Page 69 - WhyAsInY

WHo are tHese PeoPle? (Part 2)
lineup; I had to look mine up. On the other hand, he was eleven when he saw his first game, two and one-half years older than I was when I saw mine.)
I recall that in later years, Dad took me to two Sunday doublehead- ers at Yankee Stadium, one against the Indians and one against the White Sox, and to my only night game, also at Yankee Stadium, when Whitey Ford pitched against Billy Pierce, and my hero, Number 7, Mickey Mantle, played center. (I can prove that he was my hero because that is what I wrote on the personal information page in my still-retained sixth-grade “autograph book,” a fake-leather-bound book used at grad- uation time to garner on its multicolored pages such gems as “Take not the local; Take the express; Don’t get off until you reach success! Your friend, Dave Erdos.”) Mickey was so much my idol that when I would run in from the outfield at the end of an inning, I would do it with his stride, holding my elbows out to the side (and without my mitt, because in those days, the players would leave their gloves in the field when it was their team’s time to bat). When, about fifty years later, we were given the choice of maintaining our address as 5 (DiMaggio?) Garnet Road or changing it to 7 or 9 (Maris?), guess which one we settled on.
Baseball was what my father and I shared the most in my youth. Dad introduced me to the arcane art of scoring a game, recording each of its hits, force plays, strikeouts, etc., on a scorecard printed for that purpose that is sold at all ballparks. I recall with pride that, after watching this process performed by my father, I drew up my own scorecard and sat in front of our TV, scoring the first game of the 1954 World Series, the one in which Willy Mays made his still-talked-about over-the-shoulder catch off the bat of Vic Wertz in center field of the Polo Grounds, and Dusty Rhodes shocked the Indians with a pinch-hit homer to win the game in the bottom of the tenth. And I can still picture a book that my father must have given to me, which contained diagrams, dimensions, attendance capacities, and other facts concerning all sixteen of the Major League ballparks (of which only two, Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, are still around). We would talk about baseball history, baseball strategy, baseball oddities, and baseball rules, and, of those categories, I
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