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Kid Koala’s Drunken Trumpet Style

Can you guess the name of the record with the horn that he’s manipulating?

By Todd Drew

Memories Are Forever

The memories will not stop. Sometimes they come in the middle of the night and you have to walk. So you head down five flights to Walton Avenue. You pass the spot on East 157th Street where a bat boy once found Satchel Paige asleep in his car after driving all night from Pittsburgh.

Memories say it was 15 minutes before the first pitch when the boy shook him awake. It also says that Satchel asked for five more minutes and then threw a two-hit shutout.

Memories say things like that.

You cut over to Gerard Avenue where a Mickey Mantle home run would have landed if the Stadium’s roof hadn’t gotten in the way. That’s how the memories tell it anyway.

You walk up River Avenue behind the bleachers of the old Yankee Stadium. There will be no more games here, but you keep coming back because this is where your memories are.

You move past the millions that have huddled in the cold and the heat and the rain and sometimes the snow for tickets. The line wraps around the block and down East 161st Street near where a Josh Gibson home run once landed.

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By Kevin Baker

There are so many choose from, it’s hard to pick just one. There’s my first (and only) game in what was truly the old (pre-1976) Stadium, the first major-league game I ever attended, back in 1967. It was against the California Angels, and as I recall Horace Clarke hit a home run, and Joe Pepitone lost the game on an error. Par for the course for the Yankees of that year.

There were the World Series clinchers in both 1996 and 1999. The 1996 game was especially thrilling, a very close contest with the crowd roaring continuously, and the stands literally shaking. It also featured tens of thousands of Yankees fans, waiting to get in, breaking into a “F**k the Bra-a-a-ves!” version of their tomahawk chant. Afterwards, people were carrying around a coffin, marked Atlanta Braves, like something from four or five decades ago. The 1999 clincher was a little less exciting—the Yanks already had a 3-0 lead in games, and Clemens shut the Braves down for most of the game—but it does stand out for watching Mariano Rivera break Ryan Klesko’s bat three times in the ninth, reducing a team that was about to be swept in the World Series to helpless laughter.

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For years, John Sayles’ third movie, Baby It’s You  (1983) was unavailable on DVD.  But I saw it on the Netflix site last week.  What a pleasant surprise.  It hadn’t been released because of something to do with clearing music rights (Altman’s buddy movie, California Split, had similar troubles, though it too now is on DVD).  Baby It’s You was the first theatrically released movie to feature the music of Bruce Springsteen. 

I first saw it on VHS more than fifteen years ago and thought it was a charming coming-of-age story about a tough Italian kid (the Shiek, played by Vincent Spano) and a middle-class Jewish girl (Jill Rosen, played by Rosanna Arquette) set in Trenton, New Jersey in the Sixties.  Arquette has never been better.  I don’t know if Sayles has either.  

Sayles has made some interesting, thoughtful movies, but I’ve always found his directing style clunky.  The story here is nothing innovative but the direction, the cinematography, the performances (and yes, the soundtrack) all have an emotional directness that is winning.

In the original Times review, Janet Maslin wrote:

Music is a major part of ”Baby, It’s You,” as the title may indicate. The score consists of rock songs that more or less correspond to the time, although Sheik’s entrances are accompanied by Bruce Springsteen songs; these may be anachronistic, but they suit Sheik to a T. These touches, as well as the generally impeccable period details and the evocative cinematography by Michael Ballhaus (who shot many of R.W. Fassbinder’s later films), suggest that ”Baby, It’s You” was a labor of love for everyone involved.

Netflix it.

William Bendix as Babe Ruth.  What?  You think Goodman was any better?

“When you stop learning, you’re through.” –Buck O’Neil

Dig the latest from Joe Pos, who is so on-point about his old pal and the president-elect it makes you want to smile.  Well done, Pos. 

Mmm hmm.

And I got more hits than Sadaharu Oh.

Robert Whiting, who has written expertly about Japanese baseball for years, has three-part series on the Great Japanese Slugger in the The Japan Times:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Dig it, Dogs.

