Passing On My Dale Murphy Glove

Dale Murphy once again failed to earn a plaque in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. Murphy was an exceptional center fielder for the Atlanta Braves. He hit 398 home runs, had a career batting average of .265, was twice named National League Most Valuable Player, was selected seven times as an All-Star, with five Gold Glove and four Silver Slugger awards.  But the committees that selected new inductees, including the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee that voted Sunday, have repeatedly left him disappointed. 

I never followed Murphy’s 18 year career from 1976 through 1993. As a New York Yankees fan, I didn’t see National League players except when they played the Bronx Bombers in a World Series. There were no inter-league games back when Murphy played. The Braves never played in the World Series during his career.

I bring up Dale Murphy’s career because a few weeks ago I officially ended my seven decade softball career, most of which I played wearing a Dale Murphy signature mitt. With pickleball encompassing my active sports time, I transferred to my son Dan my Dale Murphy mitt and my softball cleats. It has taken me these several weeks to accept the reality my softball days are over. 

I started playing softball my first summer in sleepaway camp, 1956. I was seven. 

Before heading off to Camp Massad Aleph in Tannersville, PA, my father took me to a sporting goods store on Kings Highway in Brooklyn to buy a softball mitt. My father had little knowledge of the game, so he was more than a little “farmisht” when the Bobby Shantz glove model I had chosen priced out at $20. Reluctantly, after more than a little begging on my part, he paid the asking price. I played with that glove for the next 20 years, replacing it only when the inside padding disintegrated in the palm of my left hand, about 40 years ago. 

Dale Murphy replaced Bobby Shantz. Bobby Shantz was a pitcher, a southpaw. Still alive at 100, Shantz pitched for the Yankees when they beat the Milwaukee Braves in the 1958 World Series. As a Philadelphia Athletic, he was named the 1952 American League Most Valuable Player. 

I pitched softball in pick-up games and organized leagues. A few friends from work at Lebhar-Friedman formed a team in a Bronx league. Named Loco Focos after a radical group from the 1800s, the team played Sunday mornings in Van Cortland Park, Allerton Avenue park, and fields along the lower Bronx River Parkway. We were not good.

Then I played for Lebhar-Friedman’s business league team in Central Park, on a field at 110 street next to the FDR Drive and on a field under the 59th Street bridge once the tennis bubble was taken down. We named our team The Chain Gang after Chain Store Age. One of the teams we played was from a police precinct. The cops thought our name meant we were ex-cons. 

We were competitive but not unbeatable so our Hispanic players recruited a player, Jose, a much better pitcher than I. Lebhar-Friedman required all team members to be company employees. No problem. Roger Friedman green-lighted his employment in our mailroom. 

Jose worked for L-F for several years but the baseball gods were less kindly to another mailroom denizen. Victor (I think that was his name) played left center field. In the bottom of the last inning of a game against another publishing company we had a three run lead. But they were rallying. They narrowed the score to a one run deficit. Two outs. Bases loaded. Jose got the batter, the president of their company, to hit a sinking line drive directly at Victor. He did not have to move. He reached down for the ball but it sank below his glove and flew right between his legs for a game winning hit.

The next day Victor lost his mailroom job. 

After our second child was born in late 1981 I decided to join the Brotherhood team of Temple Israel Center, part of the Westchester Hebrew Softball League. I was enthusiastically welcomed by all but the pitcher I replaced. Michael protested that the team was still losing. He dismissed the argument that though we were losing the scores were much tighter, single digits instead of double digits when he pitched. 

Michael took his beef to the TIC Brotherhood committee. They sympathized but advised him to hang up his spikes. Instead he changed temples.  

Within a few years the TIC team played in the league championship game against Jewish Community Center (now called Kol Ami). That year we had three first basemen. One broke his elbow earlier in the season. Two others were returning from travel when the game began. A player of lesser quality started in their place. JCC’s first two batters hit ground balls to our shortstop. His throws were mishandled. Instead of two outs, JCC scored three unearned runs. 

One of our veteran first basemen showed up in the second inning. JCC managed just two more runs over the final eight innings. Facing JCC’s ace pitcher, Joel, TIC scored three runs. We lost 5-3. I’ve always said we won the last eight innings, but softball is a nine inning game.

Some years later JCC/Kol Ami’s team disbanded. Joel joined the TIC team. He started most games; I played Mariano Rivera closing out the last few innings. In 2006 Joel pitched us to a championship against the team from Greenburgh Hebrew Center in a game marred by a fight at home plate started by Greenburgh’s catcher after one of our runners slid home, successfully. Both combatants were thrown out of the game.

A week later I was confronted by a past president of the Brotherhood. He vehemently asserted our team had disgraced TIC because of the fight, that we should give back our trophy. As he wasn’t at the game I asked who told him about the incident. He said his daughter was there. 

