Of Thee I Sing

The White Sox played the Tigers at Comiskey Park, Sunday August 6, 1944.  It was a day game won by the Tigers, 10-3, the combined 13 runs on 26 hits along with two walks and seven errors taking just two hours to play out.  Both teams were missing their best players, Hank Greenberg for Detroit, Luke Appling and Ted Lyons for the Sox; they were all off to war.  The fans could watch their baseball, provided they remembered to “Buy U.S. War Bonds & Stamps,” as the scorecard urged, the image of a Revolutionary War Minuteman in the lower left-hand corner of the front.

Some 43 years later, on a crisp September morning, I bought that scorecard, along with the attached ticket stub, at a memorabilia show held in the Picnic Grounds under the left field stands at Comiskey Park.  It was a glorious fall day, where the sun rendered everything in brilliant colors until the clouds intervened.  Then it was all shadows, with a hint of the cold that was sure to follow, if not that day, then soon enough.  But the sun refused to be shut out for long, the basis, I think, of why hope springs eternal.  This may well be one of my favorite memories of the ballpark.

The scorecard appealed to me as a piece of everyday patriotism in a time of war.  There’s a couple shown on the front, and they’re eating hot dogs (“all products made under United States Government Supervision,” in case anyone asked).  The man appears to be in uniform.  So was my father most of his working life.  Chicago firemen were patriots one and all, whether or not they ventured beyond the city limits.

Baseball has been incredibly lucky not to get sucked into the controversy surrounding the national anthem and protesting NFL players.  No doubt, MLB would have gone the monster-flag-and-jets-flyover route if it would have promised the same ratings that the NFL gets; lucky for Commissioner Manfred and company, it never happened.  NFL owners now look nothing if not weak in the face of those rants on patriotism by that great non-veteran in the White House.

Maybe the echoes of Kate Smith singing “God Bless America” saved baseball from the same embarrassing fate.  Maybe baseball fans are different from football fans and don’t care if players or kneel.  Maybe the warlike nature of football elicits a kneejerk patriotism; I don’t know.  I just want whatever it is that’s bedeviling football to stay the hell away from my game.

Another of my favorite sports’ memories involves the anthem and my daughter.  I can see Clare standing at attention on the field or in the dugout, hand over heart.  If she ever took a knee, I wouldn’t have been upset.  The knee, the hand, the heart, they’re all connected.