This essay ended up as a reflection on the sustaining value of quality. I thought I might begin with friendship, or a book, or a film, but then, the tangled strands of memory got caught in the loom once again, particularly the transition from a partisan emotional attachment to a particular baseball team to a greater appreciation of genius, beauty, and character. Sure, I could have chosen literature or the arts as the medium, but why not baseball?

I was in my first year at my second boarding school in the autumn of 1960, the year in which the U2 Spy plane piloted by Gary Gary Powers was brought to earth by a Soviet missile, the US sent its first soldiers into Vietnam, The Civil Rights Act was signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and JFK became the first president born in the 20th Century. I’m pretty sure all those events happened, but the most significant event from my point of view, was Bill Mazerowski’s ninth inning home run, a long line drive that gave the Pirates the deciding game of the World Series. My dormitory included one kid from Pittsburgh and a lot of guys from Connecticut, some of whom rooted for the Red Sox if they lived east of Hartford and some for the Yankees from the western half of the state.

I lived in northwestern Connecticut and had been devoted to the Yankees from the first wobbling images of Yankee games broadcast on WPIX, Channel 11, narrated by Mel Allen and Red Barber. The northwest corner wasn’t far from New York City, but television reception was iffish on crystal clear afternoons and virtually obscured as storms moved through the region. I counted on Allen and Barber to bring the games to life even as the screen was filled with horizontal bands of black. Allen was The Voice of the Yankees, mellow and blessed with a honeysuckle voice thick with witticisms that had traveled with him from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Barber had been a notable announcer for the Dodgers whose broadcasts on Channel 9, WOR might as well have been filmed underwater, under muddy water as the signal hardly made it to my corner of the state. Barber was noted for the vivid expressions he had picked up in Mississippi – “Sittin’ in the catbird seat”, “slicker than boiled okra”, “tied up in a croker sack”, but holds my admiration to this day for his determination to keep profanity from entering his vocabulary at any time. His fear was that in a moment of excitement he might blurt out a vulgarism that would offend his listeners. I share his intentions and fail daily.

Mel was on the mike on October 13 when Ralph Terry tossed Mazerowski the fat ball that crushed my soul. 

“There’s a drive into deep left field, look out now…! That ball is going … going … gone! The World Series is over! Mazeroski … hits it over the left field fence for a home run, and the Pirates win it 10-9 and win the World Series!… And the fans go wild.”

This fan did NOT go wild; this fan watched Nick Litchfield, the kid from Pittsburgh, strut around campus for the next eight months. 

Life went on, of course, and my intensive “How to Become A Human Being” program took much of my time, but when Mazerowski was elected to the Hall of Fame, the dark and unattractive underbelly of this aspiring human took a nasty turn. In addition to recognizing a more complete understanding of the corroding power of resentment reanimated, I have to take a long look at what was bubbling up, and what animated the taking of myself back to Forbes Field in 1960 when in the present I sat in reasonable contentment, happily near almost all of the people I love best and without a virtual cloud on the horizon, with the exception of existential angst, of course.

I had forgiven Ralph Terry. Leave us not forget that the Yankees had allowed NINE runs before Mazerowski added to the tally. I was ok with Yogi Berra as well; Berra was too short to catch the ball as it cleared the fence. I have ½ inch on Berra, but I can’t see myself making the catch either. Aaron Judge, 6’7”, would have fielded it like a pop fly.

But alternate histories have no place here.

The plain truth is that from the age of five or six I really did not do well with humans. I can’t remember precisely when I shut the door to my room and lost myself in books, but books are virtually all that I do remember until I became a sports fan. I listened to games in my room and watched on television when my teams were in town. For several years children’s classics gave way to stories about baseball – about real baseball players, and fictional players, only slightly older than I, who defied expectation, overcame adversity, and played their way to victory. When asked what Christmas present was the best I ever received, the thrill of opening the wrapper and finding The Fireside Book of Baseball arrives as vividly today as it did in 1956.

Remarkable writers have written about sports, some of the most estimable about baseball. I won’t trot out the entire list of writers whose perception of the game has fired my imagination, but two, Roger Angell and George Will, are essentially men of letters who fell in love with the game and who write unapologetically about baseball in the same fashion that Joseph Campbell wrote about the power of myth. 

“This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.”

Roger Angell

“All I remember about my wedding day in 1967 is that the Cubs lost a double-header.” George Will

Angell suggested that the only path beyond blind partisan allegiance is expertise, an observation which I took to mean an appreciation of greatness in players and teams other than one’s own. 

