By Kenneth Kowald
Once upon a time, baseball was known as the “national pastime” and its players were heroes. They were looked up to as paragons of what a person should be — talented, humble (for the most part) and one with the nation in which they played.
My father told me about those times. He assured me — and in my lifetime, up to a point, I knew it to be true — that these were not myths.
Oh, there were bad apples when it came to drinking, womanizing, etc. Then there was the Black Sox scandal, in which some Chicago White Sox players threw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. One of those charged was “Shoeless” Joe Jackson. The story is complex and Joe may not have been involved, it seems, but at the time there was despair among Sox fans and others who loved baseball.
One of the myths is that when Jackson came out of the courthouse one day, a small boy tearfully called out to him, “Say it ain’t so, Joe!”
I learned about this years after I spent many a Saturday or Sunday traveling to the Polo Grounds with my father to see a single game or double-header with his beloved New York Giants. Our trips from Elmhurst were wonderful, as were the games. My father had a great memory and he knew all the stops on the trains from Grand Avenue. He knew baseball.
He had gone to work at the age of 11. His father had died five years before, leaving a young widow and my father’s older sister. My father was an avid reader of the Daily News and the Daily Mirror. He started with the back pages, where the sports were. To this day, I read the New York Times’ last section first before going to other sections.
My father’s great hero was Christie Mathewson. He was a Bucknell University graduate and a pitcher for the Giants. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in World War I, when he was 37, leaving his wife and son in New York. A gassing in training in France probably contributed to his getting tuberculosis, which killed him at 45.
He was known as the Christian Gentleman because, following a pledge to his mother, he would not pitch Sundays. Shades of “Chariots of Fire.” Some places, at the time, banned Sunday games. He was among the first five elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame some years after his death. The others were Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson and Honus Wagner.
To my father and me, King Carl Hubbell, Prince Hal Schumacher, “Fat” Freddy Fitzsimmons, Bill Terry, Harry Danning and Mel Ott were among the heroes. We would sit in the upper-right field stands to watch Ott play his position. Ott called his manager John McGraw “Mr. McGraw.” Imagine!
My father taught me how to keep a scorecard. I brought those treasures home to Elmhurst, but they are long gone.
Those players were not what we would call “highly paid,” and that includes stars like Babe Ruth, but they made enough, for the most part, to live comfortably, most of them here in the city where they played. That seemed to be the case for Giants, Yankees and Dodgers. They were part of the fabric of city life.
They were not all Boy Scouts, but they played well and hard. Hubbell, my father told me, would take himself out of a game if he believed he was not pitching well. It seemed to be a time when a fine player could also be a team player.
These are memories, of course, including those of my father’s last view of his Giants, on TV, the year Willie Mays made his debut. My father was not the most unbiased of human beings, but he commented favorably on Willie’s skills and his decent personality. Willie has remained a hero to this day.
I do not watch baseball now, but I follow it. I wish all our heroes today were like Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera. Even though they are New York Yankees, I think my father would approve of them as players and decent human beings.
I am sure there are many baseball players, here and throughout the country, who deserve our attention.
I wish we lived in an era when talent and not drugs counted. I wish we lived in an era when a young child or an adult did not have to think of crying out, “Say it ain’t so!” to any hero they might have had in any sport.
But, to our great loss as a nation, it is so.
Please read my blog, “No Holds Barred,” at timesledger.com.
