Sunday would have been a perfect Father’s Day to spend with my dad. I would have really enjoyed sitting in my dad’s living room with my brother, Tommy, watching the lineup that was available to us on television throughout the day. Early on, the YES Network rebroadcast Game 5 of the 1976 ALCS, known among us as “The Chambliss Game,” which brought back so many memories of my childhood – I vividly recall the glow of my first taste of post-season success as a Yankees fan. The later afternoon brought the climax (although the entire weekend seemed to be an enduring climax) of a legendary US Open, and I could actually feel the bonding moment I would have shared with my dad watching Rory McIlroy hug his own father after his record breaking performance. And I can imagine that we’d be polishing off the last of our Red Lobster dinner as the Yankees game began that night at baseball’s time machine, Wrigley Field. I can hear even now my dad going on about how much better Russell Martin is as a defensive catcher than Jorge Posada ever was, following his Munsonesque plate-blocking from the previous day’s game. This was my third Father’s Day without my dad around, and perhaps the hardest one, so I want to open Shtick 3.0 with some thoughts about him and how he influenced my love of baseball.
My dad was a chiropractor who had a home office, which allowed him to spend a lot of time with his kids during the work day. I remember him always being available to us, and he would often spend any break he had in the day with us in the backyard tossing around whatever ball was in season – baseball, football, basketball. I still have some copies of baseball lineups I made out on his office note paper, and my backyard role in getting the Yankees to the pennant was ever changing – one day I was Doc Medich or Ed Figueroa setting down the Orioles’ lineup (due, in large part, to a pretty generous strike zone); the next I was “Chicken” Stanley, Graig Nettles or Bobby Murcer making diving play after diving play to erase every A’s scoring threat. My favorite was getting into Roy White’s pigeon-toed stance or Mickey Rivers’s pronounced crouch and swinging for the fences. My dad relished these fantasies, and embraced his role as the Washington Generals of baseball. Every doomed Ken Singleton ground ball and ill-fated Vida Blue fastball was met with comic disgust, but he made me make every play, properly called me out on every called third strike, and always gave his runners an extra base or two when the ball clanked off my glove or squibbed through my legs. Most games would take a full day to complete, often played out in seven-minute intervals as Dad waited for his next patient. I don’t know that I ever lost a game (coughselectivememorycough), but it often worked out that the Yankees needed late inning heroics to pull out the “W.” It took me years to figure out how Dad could endure such woeful, seemingly excruciating losing streaks.
On August 22, 1976 (a thank you to Baseball-Reference.com), Dad took me to my first game at the “new” Yankee Stadium, a match-up against Frank Tanana and the California Angels. I was eight-years-old, loved baseball, loved the Yankees, hated losing. When the Angels tacked on two runs in the top of the eighth inning against some scrub rookie reliever named Ron Guidry, they had an 8-0 advantage and the Stadium was clearing out fast. I was cranky and disgusted and wanted to go home, having taken all the abuse I could endure. My dad, though, always held onto a tired Yogiism that it ain’t over ‘til it’s over, or some silly thing, and he forced me to watch every out. At the end of my rope by the bottom of the ninth, the still-scoreless Yanks started to string some hits together. With one out, eight consecutive Yankees reached base, capped by a Roy White two-run home run, and the eight-run explosion forced extra-innings. The Yanks would go on to lose 11-8 in 11 innings, but the point was well made – that game still rates among the best games I have ever attended, and certainly the greatest (only?) Yankee loss I have ever enjoyed. And to this day (save some very few exceptions in unavoidable circumstances) I have never left a ballgame early.
It was particularly fitting that White hit the game-tying home run in that game, as he was my dad’s favorite player. Although I loved the funky batting stance and his relative eccentricity as a switch-hitter, I respectfully disagreed with that choice, continually waffling among the flashier power-hitters, glove men and speedsters like Murcer, Nettles, Mickey Rivers. and the shortstop du jour, or the guys who had brilliant spotlights on them for a time, like Chambliss. Guidry made the list when he started making headlines in ‘78. White never seemed to make headlines, never made the All-Star team, never led the league in anything exciting. I guess he was always among the leaders in walks. Woo hoo. Now, I missed most of the peak of White’s career, which began around the time I was born, so I didn’t really get a chance to fully appreciate what he was capable of doing on the field, but even that was only a piece of my dad’s rationale for his choice. In an era that was full of outspoken “superstars” like Reggie Jackson (whom Dad and I both hated in equal agreement), Dad emphasized to me the greatness in White’s quiet dignity, his steady approach, and his willingness to do what was in the team’s interest. After White retired, Dad transitioned to Don Mattingly (he hated Dave Winfield and his all-or-nothing swing), then Randy Velarde (the Yankees’ first real “SuperSub,” with whom I shared a birthdate), and finally Derek Jeter. As I matured, our respective measures of the value of individual players came more in line, and I eventually learned the virtues of being a team-oriented situational player and letting your bat do the talking, the values that Dad had been championing all the while.
