Let's Hear It For Baseball

(A friend with whom I don’t always agree politically has told me via email of a personal love for baseball.  And this person is not even a born American.  But A Link is Born in such a sharing…

My first response:) 

Although I have tuned out sports in general, I consider it my great good fortune in life to have seen 'The Splendid Splinter' Ted Williams in live action, and to a lesser extent, Mickey Mantle, in a game between the Red Sox and the Yankees at Yankee Stadium in NYC.  This was in '55 or '56, I forget which, when I was living in NYC, in My Year In Manhattan, when I first started out in earnest on my search for Truth.  Ted got 1 for 4 that day, as I recall; but it was a treat, watching even the great Yankees having to go into 'the Ted Williams switch,' with the shortstop moving over between first and second base when The Great One was at bat.  I also 'met' him out here in Long Beach one time, well before then, when I was at our biggest local recreation park, for something or other, and they were having some fly-casting championships competition there, of which Ted was one as well; and I was standing there, all unaware, when someone murmured to me, "that's Ted Williams," about a tall guy standing nearby.  Possibly having overheard the comment, he looked straight at me, then.  I was too starstruck to do anything about it.  

The only guy ever to hit over .400 to win the batting championship one year.   And who [was] also a Marine fighter pilot...He was a real man's man.

I understand that he paid to be in put in cryogenics? is that the word? Put in suspended animation? - when he died, in hopes that science would at some point come up with the technology to bring him/people back to life.  I always thought that that was a bit of a conceit.  But hey - if anyone had the 'right' to want to come back as them[selves], Ted Williams would.

Better than reincarnating as a crotchety old woman, who never amounted to anything in life but a pain in the caudal exterior to those around her...or as a child in Africa, dead before the age of three...or as a thief, looked down on by everybody...or......or.....or..........            

As I think I said: I am impressed with your love of baseball.  That's the epitome of Americana.  Anybody who loves baseball is a friend of mine.

😊 Stan

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(My follow-up response, shortly later:)

Pardon - that was known as 'the Ted Williams shift' - not switch.  The years, they take their toll...

...and I remember that he was rather er, unhappy when he was called up during the Korean War to have to become a Marine jet fighter pilot in action again; letting all and sundry know that he was, er, unhappy that he had to be called out of retirement to do that, that it was for the younger guys to 'step up to the plate,' as it were.  

I couldn't tell you who the baseball heroes of today are.  But I do know, that they would have to really stretch (as in 'the 7th inning stretch') to make it into the same league as the great, the one and only, Ted Williams.

And I hope that that they still sell CrackerJacks at ball games these days.  Some things should never change.

Stan  

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I used to cut out of the Sunday paper’s Sports Section the week’s compilation of the batting averages of the players of both major leagues and post it on my bedroom wall, and compare their progress.  That is an indication of how I remember well that one year, even though Ted Williams was out injured for a fair portion of the season, he was still up at bat enough times to qualify for the title, and in a major way.  .406.  Unbelievable.

Stan ‘The Man’ Musial.  ‘Rapid Robert’ (or conversely, ‘Bullet Bob’) Feller.  Harry ‘The Cat’ Brecheen.  And my hometown duo, of reliable 20-game-winner pitcher Bob Lemon and shortstop Vern Stephens, of the Boston Red Sox.  And I continued keeping an eye on Major League baseball down into the days of the great, very tight nighttime duels between the Dodgers’ (then firmly ensconced in L.A.) Sandy Koufax and the SF Giants’ Juan Marichal.  And of course, there was always the ever-reliable, gentle presence of the voice of the Dodgers, Vin Scully, reporting on it all…I understand that he ‘lasted’ down until just a couple of years ago, when he finally hung up the microphone.

Well done, Vinny.  It was good knowing you, too.