Bat Boy
As baseball season approaches, a guest writer (my late father) recalls the stickball games of his 1930s childhood.
MY FATHER, Edward Mason Anthony Jr. (1922-2015) loved baseball. He also loved to write. For this installment of “Unsorted but Significant,” I hand the wheel over to him for a slice of life from the early 1930s just outside Cleveland, Ohio, where baseball — stickball, really — was the game of the street.
This appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2002. He has been gone almost a decade, and I remain struck by the elegance (“the resultant clatter”) and restraint (“The ball we used was distinguished by its tendency to separate at the seams”) of his writing.
Take it away, Dad.
BONUS ANECDOTE, if you’ve gotten this far:
My grandfather, whom I never knew, had polio as a youth. It left one leg shorter than the other, and he walked with a pronounced limp. He, too, loved baseball and his hometown Cleveland Indians.
A few years after the dawn of radio in the 1920s, my grandmother — who worked at home — would sit down every afternoon (this was before night games) and listen to the broadcast and keep score on a tablet of pulp paper. Come late afternoon, my grandfather would be returning home from work at the New York Central Railroad offices downtown. He took a streetcar.
As my father told it, he and my grandmother would wait at the sidewalk in front of their house on Garfield Avenue in Lakewood and watch, way down at the end of the block, as the streetcar dropped off its contents. My little father, clutching the scoresheet in his fist, would take off toward the phalanx of men coming home for the evening. He’d head straight for my grandfather — identifying him from a distance by his limp — and proudly hand him the scoresheet so he could, in those pre-internet, pre-portable radio days, catch up on the game at the earliest possible moment.
"Outs were agreed upon in a gentlemanly way. There were few arguments." I could have been, would have been friends with your dad. It's hard to find gentle men anymore.