Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (3 page)

During these eleven years, one of the three New York teams (the Yankees of the American League and the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers of the National League) won the World Series in all but two years, when the Cleveland Indians prevailed in 1948 and Milwaukee in 1957. Only in 1948—Cleveland vs. the Boston Braves—did a New York team not play in the Series at all. In seven of these years (’47, ’49, ’51, ’52, ’53, ’55, and ’56) two New York teams played each other in the World Series—all won by my beloved Yankees except for the ultimate tragedy of ’55, when the Dodgers won their single victory over the Yanks as a Brooklyn team. We got them back the next year, though, in ’56!

My earliest vague memories of baseball date to the 1946 or 1947 season. I remember the great 1948 season in substantial detail—the year that should have been the Boston subway series, but the Indians tied the Red Sox and then won the single game playoff for the right to play the Boston Braves in the World Series. Starting in 1949, I suspect that I could narrate at least the major events of all World Series games through the Yankees’ revenge on Milwaukee in the 1958 contest.

But my point is simply this—and plausible though the claim may be as an abstraction, one really had to “live it” to know the full extent of the pull and the virtual inevitability—during these years, nearly all boys in New York City and quite a few girls, as well, became passionate baseball fans, spending a good bit of each day, from April to early October, tracing the developing fate of one’s favorites.

Patterns of rooting were neither entirely capricious nor entirely predictable. Nearly all of Brooklyn’s two million citizens rooted passionately for the Dodgers. I’m still mad at my cousin Steve Sosland for failing to protect me, as he promised he would, when I admitted to being a Yankee fan while playing stickball with his Brooklyn neighborhood friends—the worst street beating I ever received, but a rite of passage in the coming of age for any New York street kid.

The still solid Jewish and Italian ethnic communities of the Bronx lived and died with the Yankees (a.k.a. The Bronx Bombers), of course. The Polo Grounds, home of the New York Giants, located in northeastern Manhattan and literally within sight of Yankee Stadium across the Harlem River, did not command so clear a geographic region of nearly exclusive rooting—and Giants fans tended to be scattered throughout the city. Many kids, myself included, rooted for two New York teams, one from each league. Affection for the Yankees and Dodgers proved difficult, for they played each other too often in the World Series (’41, ’47, ’49, ’52, ’53, ’55, and ’56, all won by the Yanks except 1955). By contrast, the Yankees and Giants only met in 1951—on my watch at least, for several Yankee-Giant Series had been played before my birth in the 1920s and 1930s.

I grew up in Queens, the most “neutral” borough, with no team of its own (the expansion Mets did not begin until the early 1960s, and I have never been able truly to view them as a “home team,” despite substantial affection based on pure accidents of birth and upbringing—and some wonderful memories of going to Shea Stadium whenever Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers pitched against the Mets, and invariably won).

Memory, of course, is the ultimate trickster, but I do have a very clear impression that at least 50 percent of boy-talk between April and October in Queens focused on the fates of our three teams, with constant bets, threats, and bickerings about pennant races and World Series outcomes. I rooted for the Yanks and Giants. But I even managed to tolerate the Dodger fanaticism of some of my best friends.

The final point is simply this: All New York City boys of the late 1940s and early 1950s were baseball nuts, barring mental deficiency or incomprehensible idiosyncrasy. How could one not be? This decade was the greatest conjunction of quality and place that the game has ever known. Grossly unfair to the rest of the country, of course, but a fabulous piece of luck that made the “coming of age” for me and a million other New York kids ever so much easier—and what purely contingent blessing of ontogeny could be more precious?

I
do understand the practical and sensible reasons behind such a profound change. But when I grew up on the streets of Queens in New York City, school ended at 3
P.M
., and then, weather permitting, we went outdoors to play with our friends until our parents called us in for dinner at about 6
P.M
. And, yes, most families did then eat dinner together, every single day—no TV allowed (we didn’t yet own one), no newspapers; just conversation.

My mother still lives in the same neighborhood, and nowadays no kid would venture outdoors alone. Children make “play dates” with their friends, and parental tracking has become ubiquitous. By contrast, and throughout the 1950s until we left for college in 1958, Roger Keen (still my best friend) and I played stickball or some other variety of baseball together practically every afternoon of our lives.

A lot of different games “erupted” each day in Fresh Meadows, our neighborhood of three-story garden apartments with adequate greenery separating the buildings, and with space aplenty on the streets (and few cars to hog all the potential parking spaces). We boys—and I must speak of “boy culture,” for very few girls ever ventured to inquire about joining us—played so many different games, many just one kid against another, others by teams always “democratically” selected by sequential choices of two designated captains. One did not want to be chosen last—and I still say thank God for Ira, wherever he may be now, the shortest kid in the neighborhood, and almost invariably the final selection; I usually got my assignment in the lower half, but not embarrassingly far down.

