More Minoso

Clare came through with two perfect Christmas gifts. It’s as it she read my mind. That, or I gave specific instructions to her on what to buy. I mean, an unused ticket from October 4, 1964, A’s vs. White Sox? I went with my dad that day, a Sunday, to see the Sox win their 98th game of the season, a 6-0, complete-game shutout by Bruce Howard in a game that took all of 1:45 minutes to play. I can still remember Tommy McCraw circling the bases after a walk, then a wild pitch, then two throwing errors, courtesy of Dave Duncan and Nelson Mathews, respectively. That made for nine wins in a row. Too bad the Yankees won one more game to clinch the pennant. The Sox signed Minnie Minoso that spring for his third tour with the team; they released him in July, on what would be my future wife’s ninth birthday. She was a Cubs’ North Side heathen and probably had no idea who Minoso was. Some forty years later, she knew enough to stop him on the street in the Loop to ask for an autograph. That picture will go with the one Clare gave me, a headshot of Minoso in 1960. I have this memory of a fathers-sons game, maybe Father’s Day 1964 or another day that season; it’s my first real memory of Minoso. Not so much him as his son, Orestes Jr., looking sharp in his White Sox uniform, all pinstripes and Old English SOX on a diagonal across his chest. We were the same age, but I didn’t go on to play minor-league ball with the Royals and Sox the way the younger Minoso did. If my dad bought me a hot dog that day, it cost 35 cents, or three dollars in today’s money, and, if he treated himself a Hamm’s, that sent him back 45 cents, or four dollars. How long has it been since beer was that cheap at the ballpark? The ticket Clare bought me is (was?) a lower deck box $3, or $26.90 today. All I can say is that, if you had box seats in the lower deck at Comiskey Park, you could pretty much touch the players, “obstructing” posts be damned. I already have two “phantom” tickets, printed in case the Sox did make the Series. Both, for upper deck boxes, were priced at $12, or $126.90 today. I’d have paid it in a heartbeat, and maybe my dad would have, too. Did I mention that I hate the Yankees?