I told him she was wrong. For the next three years we never spoke, until he approached me one day to apologize. What prompted his change of heart? Seems his daughter no longer was married to the catcher! 

Joel left our team a few years later. I went back to being the starter. But my fastball had lost some, perhaps lots of, zip. The team had regressed offensively and defensively. But the real reason I stopped playing at 65 was that I no longer enjoyed the burden of waking up at 7 am every Sunday from April through October for a 9 am game. My pickleball games usually start at 2 pm.

Reflections on a Thanksgiving Snow Storm

It is still snowing in Syracuse, part of a Thanksgiving storm blanketing much of northern New York, reminiscent of a 1971 Thanksgiving weekend blizzard that closed the thruway and delayed my return to graduate school from Brooklyn. 

It’s an occasion worthy of a retelling of my holiday experience 54 years ago. 

Here’s how the National Weather Service described the 1971 storm: 

“Heavy snow in Catskills and across the Upper Hudson Valley. This heavy snow began on the day before Thanksgiving and continued into Thanksgiving day. Albany picked up 22.5 inches with amounts up to 30” reported elsewhere. This storm turned the busiest travel day of the year into a nightmare, with many stranded travelers not making it to their destinations on Thanksgiving. This storm was the greatest November snowstorm on record and one of the greatest ever.”  

With all highway traffic shut down, I was forced to wait until Monday to return to school from my parents’ home in Brooklyn. Roads were still barely plowed in New York City, but as I got closer to Syracuse the highways were almost totally clear. Even city streets were passable. I remarked to myself that Syracuse sure knew how to handle snow. I further wondered what all the fuss was about, why travel had been restricted on Sunday.

I parked in front of the gingerbread-style, three-story house on East Genesee Street where my studio apartment occupied part of the top floor. As soon as I stepped out of the car the extent of the snowfall became apparent. Snow engulfed my legs up to my hips. I struggled to reach the front stairs, then made my way to the third floor.

I opened the door to find half my apartment covered in snow. The roof had caved in under the weight of the snow. It took several days for the landlord to repair the roof.

The rest of the winter passed without incident, though I was nervous each time I ventured out driving in the snow. Syracuse, after all, is considered the snowiest large city in the contiguous United States, averaging about 128 inches year. Snow is such an expected part of the city that it is not uncommon for a radio station to provide a prize to the person who predicts the first date a measurable amount of flakes hits the ground. A day in mid October won the year I was there. That year it snowed 133.7 inches.

Syracuse’s nickname is Salt City. I assumed the moniker came from the liberal spreading of salt on city streets to clear the snow. Actually, it derived from nearby salt mines. I had no idea there were salt mines until I heard a story on the radio explaining the origin of the nickname during my last week in Syracuse. 

My red with black vinyl top 1969 Buick Skylark weathered the winter with no dents, no fender benders, no scratches.

On a bright, warm early June day, diploma in hand, I packed the Buick up in the driveway shared with the house next door. My getaway was a few moments away. As I bent into the car to reposition my stereo, I looked out the passenger side window and saw another student’s car backing up, slowly, inexorably, toward me. I screamed, “Stop!” I waved my hands. To no avail.

Thunk! Broadsided in sunny, summer daylight in my passenger side door. I shook my head in disgust. So close to escaping Syracuse intact.  

Water, Water, All the Time: 80 oz a Day

How much water do you drink every day?

Doubtful you keep track, though many of you, like my daughter Ellie, always has a bottle at hand. So, including liquid accompanying meals, do you swallow 20 ounces? 40? 60 or more? Are you pishing it away all day? All night?

Water is said to be good for you. I accept that, but, honestly, I rarely have a thirst for it. Or for any other drink. I try to stay hydrated when playing pickleball but over the course of a 2-3 hour session I imbibe perhaps 10 ounces in the form of sugar free lemonade flavored Vitamin Water. Over dinner, I often cannot finish a 7.5 ounce can of Diet Coke.

I’m musing about water because I might once again be suffering from either kidney or bladder stones, a condition that may be flushed away, if one is fortunate, by the consumption of what I consider to be a prodigious amount of liquid, 80 ounces per day.

I’ve coped with the alternative medical remedy, details of which I will spare you, except to note that a catheter was involved.

So, one might assume that confronted with the choices I would opt for drinking lots of water. After all, more than half a century ago, in June 1970, drinking 80 ounces of water for 10 straight days kept me away from being drafted during the height of the Vietnam War.

My college deferment had run out. In the draft lottery at the end of 1969 my birth date, March 6, was picked 139th. At the beginning of June a formal letter from the Selective Service System ordered me to show up 10 days later at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn to take a physical to determine my eligibility to be one of 162,746 young men to be inducted that year into the military, mostly for service in Vietnam.