Do I cite Angell in order to mouth a mamby pamby paean to Mazeroski, a long-overdue tribute to a clutch ballplayer? 

Nah. One homerun does not a Hall of Famer make, and if defensive skill is the criterion, the list of exquisitely talented fielders not in the Hall is as long as an A’s losing streak. Do a search for Jim Edmonds. The first word you’ll encounter is “Catch”. Not this catch or that catch but the seemingly endless string of improbable catches, any one of which rivals the iconic catches in baseball lore. When Edmonds became eligible for consideration, he garnered 2.5% of Hall of Fame votes and was relegated to the heap of overlooked defensive wizards.

Like a runner inching his way down the third base line as a pitcher winds up, I am slowly edging toward the purpose of this confession. Having buried the lead several pages ago, my intention is still to describe the transition from juvenile devotion to a team, the Yankees, to an appreciation of grace, skill, and heart wherever it appears. As a child, I gave my heart to the Yankees for the same reason kids wear superhero costumes on Halloween and are fascinated by dinosaurs and sharks. I lacked agency, authority, power, and they were powerful. 

But childhood ends. In my case on October 12, 1960. All was not lost, however. That Pirates team, for example, included Roberto Clemente, among the most complete and certainly most graceful players of all time. In addition to Clemente, the National League was stuffed with greatness – Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, Orlando Cepeda, Stan Musiel, Eddie Matthews, and Hank Aaron. American League rivals included Ted Williams, Minnie Minoso, Nellie Fox, Brooks Robinson, Al Kaline, Luis Aparicio, Vic Power, and Harvey Kuenn. Against all odds, throughout the next 60 years, magical ball players continued to break into a lineup and blaze with glory. 

As I write, I am reminded of a spring training game in Peoria, Arizona, an early evening game in which the best seats had been sold out. My son and I sat on the lawn behind right field, above the bullpens on the side of the outfield. We were there to see Ichiro Suzuki, the Mariner’s newly acquired bushido batsman. His career in Japan had been extraordinary, and we would have made the trip if only to see him hit and run the bases. He won my admiration before spring training had begun. He’d worn the number 51 in Japan and had asked pitcher Randy Johnson if he could have the number in Seattle, assuring the pitcher that he would bring the number no shame. No shame? That year he was Rookie of the Year, AL MVP, won a Gold Glove and Silver Slugger Award, and was the first rookie to lead voting for the All Star game. On that evening in March, however, that was yet to come. We’d seen him hit a single and steal second in the first inning, more than excitement enough for us, but in the third, the Padres’ bats warmed up and runners were on first and second. Ichiro was playing relatively deep, read the batter’s stance, took off at the crack of the bat, and nailed the runner at third. Early in the regular season he would cut down Terrance Long of the A’s with a rope to third that was simply immortalized in Japan as “The Throw”. 

I can’t truly pay tribute to Ichiro as a hitter, but like Curry’s delicate shot from mid-court, like the mid-air acrobatics of Randy Moss, Ichiro Suzuki’s courtly extension of his bat signified a kind of kinesthetic genius.

I stopped in at the National Baseball Hall of Fame last week on the way home from a college reunion. Ichiro won’t be eligible for election to the Hall until 2025, but the museum had mounted an extensive display of records held by various players, many of which belong to Suzuki. Ichiro has visited the museum frequently, holding the bats of celebrated players, weighing them in his hands to feel the density, the “sweet spot” in each bat. He wanted to hold the bat used by George Sisler, former St. Louis Browns first baseman, whose record for hits in a single season had held until 2004 when Suzuki’s set the new mark of 257 hits. He visited Sisler’s grave in St. Louis, explaining,

“I wanted to do that for a grand upperclassman of the baseball world. I think it’s only natural to want to do that, to express my feelings in that way.”

Those of us who were devoted to his career remember his response when readying to face dominant pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka – 

“I hope he arouses the fire that’s dormant in the innermost recesses of my soul. I plan to face him with the zeal of a challenger.”

So, the Yankees were pretty terrific in 1960,  but then the Giants were pretty terrific, and the Dodgers, and the Cards, and the Braves, and the Reds, and the Mariners, and now, the Astros and the Rays.

I stood in front of Ichiro’s locker in Cooperstown and reminded myself that more grace and more beauty is likely to appear when I least expect it, I wouldn’t mind being on the lawn above a bullpen to see it arrive