A Schnorrer's Cry: Baseball's Been Good to Me

I’m a baseball schnorrer.

Theres no getting around it. As I reviewed in my mind my visits to Yankee Stadium, I see a definite pattern of schnorring.

Now, for the uninitiated let me first decipher the meaning of the Yiddish word schnorrer. It may be best defined in my case as a moocher, someone who gets something for nothing or otherwise would not partake in the experience.

Eight years into the new Yankee Stadium I finally made it, with Gilda, to the big ballpark in the Bronx Thursday night, courtesy of our friends Jane and Ken G., who themselves were recipients of four complimentary $150 field level tickets about 12 rows in and a third of the way up the right field line. Great seats.

During my years at Lebhar-Friedman (1977-2009), I was fortunate to be among the privileged to receive the company’s four box seat tickets once or twice a season. They, too, were great seats perhaps a dozen rows behind the Yankee dugout near first base. They were so good they spoiled me for sitting anywhere else.

Unfortunately, along with the building of the new Yankee Stadium came a dramatic increase in season ticket prices which dovetailed with the recession that struck publishing especially hard. L-F made the tough but economically prudent decision to not renew its ticket subscription. 

I, as well, did the financially prudent thing. I forsook going to games. I even turned down a suggestion by Ellie and Donny that we go one Father’s Day several years ago. Instead, I convinced them that rather than spend a minimum $400 on tickets alone, plus food, parking and other incidentals, we should go to a Brooklyn Cyclones minor league game in Coney Island, have dinner at a nearby Russian restaurant and stroll the boardwalk, all for less than the cost of one Yankee ticket. It was a most enjoyable Father’s Day.

I didn’t always use the L-F tickets for my own enjoyment. I would give them to Dan and Ellie. I even gave Dan tickets to the seventh game of the 1999 World Series because it was to be played on his 21st birthday. Baseball aficionados no doubt realized the gift turned out to be a beau geste as the Yankees wrapped up the series against the San Diego Padres in four games. 

I was fortunate enough to go to a World Series seventh game in 1975. I scored a free ticket from the sports editor of The New Haven Register where I worked as a bureau chief. Happy to report the Cincinnati Reds came from behind to win the title against the Boston Red Sox. Aside from the Reds’ wives and front office personnel, I was probably one of the few people in Fenway Park pleased with the outcome. I was intelligent enough to keep my delirious contentment to myself that evening, even from my fellow Register reporter John Membrino, a die-hard Sox fan.

After moving back to New York in 1977, the only time I went to a Yankee game other than with L-F tickets was with John and Gilda to watch the home team play the Red Sox. We sat high in the upper deck along the left field foul line. I have no idea why people pay good money to sit in those far-away seats. 

My baseball ticket schnorring began as a child. My brother Bernie and I would go to Yankee games using tickets provided by one of our father’s sales representatives, a Mr. Schaeman. Half the fun was going on the ear-popping elevator to pick up the tickets at his office in the Empire State Building. Back then, in the late 1950s early 1960s, when the last out was recorded, on their way to the subway fans could walk on the ball field toward the exit gate in center field. Police would keep you from running on the infield diamond, but to tread where Mickey Mantle patrolled was a thrill to be savored.

We didn’t always go to Yankee games. Bernie rooted for the Dodgers. We went to Ebbetts Field virtually for free after eating 10 Elsie the Cow ice cream treats and sending the wrappers along with 25 cents to the Bordens Company. Mr. Shaeman also provided tickets to Mets games at the Polo Grounds and Shea Stadium.

For the record, I’m not just a baseball ticket schnorrer. For many years now Gilda’s brother Carl sends us two tickets to four regular season and one pre-season game of the New York Giants football team. They, too, are really good seats, though in recent years I’ve mostly chosen to avoid the two hour drag-of-a-ride home from the Meadowlands in heavy traffic. It’s a lot more comfortable watching the game on televised tape delay skipping through commercials. If Dan and Allison or Donny and Ellie can’t use the tickets, we give them to friends, Gilda’s co-workers or donate them to charity auctions.

By the way, at Thursday night’s Yankee game, the Bronx Bombers won in true bomber fashion. Brett Gardner hit a tie-breaking walk-off home run leading off the bottom of the 11th inning. Too bad we headed to the parking lot at the conclusion of the 10th inning. Ah well, at least we heard John Sterling’s call on the radio, “It is high, it is far, it is gone. The Yankees win!”

Boston Memories

I had a hard time sitting down to write this post. I have no desire to trivialize the horror of what happened at the Boston Marathon, the terror that engulfed a great city, the subsequent assassination of an MIT policeman, and the shootout that ultimately led to the death of one of the bombing suspects and the capture of his younger brother. But I am drawn once again by the intersection of events in my life and that of our family with news of the day, so I’ve, reluctantly, pieced together some Beantown memories.

I’ve been to Boston many times, for work and to visit family. My first visit to Boston, to attend the deciding game of the 1975 World Series, predates the ritual singing of Sweet Caroline at Fenway Park. It was not sweet that night for Red Sox fans. They blew a lead to the Cincinnati Reds. The city had to wait another 19 years for its championship rings. 

Our family has walked down Boylston Street where the bombs went off several times. We’ve stayed at the Sheraton Hotel in the Prudential Center that backs up on Boylston. We’ve shopped in the Prudential Center mall. The June before Dan entered Tufts University, we bought him a Columbia Sportswear winter jacket. In truth, it was too big for him (too big for me, as well), but he wanted it and it was on sale. He gave it back to me several years later and I used it from time to time. Last year I gave it to one of Donny’s friends who needed a winter jacket while riding around as a bicycle messenger. 

I think it was during that same June visit that Ellie talked us into taking a horse drawn carriage ride around Copley Square. Her vision—all of our visions—of a carriage ride as a romantic excursion was forever destroyed that night. It’s hard to feel romantic when your olfactory sense is assaulted by the contents of the drop bag behind the horse. We couldn’t wait for the ride to finish.

Dan and Allison bought a house in Arlington seven years ago. One of the restaurants in town we ate in during our first visit was Jimmy’s Steer House on Massachusetts Avenue. She didn’t work there then, but Krystle Campbell, one of the three fatalities of the marathon day bombing, worked as a manager of Jimmy’s for the last several months. 

Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev was captured in Watertown, in the yard of 67 Franklin Street, less than a mile from the Arsenal Mall. Fifteen years ago I spent time at the Arsenal Mall researching a cover story for my magazine. 

Mostly inconsequential links. But sufficiently strong, to me, to have made me identify a little stronger than most non-Bostonians with the utter senselessness of the last two weeks. I’ve left it to other journalists to be more profound about the meaning behind our latest bout with terror.

Fenway Memory

Just as they did 100 years ago today when they opened the new playground of the hometown Boston Red Sox, the NY Yankees (known then as the NY Highlanders) will be afternoon guests at the centennial of Fenway Park. 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. For years they suffered with them in the anguish of never having won a championship from 1918 until 2004. Even with a second World Series title in 2007, Boston fans are forever lamenting the fate of their beloved Bosox. All the while they repeatedly sell out Fenway Park.

My one and only time visiting the baseball shrine off Lansdowne Street was in 1975, for the seventh game of the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. My friend John and I had freebie tickets courtesy of our employer, the New Haven Register. We 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.

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.

I have another regret, not tied to the Red Sox, 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.