The Brooklyn College bookstore carried a booklet, “1001 Ways to Beat the Draft.” I had no debilitating disease or condition, nor was I a conscientious objector. I simply had no desire to get shipped to the rice paddies of Indochina. The booklet, however, did offer a glimmer of hope.

Seems the military has a standard of acceptable physicality based on a person’s height and weight. A six foot person—my height—had to weigh at least 131 pounds. I weighed 134. I was really skinny. But my path to survival of the not-necessarily-the-fittest was clear. Get thinner!

I had 10 days to lose enough weight to get under the minimum, and then some, because the booklet also said they could keep me for three days of observation. Read that, time to fatten me up for the kill.

God bless Dr. Stillman, as in Dr. Stillman’s Water Diet. His regimen, much like the latter day Atkins Diet, permitted only proteins and required drinking 80 ounces of water a day. For 10 straight days I avoided all carbohydrates, all fruit, anything but meat, fish, eggs and water. For years my mother had tried to fatten me up, forcing me to drink milk shakes spiked with a raw egg that my sister gleefully recalls preparing, even threatening to send me away to a special camp for the undernourished. Now faced with the prospect of her youngest child being shipped off to Vietnam, she reversed course. She worried I was eating too much of my restricted diet. She removed food from my plate.

The fateful day at Fort Hamilton, the scene played out much as it did to Arlo Guthrie in the film “Alice’s Restaurant.” The sergeant told us no one, absolutely no one, would fail the intelligence test. We walked around the physical area in our skivvies, holding our valuables in see-thru plastic bags. Medical technicians poked our arms to draw blood. They couldn’t find the veins of a really fat guy ahead of me. He fainted. He earned a deferment. At the urine sample station, real or sarcastic offers and requests for extra fluid abounded. At the weigh-in, I tipped the scales at 124 pounds. I was REALLY skinny.

Ten days. Ten pounds. They could still keep me for observation. I cautiously approached the decision desk. They could keep me on base for three days, or ask me back for another physical in six months. They deferred me for a year.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was forever safe. The draft never reached number 139 again.

To celebrate my immediate victory, I took advantage of the free meal provided in the mess hall. I remember eating breaded, yes, breaded veal cutlet, corn niblets, mashed potatoes, rye bread, banana cream pie, Coca-Cola. Army food was delicious.

Can I discipline myself again to drinking 80 ounces a day? The stakes are not nearly as high. Time will tell … 

Trump's Bravado on Full Display on 60 Minutes

A sitting president enjoys many perks of office, from use of Air Force One to free Washington, D. C., residency at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, to unfettered access to anyone in America if not the world. But a most cherished perk, as demonstrated by Donald Trump for some 75 minutes Sunday night on “60 Minutes Overtime,” is the ability to ramble on, to filibuster, to conflate reality with falsehoods, to denigrate opponents, to inflate accomplishments and reject criticism, without fear of interruption or correction (https://share.google/cuR5gsIUSwZlvwiq9). 

Trump scored 75 minutes of free propaganda. Norah O’Donnell tried to ask probing questions, but her deference to the office of the president, and Trump’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink responses made the interview an extended commercial for Trumpism. 

Even easy retorts to his contention that the 2020 election was rigged—that more than 60 judges, including Republican jurists,  found no such reality—and that Trump has promised a better healthcare plan than Obamacare for more than a decade without releasing any details, and that ICE raids have failed to seize dangerous illegal immigrants but have gone after hard working, productive, long-time undocumented family members with no criminal records, and that he was wrong to say the inflation rate under Joe Biden was the highest in our history (it was higher in the 1970s-1980s), hardly escaped her lips, and when they did he rejected the counterpoints. 

CBS chose not to simultaneously fact check Trump’s numerous exaggerations, obfuscations and fantasies. Perhaps the White House insisted it would not do the interview if it were fact checked as he spoke. 

I like Norah O’Donnell. But she was overmatched because Trump chose to dominate, not interact. You get to do that when you’re president. Norah was not there to debate. There was no independent commission setting ground rules. 

Trump repeated his favorite talking points from staged events, time and again circling back on attacks that have been debunked while praising actions that have many independent observers worried they have destabilized our constitutional republic and our economy. 

By their nature, politicians are rarely humble. In that respect, Trump is an uber-politician. His extreme bravado was on full display Sunday night.

Seventh Game World Series Memories

The seemingly forever baseball season which began March 27 ends tonight with the ultimate game between the champions of the American and National Leagues, respectively the Toronto Blue Jays and the defending 2024 World Series victor, the Los Angeles Dodgers. 

Have you ever attended the seventh and deciding game of a World Series? 

I have. In 1975. In Fenway Park as the Boston Red Sox tried to end the curse of the Bambino that had suffocated them and their fans since the team sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1919. 