By Hart Brachen

“My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.”

Hank Aaron

Head on over to the Sport Magazine Gallery and check out Pat Conroy’s 1974 cover story on Hammerin’ Hank Aaron.

The stunning fact about Aaron’s assault on The Babe was that he came on so suddenly. For years, Willie Mays was the leading pretender to the throne. Willie made a hard run for it until time sent its battalions up against his flesh. Those of us who loved Willie watched our hero backed against the outfield wall by the caprices of old age, by that semi-death of extraordinary athletes who dance too long, then stumble home in a last graceless waltz that is the cruelest, most public humiliation of sport. Years ago, the world knew that The Babe was safe from Willie. But in 1971, a 37-year-old man hit 47 home runs and the chase was on again. The next year Aaron hit 34. Last year he hit 40 and at the end of the season was staring eyeball-to-eyeball with Babe Ruth.

…It was…in many ways, one of the most boring sports stories of the century. Every sportswriter in the country searched the rills and slopes of his brain hoping to find the different angle, the fresh approach or a new way of looking at Hank’s assault on Babe Ruth’s record. They asked Hank every conceivable question. They interviewed every person who had known Hank in the past 40 years, from Vic Raschi, who surrendered Hank’s first home run, to Aaron’s daughter, sons, sisters, brothers, mother, father, managers, coaches, players and friends. There was something about the obscenely crowded press conferences with Hank that made a reporter feel like a participant at an orgy. After each game last season, the flock gathered to ask Hank the same watered-down questions and Hank, salivating on cue, would render the same colorless, good-natured answers he had delivered the day before and the day before that. The chase ate up a lot of good words, and left a lot of semi-burned out reporters staring into the outfield lights.

And if you missed it, do yourself a favor and check out Tommy Cragg’s wonderful 2007 piece on Aaron for Slate:

Because he was so outwardly bland in personality and performance, Aaron seemed to take on character only in relation to things people felt strongly about: Willie Mays, Babe Ruth, civil rights. On his own he was, and remains, an abstraction, someone whom writers could only explicate with banalities like “dignified.” Our perception of Aaron today stems almost entirely from his pursuit of Ruth’s 714 home runs, in 1973 and 1974, during which time he faced down an assortment of death threats and hate mail. By then, Aaron had shed his reticence and begun to speak out against baseball’s glacial progress on matters of race. Still, very much his own man, he seemed to dismiss some of the loftier interpretations attached to his home-run chase. “The most basic motivation,” he wrote in his autobiography, I Had a Hammer, with Lonnie Wheeler, “was the pure ambition to break such an important and long-standing barrier. Along with that would come the recognition that I thought was long overdue me: I would be out of the shadows.”

No matter. Aaron was fashioned into something of a civil rights martyr anyway. “He hammered out home runs in the name of social progress,” Wheeler recently wrote in the Cincinnati Post. And Tom Stanton, in the optimistically titled Hank Aaron and the Home Run That Changed America, dropped what has to be the most unlikely Hank Aaron analogy on record: “[P]erhaps it’s The Exorcist, the period’s biggest movie, that provides a better metaphor for Hank Aaron’s trial. … Hank Aaron lured America’s ugly demons into the light, revealing them to those who imagined them a thing of the past, and in doing so helped exorcise some of them. His ordeal provided a vivid, personal lesson for a generation of children: Racism is wrong.”

Small wonder that, upon eclipsing Ruth, the exorcist told the crowd, “I’d just like to thank God it’s over.”

She hopes the ferry won’t come, but if it does, she’ll climb aboard. She’ll tremble as she steps off the landing, because she can’t swim, and she can’t forget the many times she’s crossed this ugly river only to meet more ugliness on the other side.

But fear has never beaten Mary Lee Bendolph, and no river can stop her. She’ll board that ferry, if it comes, because something tells her she must, and because all the people she loves most will board with her, and because if there’s one thing she’s learned in her difficult life, it’s this:

When the time comes to cross your river, you don’t ask questions. You cross.

