PLAY BALL! Reflections on Opening Days Past!

Gary Livacari

2 years ago

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March 5, 2023

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With spring training camps now in full swing and Opening Day just 26 days away, we welcome back lifelong Giants fan Bill Schaefer with some reflections on “Opening Days Past,” including attending Opening Day, 1952 with his dad. Bill also recalls a personal conversation he had with Willie Mays about one of the greatest catches in Willie’s career. I think you’ll enjoy Bill’s essay. -GL

PLAY BALL!

Reflections on Opening Days past!

“There is no sport event like Opening Day baseball, the sense of beating back the forces of darkness and the National Football League.”-George Vecsey

“There’s nothing like Opening Day. There is nothing like the start of a new season. I started playing baseball at seven, quit at 40. It’s in my blood.” –George Brett

“I’d walk through hell in a gasoline suit to play baseball.”-Pete Rose

Baseball Is In the Air!

Well, we’re almost there with bubbling over anticipation, when all big-league teams will be in action on one Opening Day, March 30, for the first time since 1968. Fans are already buzzing about the new pitch clock, unveiled in spring training, feeling it will add a needed element of continuity and speed to the game. The odds makers have made the Houston Astros the favorite to win the World Series, with the Mets, Yankees, and Dodgers all close behind. There is a surge of money pouring in on the New York Metropolitans.

A strange phenomenon will soon take place. The first 10 games played will seem to happen slowly. Then the season will get caught in the vortex of its own unique rhythm, and suddenly the All-Star game will be looming right around the corner. Late August will be upon us too soon…footballs in the air…and can our baseball team survive its injuries and make the postseason?

One Vivid Opening Day Memory

April 18, 1952, Opening Day, Ebbets Field. My dad and I, intense Giants fans, along with my best friend, Donn Williams (one of the great Dodgers rooters) were seated in the left field upper deck. It was the first meeting of the two teams since the famous playoff series the year before. Clem Labine, who had shut out the Giants 10-0 at the Polo Grounds, was on the mound. Labine didn’t retire a single batter. The Giants KO’d Clem with five runs in the first inning. But Jim Hearn didn’t fare much better, lasting only one out in the bottom of the second stanza. The score after two was New York five, Brooklyn four. The teams battled into the twelfth inning tied at six when Andy Pafko homered over the right-center screen off George Spencer to win it for the Brooks, 7-6. From our vantage point, high up in the second deck in left, it looked to me, at first, like a pop fly. But the rising, burgeoning roar from Dodgers fans told a different story.

Fast forward to a TV commercial setting, 30 years later, at a Staten Island car dealership where I was the spokesman and Willie Mays was one of the sports celebrity guests. A two-minute commercial message would result. In chatting with Willie during a break, I referred to that Opening Day game and said I thought his catch of a Bobby Morgan line drive in the ninth inning was his greatest grab ever. He agreed but then said, “You don’t look old enough to remember that. Describe that catch.” I launched into the play-by-play:

“Morgan belted a hard liner into the left-center gap that looked for sure like the game-winner. You came out of nowhere and dove through the air, parallel to the ground, spearing the ball with a supernatural backhand stab. You then hit the ground and rolled over and over again, winding up stretched out on your stomach near the fence and didn’t move for several minutes. Both teams rushed to the spot. Jackie Robinson led the Dodgers. Jack confessed, ‘We didn’t run out there to see if Mays was alright. We couldn’t believe he caught the ball!’ “

I passed the description test.

It’s 2023-But There’s Nothing like An Old-Time Baseball Story!

Chester “Red” Hoff was a left-handed pitcher with the Yankees and St. Louis Browns. At the time of the interview in 1991, he was the oldest living major leaguer at 100 years old.

“How I got started? My brother and I were sitting at the dinner table one night. He says ‘let’s go out and have a little catch.’ And I says, ‘Oh sure.’ “

“So we went out in the lane and had a little catch and we come back. We didn’t say nothing about it. Two days after that he says, ‘let’s go out and have another catch.’ I says, ‘Sure.’ And we went out in the lane and had another catch. So we didn’t say no more about it. But my brother had something in mind.”

“He says, ‘Saturday, we got a game down in Tarrytown, so would you like to go down?’ I says, ‘Yeah.’ I go down and pitch, you know, just for the fun of it. It was in semipro ball and I won the game down there. So it went along alright.”

(Hoff had a tryout with the then New York Highlanders and pitched his first big-league game against the Detroit Tigers in 1911).

“So I got two strikes on the batter. He fouled them off and the catcher gave me a third pitch-out sign. He thought he’d go after a bad ball for the third strike. He didn’t go with that. So the catcher come out and he says, ‘I’ll give you the curve ball sign this time.’ “

“And I gave the batter the best curveball he ever seen and he just looked at it. And the umpire says, ‘Strike three and you’re out!’ And I didn’t know who the batter was. So the next morning I picked up a New York Journal and in the sporting page it had in big red letters, HOFF STRIKES OUT COBB. And that started me out in baseball, believe me!”

Over the next four years, Hoff pitched for the Highlanders-Yankees and St. Louis Browns. He pitched 83 innings in the majors, with a 2-2 record and an ERA of 2.49. He lived to be 107.

There is something so comforting about going back into baseball history, enjoying its stories and rich tradition. Writer, Poet Laureate and Red Sox fan, Donald Hall, expressed it perfectly,

“For most baseball fans, maybe oldest is always the best. We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass paperweight.”

But now a new season awaits – and we’re ready!

Bill Schaefer

Sources: Baseball, an illustrated history, Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns; Wikipedia, Donald Hall; Baseball ref.com, Red Hoff; 1952 Dodgers schedule almanac; Google baseball quotes.