Fathers and Baseball

These are the greatest of possible words, “pitchers and catchers report.”

Everyone has their own way of determining the end of the long winter. For some, the first sighting of the red-breasted robin serves as a harbinger of spring. Some rely on a Pennsylvania-based hedgehog and the likelihood of the overgrown rodent seeing his own shadow. Others, antagonistic to the idea of a farcical hibernal ritual to determine seasonal transition, use scientific data such as rising temperatures as a guide. For me, the onset of spring begins with the words, “pitchers and catchers report to spring training camp.”

The line of iambic pentameter at the top of this page is actually mine, but I’m paraphrasing the 1910 poem by Franklin Pierce Adams, written about the early Chicago Cubs’ double-play combination, “Tinker, to Evers, to Chance.” I’m celebrating the fact that on Wednesday, February 17, spring training for the major leagues officially began. Every February, even as a little kid, I would look forward to reading those words in the newspapers. For me, the phrase “pitchers and catchers report” indicated winter was drawing to a close, baseball had begun, and spring was on its way. It’s difficult to think about spring during this week of record cold, snow, and ice, but, for me, those words always conjure up images of baseball—and my dad.

My dad also loved baseball, and he encouraged my ill-fated affection for the Chicago Cubs from an early age. Later, in my more rebellious years, it was like the Daniel Stern character in the film City Slickers said, “Back when my dad and I couldn’t communicate about anything at all, we could still talk about baseball.” In my mind, baseball and memories about my father will always be inextricably intertwined.

As far back as I can remember, I was a Cub fan. The first season I clearly recall was 1962, the year in which a 21-year-old Cub player, Kennie Hubbs, won the Rookie of the Year award. I related to Hubbs, because I, too, was a “good-field-no-hit,” middle-infielder. In fact, I hit a robust .163 for my Little League team that season. On those rare occasions when I managed to get on base, however, I was fast enough to steal my way around to third. My manager, knowing that my only realistic chance of reaching base was if I walked, would send me to the plate with the encouraging words, “Henderson, if you take that bat off your shoulder, I’ll break your arm.” The era of promoting self-esteem in children had not yet arrived in Chicago.

Nor had it affected Southern Illinois, if Kathleen’s father was any indication. When we began dating in the 1980s, we were watching her daughter Kristin’s team play a game in Carbondale. These were tiny little kids playing at a level that was not much above T-ball. If a miracle occurred, and a girl managed to hit the ball, the fielders had no idea what to do with it when they picked it up. Also sitting with us was her dad, Raymond McCormick, a former Marine who had fought at Iwo Jima. He had played baseball for years and managed championship American Legion teams. He knew the game well, and, where fundamentals were concerned, he apparently cut no slack for his grand-daughter or other ten-year-old girls. In this particular game, with a runner on first, a girl hit the ball to Kristin at shortstop. She scooped up the ball, and, wonder of wonders, threw to first in time to get the runner hustling down the line. The stands erupted in cheers, those parents never before having seen a play executed correctly. In the midst of this wild celebration, however, Raymond shook his head in disapproval and pointed toward the infield. “The play was at second,” he told me gravely, as if those girls were certain to turn the double-play had they simply thrown to the correct base. I just nodded in response.

My father was from that same generation as Raymond. They weren’t big on praising children, being more concerned that their kids would “get a big head” than boosting self-esteem. That is not to say that my dad wouldn’t stand up for us when we had been wronged. One 4^th of July Little League game stands out in my mind. It was a hot day, and the game had dragged on for hours. It was a typical kids game in many respects. Our pitcher had a no-hitter going, although he had walked about 14 batters. Meanwhile, my team had racked up twenty or so runs, largely through a combination of errors and walks. Late in that 20-to-nothing game, my manager scanned the bench to see who he could send in to hit at that crucial moment. He pointed at me and told me to grab a bat. As I eagerly headed to the plate, he yelled, “Henderson! If you . . .”

I rolled my eyes and said, “I know: if I take the bat off my shoulder you’ll break my arm.” I stepped into the box and banged the bat against my tennis shoes as I had seen Ernie Banks do many times. My family was in the stands that day, so, despite the admonition from my manager, I was determined to swing if the pitch was anywhere near the plate. The first pitch bounced in the dirt, two feet in front of the plate. I held off. “Strike!” the umpire barked. I was confused, but I dug in again. The second pitch almost hit me in the hip, but I deftly avoided the ball with a maneuver that would have made a Spanish matador proud. “Strike two!” I wasn’t sure what was happening, but I understood the cardinal rule of baseball that says you should never argue with the ump about balls and strikes. Behind in the count, and feeling a bit like Casey from the famous poem, I grew more determined than ever. The third pitch came in, well over my head, and I coolly let it sail by. “Strike three!” the umpire called, with a little more enthusiasm than I thought the situation merited. I trudged back to the bench with tears streaming down my face. I wasn’t upset about striking out—that had happened a lot; it was because of the injustice of being called out on three pitches that were clearly out of the strike zone.