From Crossing Over by JR Moehringer

 
I wonder what Mary Lee Bendolph would say today.

By Josh Wilker

Driving Past

I.

A few months ago I saw Yankee Stadium for the last time. I was driving on the Major Deegan, headed north after a short trip back to the city where I’d lived throughout my twenties. My first impulse was to give Yankee Stadium the finger.

But then I remembered what happened the last time I gave Yankee Stadium the finger, years ago. My brother and I and another friend, call him Butch, were heading upstate for a court date. On another earlier trip of ours upstate Butch had gotten arrested for being the point man in our self-consciously absurd drunken heist scheme to steal a poster from a movie theater lobby. The poster featured an ape wearing glasses and playing chess. We were all pushing thirty by then. We had not figured anything out. Butch was apprehended by blond and tan teenagers in national movie theater chain golf shirts. They held him until the cops arrived, chewing their bubble gum.

Anyway, a few weeks later we headed back upstate on the Major Deegan and passed Yankee Stadium on the way. This was during the era when the Yankees won the World Series every single year. Every single lonely stupid meaningless drunken suffering New York year. My brother and I were Red Sox fans, and Butch was a Mets fan. We all felt conquered. We all felt like there was no place for misfits like us. We all held our middle fingers high.

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Brace yourself, this may come as a shock, but…

Future Hall of Famer Derek Jeter isn’t a very good fielder. 

Oh, well.  See ya in Cooperstown, Jetes.

Studs Turkel, the great man of American letters, passed away last Friday. 

If you are not familiar with his work, check out his wonderful site, sponsored by the Chicago Historical Society.  It has audio clips from many of his books.  Studs was an activist, a writer, a radio personality, and one of the best listeners this country has ever produced. 

It’s hard for me to imagine Chicago without him.

He lived a long, rich life and will be missed.

[Editor’s Note: The Lasting Yankee Stadium Memory series will continue tomorrow.  But first, enjoy this special treat…]

By Ed Alstrom

Ed Alstrom playing the organ on the final day of Yankee Stadium behind a framed picture of Eddie Layton

There’s always something about the ‘last time’ you do something, especially when you know for sure it’s going to be the last time. Preparing for the last game at the existing Yankee Stadium was was a little easier than it might have been, because by that time we all knew it would be the last time. I was able to walk around and soak it all in with a sense of closure, and smile and say my silent farewells to this and that (jeez, it even extended to the bathroom and the elevator), without any nagging doubts that maybe we’d be back yet again.

I arrived early, as I customarily do, at noon, about an hour before the gates opened. There is always a sense of calm at that time at the Grand Dame, but especially so on this day. The place looked stunning, as it always does. The red-white-and-blue bunting always comes out for the special occasions, and the place seemed to have an extra halo around it just for the day.

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The New York Giants Baseball Nostalgia Society met last night at the Church on 231st street and Kingsbridge Avenue. The group met in a big room, set up foling chairs and tables. Rich McCabe, a former Giant bat boy and guest speaker at the previous meeting (check out the video here), was back again, and he brought bats, autographed balls and jerseys. Not just Giant jerseys–Fernando’s road Dodger jersey, a Glenn Davis Astros number, Lonnie Smith’s road Braves joint.

It was cold as Richie spoke. In the hallway outside of the room, new tile was being put down and you could hear the buzzing of sanders. Somewhere else in the church, the organist was practicing–in fits and starts, which gave an unintentionally comic and sometimes surreal touch to the proceedings.

Richie delivered the same exact routine he had this summer. Almost to the word. He lost the returning members in almost no time and I felt bad for him. Only Bob Mayer looked completely content, grinning as if hearing the stories for the first time. But the bat boy schtick was all Richie had. He’s been repeating the same stories for years, he didn’t have anything to add. He could have talked about all of the jerseys but didn’t. After fifteen minutes, he realized he was bombing and said,” I’ll take questions, I don’t want to repeat myself.”

