, but a chattering press box inside a celestial breeding ground of wonders. All those fabulous ballgames (didn’t matter if the teams were in first place or last place) poured out of that little yellow box and made a party out of a glum night where psychopaths appeared at the window and zombies rustled in the closet.
The Dodger announcer was the famous Red Barber. A fixture in New York for many years, Red was actually a Mississippi boy, and you could hear a trace of it in his unique delivery, just as Hoyt, a former Yankee great who pitched for the Bronx Bombers in the days of Babe Ruth, was New ‘Yawk’ all the way. They sold products on the air – Hoyt spoke for ‘Burger Beer’ and Barber for “Wheaties (cereal) – Breakfast of Champions’. Of course, this was also back at a time when everyone smoked, so he spoke for Camels, one of the popular brands. That would never fly today, but this was yesterday.
The attraction of baseball back then was its sense of pastoral timelessness. It wasn’t played according to a clock but by ‘innings’ and whatever ‘time’ it was going to take that day to get through nine of them. If the game was tied at the end of nine, then you played ‘extra’ innings. Before the lights came on in stadiums (they didn’t use to be called ‘stadiums’ – they had names like The Polo Grounds, Crosley Field, and Shibe Park), every Major League or Minor League or Pony League or Little League game took place in daylight only, and sometimes these games had to be “called on account of darkness,” which meant they had to stop because night was on its way.
For Europeans or people who never played baseball, it’s hard to explain, not just the rules of the game (anybody can do that, and, besides, the British just dismiss it disparagingly as an old version they called ‘rounders’), but the way the game feels, especially during those first spring practices when the air is still raw, and, suddenly you hear what sounds like a hard cough, like someone getting over a winter catarrh, when ball meets bat, or the sizzle of a high hard one whizzing in from the mound, and then the thud of the catcher’s mitt. Everyone who has ever played knows how a baseball can sting your hand. It is a signature, once and for all.
I don’t know, but I imagine it’s like what a real fisherman, branded by the sun, experiences on the swoosh and slop of the sea, all of which – man, fish, and swaying brine – are as old as time but forever young in the spirit of the mariner. Or maybe it’s like the smell of freshly cut grass after a sudden shower that awakens you to the memory of someone irretrievable, or even – for people like me – the intoxicating odor of a wet dog, so strange and wonderful that many flee from it, but primitive like the first smell of sex, wild and delicious if you allow yourself to wallow in it. This is not perfume from a shop, but the sound and shape and smell and taste and touch of the human soul when the umpire cries “Play Ball” – and life starts all over again.
I have read three great books about baseball: The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn, The Summer Game by Roger Angell, and Dream by Jeff Trippe. All three reach into the way that ghosts awaken in the springtime and are spurred into rebirth as soon as the game begins. Nowadays, I believe that football does the same thing; it’s today’s major sport. But baseball connects you, not just to your father, but to your grandfather and great-grandfather as well.
There was a movie called ‘Field of Dreams’, which I personally loved. It is about a man who moves his family to Iowa and into a house next to a cornfield. When the man is out wandering around in the corn, he hears a voice: “If you build it, they will come.” It sounds biblical.
At first, he has no idea what this means, but when he keeps hearing it, he finally understands that he is being commanded to create a baseball diamond in the middle of the cornfield, which he does. Then old ball players start coming out of the darkness, and the film ends with the man playing catch with his father, also a young man now. At first, there is a stoic gruffness between them, like old imagined failures brought to mind, but the ball going back and forth is the catalyst for reconciliation.
Imagine meeting your Dad as he was when he was your age, and throwing a baseball back and forth with him. Sounds corny? Cheesy? Nope. You’ve got it wrong if you think that. In that film, Kevin Costner was doing what millions of boys have dreamed of.
So, what did I do last night? I chose the Dodgers vs the Pirates in the spring of 1950. I would have been one year old then. But as I listened to inning after inning there in the darkness of my bedroom, I heard Red Barber bring that game to life. And I understood, as he called the action – in the meantime talking about the weather (the sun had broken through the dark clouds), the fans at the park (Ebbets Field), the fact that today was going to be a double-header to make up for yesterday’s rainout, and some of the homespun congeniality which corporate culture now does everything to erase – that part of me was in my bed of 2025, while the other part of me was in Ebbets Field in 1950.
I joined Red in the booth and saw them out there in the dirt and grass: Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and so many others. These guys are long gone now, vanished like time on a grandfather clock, but they were the kings of my childhood, the summer princes I wished I could be, and here they were again, come back to life, and yet what mattered was the game – Dodgers-Pirates – because it was real. The players had taken their positions on the diamond of Ebbets Field, and there was a dazzling familiarity to them now. Pee Wee Reese was not just a famous player of the distant past; no, he was out there now, putting on sunglasses to shield his eyes from the glare because he had dropped a pop-up a couple of days ago.
I listened until late, even though I had to get up at 5.30 to teach at 6.00. I was trying to make it past the bottom of the fifth. The last thing I remember, Gil Hodges was up, and the Dodgers had two men on and two out, and I was wondering if big Gil, the Brooklyn first baseman, would come through. If not, Carl Furillo, Roy Campanella, or the redoubtable Robinson himself would do the job later on.
Then, with Hodges still at the plate, I guess I drifted off – like all children – and left the matter to the great Dodger to determine. He was still batting when I slept, and if I rejoin the game late tonight, he’ll come back again to swing the lumber, and the Pirate hurler will be trying to outfox him.
Red Barber will pick up right where he left off on that day 75 years ago, a day when a battle was joined, strategies unfolded, and boys of summer were running the bases and chasing down fly balls in the outfield, scooping up grounders, and sliding in at second base and third, and at home plate. I can see the right arm of umpire Augie Donatelli sweeping upwards like an emperor and shouting “Steee-rike”, and Danny Murtaugh, the Bucs second baseman, looking back at him in disbelief.
Sleep took me, as it will, and I lay there in the night. I vaguely remember trying to do the stats, which, as everyone knows, are important in baseball: Now I am one year older than they are. Before last night, they were 75 years older than me. Stats. It all seemed a little foolish because the game wasn’t over, and if I hope to know the outcome, I’ll have to rejoin them at Ebbets Field tonight or tomorrow.
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