(This is a 'pilgrimage essay'. It's another one from my Creative Writing class. Those of you who know Drake will appreciate this one.)
Living
with a baseball fanatic takes patience, fortitude, and the ability to
absorb an unending stream of information. FANS follow their baseball teams,
mildly interested during the long, long season, jacking their
interest up during the play-offs and the World Series. FANATICS are
altogether different. My husband, Drake, is a fanatic.
One
of his first memories is going with his father to a Cincinnati Reds
game. He doesn't remember the game or the field, but Ted Kluzewski,
a Reds star with huge arm muscles are part of his toddler
recollections. He started playing sandlot ball when he was about six
years old. At the age of 10 he tried out for Little League. At this
time, Little League was divided into the 'majors' and the 'minors'.
It was composed of 10, 11 and 12 year olds. Even today, Drake's eyes
glow when he recounts he was one of the few 10 year olds picked for
the majors. He actually started at 2nd
base for the “Schwabs” even though he was all glove and no bat.
As
a kid, when he wasn't playing, he was listening. Baseball was a
radio sport in the 1950's, and he listened faithfully to the
Cleveland Indian games following his hero Rocky Calavito. I think
this is when the seeds of fanaticism were planted. To be a Cleveland
Indian fan in the 1950's meant your team always, always lost the only
playoff position available in the 1950's to the Yankees year after
year. In the 1950's there wasn't a play-off system in baseball, only
the National League Champion and the American League Champion who met
in the World Series.
Until
early high school, Drake was still on the field playing baseball. A
combination of a poor team manager and his failing eyesight drove him
off the field. He never stopped watching baseball, and even had a
period in early high school when he obsessively played a pencil and
paper version of fantasy baseball with a couple of other high school
buddies in binge sessions during one summer. He spent so many hours
playing this game that his mother despaired over his social life.
Since
1971, figuring conservatively, Drake has watched 4000 baseball games.
He knows so much about the game, that I'm still constantly learning new
strategies and new slang from him. Baseball slang always tickles
me. Some of my favorites are: 1'worm
burner', 2'golden
sombrero', 3'taters',
4'chin
music', and 5hitting
in a 'bandbox'. I've had plenty of opportunities to be educated in the finer points of the game. We had season tickets to the Houston Astros, and
followed that team for almost 20 years. When we moved to the
Dallas/Fort Worth area, his allegiance returned to the American
League, and he began to follow the Texas Rangers in 1991 – long
before they were baseball's golden team. For the past three years,
we have gone to 15 Spring Training games, followed by watching about
150 games out of 162 in the regular season, and ending each season by
watching 20 play-off games and then rounding out the year watching
the World Series. Post World Series, there is a period of mourning
that sometimes lasts a month in our household.
With that resume you
can understand how I can call Drake a fanatic. However, as the years
passed, there was always one thing in baseball he hadn't experienced:
The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. This place is the
temple of baseball. Every true believer wants to breathe the air in the
Hall of Plaques which is the altar inside the temple. This past
November, Drake fulfilled his lifelong wish. He went to the Baseball
Hall of Fame.
Believe
me, it's not exactly easy to get to this place. Cooperstown, New York
(population 1800) is in the middle of nowhere, otherwise called the
Mohawk Valley. It's smack dab in the middle of dairy farm country. We
left northern New Hampshire and drove and drove and drove to get
there. We finally reached the exit on the Interstate, and THEN we
drove another 40 minutes. Cooperstown in a quaint little town filled
with architecture that goes all the way back to the 18th century.
It's actually named NOT for James Fenimore Cooper, but rather for his
father.
During
the Great Depression, Stephen C. Clark, a mover and shaker in
Cooperstown, was looking for a way to improve the economic outlook of
the hometown he loved. He pitched the Hall of Fame idea and baseball
executives loved it. Thus, Clark snagged the prize for sleepy
little out of the way Cooperstown. Today the name of the town is
synonymous with baseball. In 1936 the inaugural Hall of Fame class
of Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth and Honus
Wagner was elected, and in 1939 the original building opened.
The
entire downtown area of Cooperstown is filled with souvenir shops,
baseball card shops, equipment shops, buy a bat shops, a wax museum
of baseball heroes, and little restaurants and cafes. It's surrounded
with motels, hotel, inns, and bed/breakfast mansions. No wonder! At
peak times of the year thousands of people visit. Inductee Weekend,
where new players are added to the Hall of Fame, can see 80,000
visitors. Can you imagine a town of 1800 hosting 80,000 people? Some
visitors wind up staying as far as 200 miles from the town during
that weekend.
Fortunately
for me, we visited at one of the most uncrowded times; only in
January are there fewer visitors - can you say 'snow'? Instead of
thousands of people thronging the museum, there were literally less
than 10 people visiting the day we arrived. We got to see every
exhibit, take 6photographs
and look at everything completely unimpeded. I asked Drake for his
impressions about the Hall of Fame, and the verb he used was
"surprised". His expectation was that the building would be
'old' (it wasn't), and that it would be jam packed with smudged glass
cases full of baseball stuff. Instead, we saw an open, airy space of
three floors, and an exhibit policy that reflected the credo that
'less is more'.
First
and foremost was the plaque gallery. This would be the heart of the
museum. There are
289 individual bronze plaques each with a bas relief sculpture of the
inductee's head (wearing the baseball team cap the inductee chose)
together with a short recitation of their accomplishments. We spent
a couple of hours just in this area roaming the plaques. Babe Ruth is
here as is Joe Dimaggio, Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax and every other
famous player you can name as well as some I'd never heard of. There
are Major League players, Negro League inductees, executives and
pioneers and even eight umpires represented on the plaques.
Drake really enjoyed being in a first class museum dedicated to his
greatest interest. He seemed to float around the exhibits that day.
Baseball is 'only a game', but baseball for Drake is tied up with his
one and only athletic prowess, is the basis of the best part of his
relationship with his father, and figures in many of our personal
family memories. Our daughter was five when she saw her first major
league park, and her face when she first glimpsed the green field, is
one of our snapshot family memories. Standing in the Baseball Hall
of Fame, Drake said, "This place makes baseball seem important
because the museum is of such high quality." Not only was he
not disappointed as can easily happens when something is anticipated
for so long, but his obsession with this American pastime was somehow
vindicated in Cooperstown.
5 A
small major league park such as Fenway Park in Boston which has the
“Pesky Pole”. The fence is 302 feet down the right field line
named for Johnny Pesky, a weak hitting infielder, who hit his 17
home runs down this line. Aerial shots actually show the distance
to this fence to be significantly shorter – perhaps 295 feet. An
average right field fence in a non-bandbox park would be at least 25
feet longer.
