We’d sit in the bleachers (25 cents), me and my friends, or in the grandstands, if we had 75 cents, which we usually didn’t. It was at the old Yankee Stadium, which was only three blocks from where we lived. This was in the mid-1950s, when the N.Y. Yankees made it easy, almost mandatory to be a fan.
Most of the Yankees lived, during the baseball season, in the Concourse Plaza Hotel, just up the road from my building. I loved those guys. They felt like family: you’d run into them at the G&R Bakery, or at the Safeway on 161st Street, or just strolling along the Grand Concourse. (I’m sure I’m the only person you ever met who was shoved to the sidewalk by Mickey Mantle.)
I loved statistics. At Yankee games I’d keep track of hits, runs, errors, walks, strikeouts. Don Larson’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series was the greatest stat of all time, but the Mantle-Maris home run race of ’61 was a close second. Every kid in The Bronx was on edge all summer long (Maris eventually beat Mick). So when I found Steven Goldman’s 2022 book, “Baseball’s Brief Lives,” in my local free little library, I took it.
I didn’t know if I’d like it. It’s been many years since I followed baseball, and it left a particularly sour taste for me when Oakland progressives drove the A’s out of town. But the book hooked me from Chapter One, which was about Biz Mackey (1897-1965). He never played in the major leagues, due to segregation; he came up through the old Negro League, where by general agreement he was the greatest catcher ever; and when he was too old to play, he became a team manager, and won a Negro League World Series, in 1946.
I never saw Biz Mackey play, but I saw a lot of the other players Goldman profiles, including Mantle, Gil McDougald, Nellie Fox, Elston Howard, Pee Wee Reese, Don Baylor, Don Drysdale, Hank Aaron and Pete Rose. I think much of the pleasure of reading “Brief Lives” is to remember and return to the pleasures of growing up in a baseball-crazy town. The South Bronx back then was not the bastion of criminality it later became, which caused massive White flight in the 1970s. It was delightful to be a child in the 1950s, to hear the roar of the crowd at Yankee Stadium at night as I lay in bed, to—yes—get shoved to the sidewalk by Mickey Mantle, which I considered to be a great honor.
I wonder if the children growing up today in Oakland, especially in the flatlands, will harbor such wonderful memories of their own youth. Or will they be haunted by the murders, the school shootings, the shuttered shops, the derelicts wandering the streets, the piles of trash, the danger of playing outside at night, the sight of so many of their neighbors being hauled off to jail, if not slaughtered? All that, without even the pleasure of having a great local baseball team, because Carroll Fife, Rebecca Kaplan, Nikki Bas and Sheng Thao deliberately chased the A’s (and the Warriors and the Raiders) out of town. And now, of course, Oakland teachers are threatening to strike, possibly this week. As if the Oakland public schools could possibly be worse! The District already is well below average in student outcomes. So let’s shut down the schools for a week or three—maybe we can drive our scores down even lower!
If I could have one wish granted, it would be that the children of Oakland—if not in this generation, then the next—enjoy the peace, happiness and stability of growing up in a place like The Bronx of 1956, and be able, when they’re old, to relive the beauty and joy of childhood.
Steve Heimoff