The next speaker was an old sports writer that I’ve never heard of, who had also spoken at the previous gathering. He looked like a George Price cartoon from the New Yorker and refused to use the microphone that was set up. “Unless you’re deaf, you’ll hear me.” But his low, gutteral voice was drowned-out by the organ and he too, in short order, lost the audience. Not that it seemed to bother him.

Richie sat a few feet away on the table with his autographed bats and balls. He was wearing a road Giants jersey, black pants and generic white sneakers. He had long arms which he folded in his lap. Richie hung his head, lost in thought, nodding and smiling reflexively when he heard a name from the past–Burleigh Grimes, Brick Yard Kennedy. He kicked his feet back and forth as the organ played and the old sports writer droned on, an old man who looked like a boy. The bat boy.

I was freezing by the time the sports writer finished. I chatted with some of the guys, inclduing Bill Kent, the ringleader of the group, who looked a little more like Art Carney circa Harry and Tonto than ever. He gave me a tip on a mail order cataloge (“cheapest place to buy clothes…in the country“). On the way out, I shook Bob Mayer’s hand. He seemed delighted by the speakers even though they repeated themselves. It brought him back, which is why he comes to the meetings in the first place. We laughed.

“Hey,” he said as we walked out of the church, “this meeting was like Deja Vu all over again. See you next time.”

I visited my mother’s family in Belgium the summer I turned twelve and went to the seaside with my uncle, his girl and a bunch of their friends, all in their early twenties.  We were sitting on the boardwalk one grey, typically overcast afternoon and heard somebody playing the saxophone.  My uncle’s best friend, Beniot, a Germanic-looking guy with short, blond hair and round glasses that made him look like Thomas Dolby, began to cry.  He told me that the saxophone, the jazz saxophone, always made him cry.

Tonight I heard a guy playing the trumpet on the uptown platform of the 7th Avenue and thought about Beniot.  Dude was playing In a Sentimental Mood, slowly and beautifully, when I passed him by.  The sound of his horn made me want to cry.  But it wasn’t just that.  It was what he was playing.  That song, a standard that is almost unbearably melancholy when played right.  For close to a minute the sound drifted down the platform uniterrupted before being drowned-out by a passing downtown express train. 

Then my train arrived and I couldn’t hear the trumpet anymore.  But I could in my mind’s eye and I still felt like crying as I got on the train to come home.

This is my favorite version.  The Duke with John Coltrane.

Humility & Hubris

By Greg W. Prince

“I still don’t know why they asked me to do this commercial.”
—Marv Throneberry for Miller Lite

Alex Belth, apparently dizzy from inhaling Impetuous paint fumes, asked me to contribute a “classic-hater” perspective to this marvelous series of Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories. Nevertheless, despite my assigned role as the skunk that wanders into the wake — even an Irish wake — I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead. I, like many of you, know what it’s like to have the plug pulled on my ballpark against the wishes of its survivors.

I did, in fact, experience a very happy day at Yankee Stadium, my first game of five at Yankee Stadium. It was the only one the Yankees lost.

On Memorial Day 1986, I got a call from my friend Larry who used to be a Yankees fan before withdrawing from baseball altogether; he wasn’t really much of a sports fan in the first place, but the trade of Sparky Lyle to Texas drove him away for good. Anyway, he had been talking to another friend of ours, Adam, a genuine Yankees fan. There was nothing going on for either of them that day and they thought it might be fun to drive up to the Bronx from where we all lived on Long Island and see a game. They wanted to know if I wanted to go.

What a strange idea, I thought. I’d always held to a principled stand of never setting foot inside Yankee Stadium or anywhere the Yankees were playing. I refused to go on a day camp field trip in 1975 to Shea Stadium because it was for a Yankees game. At twelve years old, I was highly principled.

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‘Member this mid-Nineties Underground Posse cut?

Sadat, Large Pro, Puba, Finesse. ‘Nuff Said.