I was embarrassed about my performance as I headed back to the car to meet my family. That’s when I saw my dad. He had the umpire pinned against the cinderblock wall behind the dugout. My dad was a big guy with a long history of barroom brawls, so the umpire, with fear in his eyes, was listening attentively to what he had to say. Despite his aura of menace, my dad spoke calmly and distinctly. He said, essentially, “Sir, I understand that it was exceedingly warm behind the plate, it was a one-sided game, and you would like very much to get home to your family. But these lads are trying to learn which pitches are strikes and which are balls, and your calling every pitch a strike, regardless of its proximity to the strike zone, could prove deleterious to a young man’s fledgling batting eye.” My memory might be somewhat faulty, so his words were probably put more crudely, and perhaps punctuated by profanity and other colorful terms, but he got his point across. The umpire, apologized profusely before sprinting to his car when my dad released him.

There was one other instance in which my father intervened on our behalf in a baseball-related situation. My house in Chicago was on a barely paved street directly across from a cemetery. In the wide gap between the cemetery fence and the street was a double set of railroad tracks and a narrow strip of grass perhaps fifty feet wide that led to a small embankment on which the tracks sat. That strip of grass stretched for the entire block and served as the neighborhood playground for football, baseball, and hockey, as well as for games of “Cowboys and Indians” or “Army.” One spring, we noticed that our next-door neighbors, the Boggio family, was occupied for an entire morning, doing something to the grass across the street from their house. When they finished their task, we discovered to our horror that they had planted a flower garden smack in the middle of our multi-purpose field. They had set up neat lines of brightly colored flowers accented by a dozen or so bushes that would eventually grow into a solid hedge surrounding the garden on three sides. The problem, of course, was that it was directly behind second base of our baseball diamond. We didn’t know what to do, so we waited anxiously for my dad to get home from work. In those days, we had five kids (two more would come later), and dad had to work two jobs to feed us all. Several times a week, he returned from his factory job about 4:30, showered, shaved, and changed clothes before heading out for another eight hours of tending bar. The only opportunity we had to talk to him was the five minutes while he was shaving. My brother Dan and I saw our opening and briefed him on the critical situation:

“Dad! Mr. Boggio built a garden in our baseball field!”

“I saw it.”

“What are we gonna do?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“But, we’ll have to walk a mile to the park just to play baseball.”

He stopped shaving, turned to us, and said, in a voice that indicated the conversation was over, “Don’t worry about it.” We walked away dejected, feeling as if he had let us down.

The next day, a Saturday, we woke up to an amazing sight. Overnight, something had happened to Mr. Boggio’s garden. It looked as if King Kong had ravaged the area, leaving flowers and hedges uprooted and scattered in all directions; some greenery was even stuck high in the barbed wire atop the cemetery fence. There was nothing left of the garden but an area of black dirt where plants had once grown. Before we could ask our parents what had happened, we heard a knock on the front door. My dad answered it, and we could hear Mr. Boggio’s voice, but we couldn’t make out the words. My dad, in a voice oozing with Eddie Haskell-like sincerity, replied, “Gee, I don’t know anything about your garden.” Mr. Boggio spoke again, and my dad said, in a much louder voice, “I told you I don’t know anything!” and slammed the door. He calmly walked past us, sat down and returned to his coffee and morning newspaper. As Dan and I added two and two together, we could hear my dad chuckling behind the newspaper he held up in front of his face.

He never told us what happened, but we assumed that he returned from the bar about two in the morning, after having imbibed several cocktails in the course of the evening, saw the flowers shining in the streetlights, and took care of the problem with great energy and no small amount of flair. We aren’t certain of this, but, knowing my dad the way we do, it seems the most likely scenario. Regardless of the true story, we had our field back, and the garden never re-appeared.

When my dad was too young to really remember, the Cubs won the National League pennant every three years, in 1929, 1932, 1935, and 1938, losing in the World Series each time. Then, when he was 17 and stationed on Guam with the Navy in 1945, they won again, so he missed the World Series (which they lost). He told us that he wrote his brother, “Oh well; I’ll catch them the next time they’re in the Series.” Of course, that “next time” never occurred in his lifetime. He died seven years before the glorious World Series of 2016 when the Cubs finally won it all for the first time since 1908. I thought about him a lot that season.

In fact, that year, I probably started thinking about him in February, when I heard the words, “pitchers and catchers report.”