The point has been made many times, in this book and elsewhere, but the phenomenon really did define New York at the time. Throughout the 1940s, and until 1958 when New York City began a serious decline with the migration of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants to California, baseball virtually defined the joys of city life.

Almost all the neighborhood boychicks (about half Jewish and half Catholic in our vicinity of rising working-class families, “ruled” by fathers still recently returned from service in World War II) lived and breathed baseball all the time, for our city then boasted three truly great teams. Nearly all our street games—the main point of this chapter—applied baseball rules to the object of the contest. To this day, my memory remains tickled by the diversity that I can remember, and frustrated by the several versions beyond my recall.

I don’t mean to claim that we did nothing else but adapt our activities to the rules of baseball. For example, I was also an avid philatelist (particularly on rainy days), but I never really warmed up to the Lionel electric train set that my Uncle Milton insisted on giving me. A few outdoor games did not follow baseball conventions. I did enjoy my roller skates, and we did play touch football, but only in season. The big kids hogged the few basketball courts in the schoolyard, while adults took constant possession of the four handball courts. Indeed, in the weirdest “time warp” I have ever experienced, the same men have never yielded their ground. When my mother moved back to the old neighborhood about twenty years ago, I walked over to the schoolyard and found the very same men—not their sons and not their cousins—still presiding over the handball courts!

I remember only three street games not played by baseball rules, and only one of these held any interest for me. Some kids played marbles (I didn’t), or one of the various versions using bottle caps and known as skelley. Others played mumbledepeg (called “land” or “territory” in my neighborhood), but you needed a switchblade, or at least a pen knife. I owned neither and couldn’t have brought such an implement to school in any case.

Chinese handball enjoyed substantial vogue and was the single exception that captured my participation. As a key to spontaneous street games in major cities, one must acknowledge the two controlling variables: the nature of the projectile (the ball), and the geometry and distribution of sidewalk boxes. To play Chinese handball, you first need to put together a substantial and uninterrupted row of chalked boxes, all abutting a wall. Each player gets a box and the game proceeds as follows: using the canonical pink rubber ball (not always called a “spaldeen,” but more about this in a moment), a player hits the ball with his palm against the wall on a bounce. The ball must bounce into the chalked box of another player, who must then bounce it against the wall and into someone else’s box. Whenever a player fails to execute this maneuver properly, and his ball does not bounce clearly into another player’s box, then he has “lost” the round and must move down to possess the box at the end of the line, while all players below him move up a box. And so the game proceeds, until Mom calls you in for dinner. Really good players—not including yours truly, who never really got the hang of this particular activity—could hold onto their top boxes nearly forever.

Let’s get to those spaldeens. Yes indeed, those smooth, hollow, pink rubber balls made by the A. G. Spalding company were the sine qua non of boy play. Prices varied, but I remember ten or fifteen cents as the usual cost. And you never abandoned a ball until all potential utility had been extracted. Each was made as a two-piece mold with a full center seam. Eventually, the ball would split in half, and Roger and I played many a full stickball game with half a ball—either because the drug store was closed on weekends or because neither of us could get our allowances for another day or two.

Quite a bit has been written about New York streetball over the past two decades or so, and I have tried to follow the claims carefully. As usual in such circumstances, a few prominent errors emerge and then become entrenched by constant and mindless repetition. Let me then dispel the most prominent of these mistakes, citing as evidence no more than my own absolutely firm memories of Queens in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

To be sure, very few kids owned a real bat (although we did play softball occasionally and some neighborhood kid would then turn up with a proper bat). Mom’s broom or mop handle served our daily needs, and stickball became the standard everyday game. Yes again, we always played stickball with that ubiquitous pink rubber projectile. But now consider the two errors. Most sources insist that the ball bore only one name—a “spal
deen
.” Well, my Brooklyn friends did so designate the ball, but in my neighborhood we called it a “spal
ding
,” with strong accent on the final syllable. (These variations, of course, record the same theme, for the balls, made by the A. G. Spalding company, carried the name embossed in black letters.)

Second, the impression has grown that New York stickball followed one set of rules—played in the street, with sewers used as standards of distance (two for a double, four for a homer, for example). Well, I knew the sewer version, and my Brooklyn friends did play by these standards, but on my turf in Fresh Meadows we almost always played stickball by chalking a box (the strike zone) against a wall (usually of a store or an apartment building), and then pitching toward the batter and into the box, with prearranged distances counting for hits of various merit. Broken windows—not so rare, by the way—were automatic outs and usually the game’s end as well.

New York City stickball, circa 1940s.
Credit: Bettmann/Corbis

While I cannot provide an exhaustive description of even the major forms of New York City street games played by baseball rules, let me at least briefly describe five major forms. Each occupied a distinctive role in our overall play.

Punchball: the canonical “recess” game.
In that blessed half hour or so of midmorning schoolyard recess, when the girls jumped rope and the teachers sat and smoked, the boys invariably gathered at the concretized baseball diamond to play the unvarnished “standard” form of baseball with a Spalding—punchball by our name. No pitching. The fielders of the opposing team took their positions and the “batters” of the other team then proceeded by throwing up the Spalding and punching it with their fist. Some kids threw the ball high and punched it overhand; most (including me) tossed it up a foot or two and punched it underhand. Pure baseball rules applied. No exceptions. (And you could often get in a three-to five-inning game during a full half hour of recess time.)

Punchball truly held status (in my neighborhood at least, but not in other, even adjacent, turfs). It was the game we would play unless kids specifically called for another form. If we played by teams rather than twosomes after school, we “automatically” went to punchball, which required no equipment beyond the ball and a spontaneously laid-out field with bases.

Just one (true) story illustrates the kid–grown-up issues that arose on a daily basis. Boys on first and second; no one out. The batter pops one high in the infield. I, playing third base, shout out “infield fly rule” and insist that the batter is automatically out. Most players have never heard of this “arcane” rule and dispute my claim (it didn’t really matter because I caught the pop-up in any case). We agreed, by standard custom, to ask the first adult man who passed by, and to abide by his judgment. Thank goodness. The gent turned out to be a knowledgeable fan who not only affirmed the existence of such a rule but even gave a well-wrought explanation for its necessity.

By utter contrast, one summer at camp I got into an argument with a bunkmate about whether humans and dinosaurs had coexisted: me, already a budding paleontologist, in the correct negative; he, citing Alley-Oop, in the wrongly positive. We bet a candy bar and agreed to abide by parental opinion at the forthcoming weekend visitation. My parents were unable to come. His father affirmed that, of course, humans and dinosaurs had coexisted—just look at Alley-Oop—and I had to pay, Hershey’s chocolate with almonds. What can be more galling than absolutely to
know
you’re right but to have to submit anyway! I don’t remember the guy’s name, but I’ll murder him (something slow and painful like drawing and quartering comes to mind) if I ever find him.

Stickball, the second “standard” form, either by pairs or by teams.
Much is known about New York City stickball. The rookie Willie Mays worked on his game by playing stickball with neighborhood kids in Harlem, for example. I have little to add to the consensus, except to note the enormous variety of norms and styles. Each neighborhood, each tiny subdivision of each neighborhood, developed its own local customs.

Stickball could be played by twos or by teams. Twosomes predominated on my turf, and I suspect that Roger and I logged more stickball hours during the 1950s than I spent in any other activity.

As mentioned above, we pitched toward a chalked box on a wall and the batter flailed away. Distance determined the status of a hit. Caught pops and flies were outs, and cleanly fielded ground balls were also outs (probably the most common mode, along with strikeouts). We tried to play seven innings, but didn’t always have enough time for a full game. Roger, by the way, is a lefty—a great advantage in this forum (and I think he won about two-thirds of our games over the years). And, yes, it isn’t easy to hit a Spalding with a broomstick, but when you swing hard and catch the “sweet spot,” the ball really sails—up and away, often far enough to count as a home run.

Stoopball, much of a muchness, but each a bit different.
Baltimore may be the greatest American city for stoops, but New York owes no apologies to anyone. The garden apartment buildings of Fresh Meadows each have three entryways, each up a stoop of several concrete steps. Each stoop leads to nine apartments, three to a floor.

Stoopball, usually played one to a side, works basically like stickball, with the Spalding as projectile, the status of a hit determined by distance, and the steps of the stoop as the analog for a bat. The “batter” throws the Spalding against a step and the fielder tries to catch the rebounding ball on the fly or ground.

As almost every player knows, each step has a pronounced “sweet spot” located at the perpendicular intersection of the horizontal and vertical portions of the step. If a batter manages to hit this spot with his Spalding (called a “pointee” or a “pointer” on my turf), then the ball really flies—usually over the head of the fielder and often into home run territory. An extensive mythology surrounded the issue of whether anyone could figure out a way to hit the point of a step in some systematic way and at high probability. We all tried, but so far as I know, nobody ever succeeded.