When I was 13, my mom justly moved my sister and I with her to Connecticut, two hours from Dad. He was understandably upset, but he resolved to making himself every bit as present in our lives as he was when we were home. As my baseball pursuits advanced, through every year and every league, Dad made every possible sacrifice to attend as many of my games as he could. Through Babe Ruth League, high school, and American Legion ball, it was a rare game that I couldn’t look up and see my father’s attentive eye in the stands. He adjusted his work schedule, which included evening office hours, moved patients around, and logged untold driving hours to catch games even in the most remote parts of the state. Even when I was a junior member of a team and my playing time was often limited, his commitment never wavered, and his encouragement never ceased. Throughout my life, as I look back at that time, I cannot fathom having the fortitude that my dad – and my mom, who bore an equivalent strain – demonstrated in support of me and all of my pursuits.
Dad was a pretty good athlete, too. He played all sports in his youth, and though he was on the smallish side growing up he stuck on most of his high school teams in football, basketball and baseball. He was a reasonably talented tennis player and an avid golfer, and as he aged he gave up these activities begrudgingly, though often gracefully. He would humorously recall his final attempt at tennis – he was hitting some volleys with me and my sister when we were in high school, when he took a swing and whacked himself in the face, splitting his forehead open above the nose. He played rec league basketball until I was into my teens, and he golfed until an ironic spinal condition caused him to retire from his practice and most athletic efforts just as he was turning 65 (a very convenient way to end my unsuccessful bid to ever beat him on the course).
When I graduated from college, my first job was in Manhattan, and I would spend weekends playing softball on the Great Lawn in Central Park. One weekend, Dad came down from Poughkeepsie, and I convinced him to come out with me to the Park to check out the scene. It had been a long time since our days of having a catch in the backyard, and I wanted to grasp one more opportunity to share the field with him and throw the ball around. These were all pick up games, very casually organized, and it did not take much cajoling to get him to agree to pitch a game or two. We ended up on opposite teams, and Dad, then in his late-50s, really let his competitive nature come to the forefront. A lefty hurler, he frustrated hitters with spins and curves that I had never seen before from him. I don’t think I got a hit off of him all day. I couldn’t say when he had last played softball before that day (neither could he), but he looked like a regular on the hill. His iconic moment came at a critical time late in his last game (maybe the last game he ever played – certainly the last one he and I played in together). With a runner on third and two outs, the batter hit a ground ball that the first baseman fielded to his right. Dad instinctively ran over to cover first. The toss from the first baseman was terrible – high and far to the infield side of the bag. In one deft motion, Dad leaped high in stride, grabbed the ball behind him with his bare hand, landed on the bag, tumbled, rolled, and popped up with a grace that belied his years. Runner out, inning over. He looked over at me with a “that’s how you do it” wink, and I can only list a handful of times that I was ever as proud to be his son.
Dad’s generosity to his kids rarely wavered. When I became old enough to go to baseball games regularly, he started buying a Saturday season ticket package to Yankee Stadium, two seats together. One of the benefits he promoted regularly was the ability to acquire post-season tickets if and when the Yankees ever made it into October. It was years before we were able to take advantage of that perk – by 1995, I was living in Washington, DC, and my brother, 13 years younger, had become his regular companion. They got to see an unforgettable extra-inning playoff game against Seattle in which Mattingly hit his first and only playoff home run, and Jimmy Leyritz smacked a two-run walk-off shot in the 15th.. When the Bombers finally made it to the World Series, Dad coaxed me to come up for the one game to which he had tickets. He insisted that my brother and I take the seats, resigning himself to watching in a nearby bar and meeting up with us afterwards. He would accept no argument. Fortunately, I was able to corral a bleacher ticket from a nearby scalper for the then-unheard-of price of $90, and we got Dad into the game. He was terrified, never having sat with the Bleacher Creatures before in his life, but he ended up having a blast. I really missed having him with us for that game – a 4-0 defeat to the Braves at the crafty hand of Greg Maddux – but there was no way he was going to let one of his sons sacrifice for his benefit on that day.
I spent Sunday thinking about all these events, and the lessons and values of my dad’s that I absorbed in the process. Sometimes I think I take some of them too much to heart. Sometimes, in an impossible pursuit to be Dad’s Roy White, I think I let go of my personal interests too easily for the imaginary benefit of some self-architected team. It feels good, though, anytime I believe that I am somehow following the path laid by my dad. They are big shoes to fill, and a bar higher than I can hope to hurdle, but the effort to do so is well worth it. And it occurs to me now, as it has throughout my life, that I owe an enormous debt to baseball. Baseball taught me a lot about my dad.
