6-15-62

This is the game I wish I had the ticket stubs to, Angels vs. White Sox, June 15, 1962.  It was my first-ever baseball game.  My dad had the tickets, so he would’ve gotten the stubs, and my father was a man who did not care much for sentiment.  But I’ve been able to hang onto the memories.

 

Before my dad got home from work, my mother had me polish my shoes.  That’s part of the reason why I’ve always treated baseball as serious stuff.  Other people went to their first game as part of a group of kids, and it was a party in the grandstands.  Me, I went with my father and several of his coworkers at Wesco Spring; I was expected to be on my best behavior, during dinner at the old Glass Dome Hickory Pit and at the game.  Going to my first ballgame was like attending church.  Green cathedrals, indeed.

 

My dad would’ve been 48 going on 49, his kid seven weeks short of ten.  I think we had cannoli for dessert, and I know we had great seats, upper deck loge, close to the photographers’ nest between home and first.  It was like being in the choir loft at St. Gall.

 

Because we were at Comiskey Park, one of the classic ballparks, the upper deck was not at all what it’s like today, less a mountain peak and more top of a step ladder.  That said, I couldn’t get over how small the first major-league ballplayer I ever laid eyes on looked to me.  It wasn’t until much later that I found out Angels’ leadoff batter Albie Pearson stood a mere 5’5”.

 

The Sox started 42-year old Early Wynn, and my dad wasn’t pleased.  “This will be a loss,” he predicted, wrongly.  My father was what you might call a pessimist, and that was on a good day.  But better that than the fatalism he often gave voice to.  Nothing like bringing your daughter to visit Grandpa, only to have him say, “Tell me the man upstairs doesn’t say your time is up, and it’s up,” on hearing the news report of some person minding his own business only to get run over, crushed or hit by lightning.

 

Wynn made it through five innings, yielding four runs.  Eddie Fisher gave up another two runs in relief, leaving the Sox trailing 6-5 going into the bottom of the ninth.  My first-ever baseball game ended with Floyd Robinson hitting a walk-off, two-run triple.  And, yes, I have a baseball card of Robinson tacked on my office wall.

 

The game happened at precisely the right time to turn me into a forever Sox fan.  Nine days earlier, I was at my grandmother’s watching the Cubs and Giants on Channel 9.  It was one of those days Jack Brickhouse didn’t even try to pretend he was anything but a shill for the North Siders.  Now, talk about foreshadowing.  It was another Chicago walk-off in the most literal sense.

 

The Cubs won when pinch hitter Don Landrum, acquired the day before from St. Louis, walked with the bases loaded; I seem to recall that Landrum had his name and number done in tape on the back of his uniform.  Anyway, the win lifted the Cubs to a record of 17-35 on their way to a 59-103 season.  Let me just mention here the Cubbies had four future HOFers in their lineup that day: Ron Santo (batting leadoff!); Billy Williams; Ernie Banks; and Lou Brock.  Did I mention they were headed to 103 losses that year?

 

Brickhouse, as was his way with things North Side, made it sound as though the Cubs had just clinched the pennant.  There was a crowd of 3783 that day at beautiful Wrigley Field.  Brickhouse was screaming so loud most of the faithful assembled had to be able to have heard him.  Even at the age of nine, I thought it was weird that a grown man should be pretending something great had happened when it so obviously hadn’t.

 

I couldn’t tell you if Channel 9 broadcast the Sox game I went to nine days later.  I could find out, but it doesn’t really matter.  There were 19,214 Sox fans on hand that night, and we tend to be a loud bunch.  Even if Mr. Brickhouse had been able to pretend he was excited by Floyd Robinson’s triple, we likely wouldn’t have heard, or cared.  That’s just how Sox fans are.

 

The win put the Sox record at 30-32, and they’d finish the year at 85-77, so you could accuse me of just being a frontrunner.  Ah, but the good times of winning baseball stopped in 1968, around the same time those Cubbies came out of hibernation.  But I was never, ever tempted to look north for a team to root for, not even during those two one-hundred loss seasons on the South Side (56-106 in 1970 and 62-100 in 2018).  Baseball loyalty is forever, or should be.   

 

For what it’s worth, the Sox had three future HOFers in the lineup: Luis Aparicio, Nellie Fox and Wynn.  All would be gone by the start of next season, so I never formed anything approaching a deep attachment.  No, my favorite Sox from that night would be Cam Carreon, Robinson and Charley Smith, a journeyman infielder who would spend only one full season and part of another with the Sox before moving on to four more clubs on his way to a seven-team (ending with the Cubs, by the way) , ten-year career.      

 

But Smith set off the exploding scoreboard in the bottom of the second inning with a shot off LA starter Ken McBride, and you don’t forget the first major-league homerun you see or the person who hit.  I haven’t.