On that night in 1975 I was sitting along the third base line with John Membrino, a fellow reporter on The New Haven Register, courtesy of comp tickets from our sports department. John was an ardent Bosox fan. As a lifelong New York Yankees fan I was not. I kept my prejudice to myself as the game against the Cincinnati Reds proceeded. 

 

A cherished edifice of Beantown architecture, Fenway is a bandbox of a ballpark where fans sit so close to the action they feel they can almost touch the players. John and I sat along the third base line, in the lower, covered deck. It was the night after the Red Sox had triumphed in what some people argue was the best World Series game ever, a contest tied in the bottom of the eighth by a three-run home run by Bernie Carbo and won four innings later by a solo shot over the Green Monster down the left field line by Carlton Fisk, a home run forever immortalized in film by Fisk’s willing the ball to stay fair to give Boston a 7-6 victory and a chance to win its first championship in 57 years. (Some might equally argue that the third game of this year’s series, won by Los Angeles in the bottom of the 18th inning via a walk-off home run by Freddie Freeman, topped that 1975 epic, though Fisk’s physical antics surpassed Freeman’s exuberance.)

Despite the exhilaration from the night before, Boston fans, including my friend John, seemed to me to carry an air of resignation on their shoulders, even after the home team took an early 3-0 lead. They seemed to be waiting for someone to foul up, to make the error that opened the floodgates for the Big Red Machine. 

Sure enough, in the sixth inning, second baseman Denny Doyle, a mid-season acquisition based on his defensive skills, made his second error of the game, a miscue that prolonged a Cincinnati at bat. Tony Perez promptly made Boston pay by smacking a two-run homer. From then on the home town crowd’s emotional support never revived. Like prisoners waiting for their turn before the firing squad, the fans waited patiently for the coup de grace. Cincy scored single runs in the seventh and ninth innings to win the game and Series, 4-3.

With the exception of Reds players and their families, I probably was among the few fans to leave Fenway a happy fellow that night. I don’t like the Boston Red Sox. My only regret is I could not openly express my feelings. I’m not stupid, after all. No way would I openly cheer against the home team in Fenway.

If there’s another team that ranks among my despised, it is the Dodgers. I grew up in Brooklyn, but unlike my brother who rooted for the Dodgers, I followed my mother’s devotion to the Yankees, though she also liked the New York Giants (she did, after all, grow up in the Bronx and Manhattan). I was a mere lad of six when “Dem Bums” of Brooklyn beat my Yankees to cop their first crown. 

I was a more devoted, older fan when Sandy Koufax, seen cheering on the Dodgers during this year’s telecasts, began the 1963 series by striking out five straight Yankees including Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris enroute to a 15 strikeout, complete game win, the first of a four game sweep by Los Angeles. Of course, last year’s Yankee loss to the Dodgers also did not sit well with me.

I have another regret, not tied to the Red Sox or the Dodgers, but to baseball in general. My business travels took me to every major league city. I regret not watching a game in each ball park. Too late now.

Only one other time did I possess a ticket to the seventh game of a World Series. It was in 1998. Yankees vs. the San Diego Padres. My employer had four season tickets to Yankees games which accorded the right to purchase two additional seats. As our son, Dan, was celebrating his 20th birthday during the week the series was being played, I asked company president Roger Friedman for two tickets to the seventh game. Roger agreed. I mailed the tickets to Dan at school. He was thrilled. The Yankees, however, finished off the Padres in four games. Dan had to mail back the tickets for Roger to obtain a refund, but I still scored points for the thoughtful gift. 

In the Heartland, No Kings Royally Received

Gilda and I flew to the center of the country last week to participate in a No Kings demonstration Saturday protesting Donald Trump’s autocratic tendencies and actions. 

Well, in truth, we flew to Omaha to spend a week with daughter Ellie and grandchildren Cecilia Jane and Leo. 

Deep in red conservative middle America-Trumpland, Omaha is a blue dot oasis. Aside from the main protest site near the downtown, anti-Trumpers lined main thoroughfares waving signs and eliciting approving car horn blasts. In Turner Park thousands gathered to hear and cheer a slew of speakers blasting Trump’s anti-democratic actions. 

Perhaps the best way to convey their themes is to quote some of their handmade placards and display some photos: 

“Free the national guard”

“Hate will not make us great”

“At second Unitarian Church, we love our neighbors: immigrants, LGBTQ, of color, with disabilities, of all and any faiths”

“No faux king way”

“I’ve seen smarter cabinets at Ikea”

“Silence fuels injustice”

“Health care not wealth care”

“This is not left or right, this is right or wrong”

“Masked police are secret police”

“If you are not outraged you are not paying attention”

From three women dressed in Handmaids’ red capes and white bonnets to a gold-plated Trump-faced giant chicken, here are some of my favorite visuals: