Earliest Baseball Memories

My friend and fellow Seamheads writer Alfonso L. Tusa C. suggested we ask our friends around the Internet to recount their earliest baseball memories.  Their responses were fantastic.  Here is what we came up with:

Janette Garton: “My dad is a sportwriter here in Southwest Oklahoma. (Mostly retired now, but he does local stuff.) Sports were always a big part of my life; my husband is always joking with me about my “lack” of movie knowledge; when his family was watching TV movies, we had sports on. Baseball was always my favorite. My first hero was Johnny Bench. Dad got to go to some special event and got his autograph; I was so happy and excited that I cried – profusely! I was a huge Reds fan, too; that was the Big Red Machine era.

“When Dad took us to my first game, I was 8 (I believe), and I just knew we would see the Reds. Well, living in Oklahoma, we went to Dallas, so we saw the Rangers. To me now, this seems like an omen; I was so disappointed that we weren’t seeing the Reds; now the Rangers are my team, and they’ve continued to disappoint me! Of course, I always have hope, and this year is no exception. That’s my first baseball memory.”

Tyler Monroy: “My first baseball memory was when I was 3. My dad took me to a Dodger game. They were playing the Mets that day, and Hideo Nomo was pitching. All I remember was Mike Piazza running down the first base line and getting an icee and getting it all over my shirt.”

Michael Clark: “I was eight years old and living in Manhattan, Kansas. On September 25, 1965 my dad took me to see the Kansas City A’s play. We watched Satchel Paige pitch 3 shutout innings (1 hit) of baseball. I wish I could remember the day more clearly. I do remember it being a big deal and my dad telling me that some day I would appreciate it. Well, he was right.”

Michael DeVuono: “I didnt grow up in a ‘Baseball Family’…. aside from very limited memories of the 1980 Phillies, I dont recall a whole lot of baseball from my childhood, if any at all.

“Never got to play in Little League because we went to the New Jersey shore for the summer, although we played a lot of wiffle ball down there.

“But then this all changed for me in the Summer of 1993. I had a roommate who lived, breathed, and dies by the Phillies. Naturally the were always on, and I took a liking to them. What a year to hop on board with the team as well!

“From the point forward, my now wife and I would visit Veteran’s Stadium whenever we had the chance. Taking in a game on a warm summer night was just a great time to get out of the house and spend time together.

“We now have 3 kids, all of whom have spent a great deal of time at Citizens Bank Park. My oldest son and I have a Sunday game plan, and love to go to the games. Although he is still a little too young to sit through the entire game, and the lure of the ‘Phanatic Fun Zone’ is more to his appeal than the games sometime, it’s still a great way to spend time with the family.”

Phil Quinlan: ” It’s my father’s fault I’m a Cub fan. The first game I ever remember watching was a Cubs/Cardinals Game of the Week in 1974-5 when I was 4-5 years old. My father was an avid Cardinals fan and the Cubs happened to beat the Cards, and in my 4 y/o brain I thought to beat the Cardinals you had to be really good. When the Cubbies win the World Series, I’ll forgive my dad.”

F.X. Flinn: “This is difficult because baseball was woven into the fabric of my life from the get go — my dad would play catch with me and talk baseball even before memory begins. For me, memory really begins to cohere and become lived history around 4 1/2, in the summer of 1958, but it’s not until the late fall of 1959 that I learn to read, and not until the spring of 1960 that I start reading whatever I want — and the newspaper attracts me. My first baseball memory is reading some article in the Long Island Press or the Sunday Times during spring training of 1960, and what attracts me is a photograph and headline. It must have been something like “Can Mickey Mantle Break Babe’s Record?” Mickey Mantle, he just looked like a hero. And he was the hero of the NY team (my team!). So just like that that, boom, I was a Yankee fan and Mickey Mantle was the hero of my team.

“In retrospect it was a fabulous way to start.”

Mat Kovach: “This isn’t my earliest memory, but the one I remember all the details about.

“It was May 15, 1981. A cold and rainy school night. Dad had gotten a little bonus at work and wanted to bring the family to a baseball game. I was happy. Mom, was less than thrilled … it was cold, rainy, and she didn’t want to go. Her excuse, ‘We can’t go, it is a school night!’

“Wait. What?

‘Did you go to school today? See it is a school night.’

“Then during the game, Mom was bored and wanted to watch something else on TV.

“So I COULD have gone to Lenny Barkers perfect game, if it hadn’t been a ‘school night’.”

Carol Sheldon: “My Mom was a Girl Scout leader and she took my sister’s troop to the Tiger Game. Since I was only 5 1/2 she took me along.  This was my first baseball game. We sat in the the center field upper deck bleachers in Tiger Stadium. This was the summer of 1960. I’ve been a Tiger fan ever since.”

David Berger: “Mike… not my earliest… but I’ll give you 2…

“1) 8/23/80 Old timers day at Shea… they honored Duke Snider and it was Dodgers/Mets.

“I was sitting right on top of the 1B dugout, when Pee Wee Reese flipped a ball up there for me. I wasn’t paying attention, so my dad held off a couple other people so I could turn around and pick it up myself. I gave my dad the ball for his 60th birthday 3 years ago.

“2) Little League…. I was terrible, playing my mandatory 3 innings in RF… close game, end of the season. Batter hits a long fly to me, and I hear my coach yell, ‘Oh Shit’… My 1st catch of the year.

“Next batter is left handed, so the coach switches me to LF to get me away from the play… another sliced liner… another catch. Best 2 plays I ever made.”

Don Drooker: “My Uncle had box seats at Fenway Park from the ’30s. When I was 7 years old (1953), he took me to the Red Sox game the day that Ted Williams came back from Korea. Obviously, he and my dad talked about “Teddy Ballgame” all the time but I had never seen him before. He had missed all of the ’52 season and most of the ’53 season flying jets in Korea. When Ted came to bat, the fans gave him a standing ovation…after he popped out, they gave him another standing ovation. At that point, I began to understand what a special player (and person) he was.

“Williams only had 110 AB’s at the end of the ’53 season (after missing almost two years), but he had 13 HR’s and hit .407…the greatest hitter of all time…and a true American hero.”

Eli Timmons: “Not super early, but memorable. I saw Wade Boggs hit a home run in one of his first appearances at Fenway. We were in the bleachers as part of a birthday celebration for one of my dad’s friends.

“The bleachers were rowdy that night (early ’80s, so go figure) and people were flinging keg cups at each other and the security guards. Somebody beaned a guard, and the guard turned and flipped the cup at my Dad’s friend. When Robert (the friend) went to the guard to discuss it with him, all the other guards (read BU linemen) in the section surrounded him and gave him the bum’s rush out of Fenway, through the turnstyles, backwards.”

Nuke LaLoosh (Matt): “My earliest baseball memory was from 1980 as a six-year-old and I remember it like it was yesterday. My parents took me to see my first major league game as the Phils played the Giants at the Vet. I wore the t-shirt of my first little league team, Gera’s Cafe, that I was playing on that season and I thought I was the man. Never being to a game before I told all of my friends how I was going to catch a foul ball for each of them. Needless to say no one, myself included, got a foul ball from the game.”

David Zeller: “One of my best memories: My parents had just bought their first house in St. Paul. We had spent the entire day moving in, it was October. I remember sitting on the floor, we hadn’t loaded in the couch yet, and watching the Twins clinch their first World Series title. Hardwood floors and my father beside, it is one of my first memories and still one of my best!”

Howard Megdal: “My earliest baseball memory is a jumbled one. I could have sworn that at age 6, I remember seeing Darryl Strawberry tie and Ray Knight win a game against the Astros in my parents’ bed, then all going out to watch fireworks. But it appears the game I am thinking of happened July 3, while July 4 was a Gooden-Ryan showdown.”

Morris Greenberg: “As a high schooler, I have many less memories than most people posting this up, but I have grown up with baseball all around me so still have a few. As a Bostonian rooting for the San Francisco Giants, it’s much harder to follow my team, especially when I was younger and I didn’t know how to navigate to blogs, rumors, and news about the Giants on the internet.

“My grandparents take each of their grandchildren on a trip upon reaching the age of 9, and the only thing I wanted to do was to see my Giants for the first time. We went to California for two weeks, and while seeing famous places such as Hearst Castle, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Redwood Forest, my highlight was seeing four Giants games throughout the two weeks. Two in SBC (now known as ATT) Park, one in Dodger Stadium, and one in the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum.

“While Barry Bonds didn’t hit a single homer during those 4 games, it was still a trip of a lifetime for me. As I walked in, I remember flipping out as to how much newer, bigger, and cleaner this stadium was compared to Fenway, Wrigley, and Olympic Stadium. I know no matter how much more detail I go into, I can’t show the complete picture of this baseball memory for me, so I’ll stop here.”

Ron Kaplan: “It’s actually my daughter’s first baseball memory that resonates with me. When she was a baby I used to sing ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ as a lullaby. On her second birthday, we took her to her first pro game while visiting friends in Binghamton. During the seventh inning stretch, the crowd sang the song, and the look on her face — such surprise that everyone knew the tune — was priceless.”

Greg Fischer: “Going to an Expos game with my dad back when I was like 2 or 3 and thinking Chris Nabholz was my age. No matter what, I thought he looked like a kid, like myself. From that day on, I loved Chris Nabholz.

“Also my dad bought me a Baseball America Almanac when I was 5. Something he surely regrets, as I spent the next year reading him random stats of AA players.”

Fredric M. London: “I have many later memories, such as being at BOB when Randy [Johnson] struck out 20, or the first no-hitter in the park (during a SABR convention, no less!). In terms of early, I would have to go with an Old Timer’s Day at The Stadium. I was only about five or six, but I saw DiMaggio double, on the fly, to the center field wall.”

Gordon Forsyth: “My earliest memory would by my father making me get up to change the TV channel because Baseball was coming on. Where was the remote in 1965? LOL”

Stuart Sklaver: “Mike, funny story for my first game. My dad took me everywhere as a child. As a nine-year-old, one year after the ‘Impossible Dream’ season. I went to my first Red Sox game. We sat in the bleachers, a section that was to become my favorite area to sit for 30-something years. I still have the ticket somewhere, it cost us 25 cents apiece to get in. YIKES! My first game was against the Yankees, and it was Mickey Mantle day @ Fenway. I guess it was his swan song, and the Yawkeys wanted to do something for him. I don’t remember much else, except for the fact that the rivalry wasn’t quite the same as it is now.

“The sad thing about my dad and the Sox, is that he passed away in April of 2004, of ALL YEARS!!!! But, he was a happy camper in heaven when the Sox brought home the two titles. I know I cried a stream when the final out was made in each series…pointing to the sky like Manny and Big Papi after a homer to my own BIG PAPI.

“Thanks for allowing me to tell you these two stories, Mike. I can get pretty emotional.”

Bill Nowlin: “I don’t really have a ‘first memory’ of baseball per se. It almost feels more like I grew up with the game, though I know that’s not really true. My earliest memories are threefold and (I guess this happens as you get older) few of them go back to before I was 12. That was in 1957.

“Three things I can recall from that year:

“1) going, often, to Fenway Park by myself or with a friend or two and sitting in the bleachers watching Ted Williams hit home runs (he did bat .388 that year)

“2) playing in a neighborhood field that we mowed and prepared as a baseball field almost every day all summer long, with neighborhood kids – just for fun, not as anything as organized as Little League. Twice in one day, I was knocked out by ground balls that popped up off the rough field and hit me in the face. From that day on, I’ve been doomed as a fielder.

“3) being the “sports editor” of a neighborhood newspaper that Stan Brown and I ran. I wrote all the stories, too, pretty amateurish stuff detailing the highlights of both our neighborhood games and the Red Sox.”

Jason D. Reis: “Willie Mays night at Shea Stadium, September 25, 1973 with my dad. We still have the commemorative mini-bat.”

Jeff Katz: “I know I have a home movie of me at Shea circa ’68 or so wearing Batman Sunglasses, but that doesn’t count. Nor does a fuzzy recollection of Johnny Bench hitting one out of Shea against a black night sky (although Retrosheet backs that up). My first solid, I can still see it, memory was at a Mets-Phils game at Shea, 1972. Got my first player autograph, Ron Stone of the Phillies, and saw Jim Fregosi smoking in the dugout.”

Bob Stalder: “My grandfather took me to the first ever Royals opening game in 1969. He was a season ticket holder and a friend of Ewing Kauffman the owner, so we had seats right behind the dugout, and after the game I got to meet Lou Piniella and he signed my Royals T-Shirt which sported the Royals logo and his name and number on the back. I had no idea who he was..

“Of course, I was 4 years old at the time, but the images are fresh in my mind of walking along 22nd street and Brooklyn as we entered the ball park and seeing all of the people and wondering what was going on.

“I don’t remember much about my childhood, but I always remember that day. My grandfather had season tickets up until 1982 when he passed away and I saw some of the greatest moments in Royals baseball with him.”

Lyle Spatz: “I was out on the street in New York City on a July morning in 1945 when I overheard a nearby group of men heatedly discussing the waiver sale of pitcher Hank Borowy from the Yankees to the Cubs. Not far away, another group of men were discussing the crash of an American bomber into the Empire State Building. For some reason, I was more interested in the discussion of the first group. Though at 8-years-old, I had no idea what waivers were, I was captivated by the names of the teams, the players, the statistics, and everything else about baseball, and I have been ever since.”

Dave Baldwin: “After moving to Marana, AZ, from southern California, I came home from third grade in my new school in tears because I didn’t get picked to play in a pickup softball game. Small wonder. I couldn’t catch or throw a ball. We lived on a ranch, and my uncle took me out in the desert and taught me both of those skills. Also, how to avoid cactus and snakes — all were valuable lessons.”

Randall Hall Chandler: “April 8, 1954

“After crying most of the day on April 4, 1954 due to not getting to go to Nashville’s Sulfur Dell Park to see the Brooklyn Dodgers vs the Milwaukee Braves, my father decided to take me out of school on April 8, and I was allowed to go to Memphis, TN. Russwood Park to see the St. Louis Cardinals play the Chicago White Sox in an Exhibition Game. Little did I know what doors that trip would open for me in my lifetime so far.

“The Sox won the game 6-2 with Billy Pierce pitching a better game than Cardinal Memo Luna who would pitch 2/3 inning in his major league career. Both teams had a Negro first-baseman, Bob Boyd for the Sox, and Tom Alston for the Cardinals, little did I know at age 7 that I was seeing the first integrated game in Memphis baseball history. Also seeing my hero Stan Musial was a thrill in itself, and Enos Slaughter would be traded that weekend to the Yanks for Bill Virdon and Vic Raschi.

“After the game, getting back home, I starting getting ready for the season to start, I knew how to read the box score but I wasn’t familiar with the standings, especially the 1/2 game behind, I would slowly learn about the half game, no-hitters, etc. However the first question after reading the standings was where was Brooklyn? Little did I know at seven years old. I would learn a lot in the 1954 season, attending my first “real” game in August, seeing Musial and Mays both hit a home run, finding out about the World Series in September, seeing my first game on TV and seeing Willie make “The Catch” on TV. 1954; what a year.”

Mark Zeigler: “Watching the Baltimore Orioles’ Brooks Robinson hoover Cincinnati Reds’ Lee May’s line drive at 3rd base during the 1970 World Series while in sitting in Mrs. Miller’s 2nd grade class. I remember it was a big thrill just being able to watch a baseball game while in school!”

Jim Brown: “My father was very involved with American Legion Baseball. I can not remember a time growing up when I was not either the batboy, a player or umpiring. When summer came baseball was and is my life. I do miss my dad being a part of it. When he died they played ‘Take Me Out To the Ballgame.’ It was a moment I will never forget, seeing all the players he had touched over the years with their hats over their hearts. Baseball truly is a part of the fabric of America.”