Please note: As we compose new blog entries, we will now send each one out to all our subscribers as we post them. Here’s a link to see the entire Blog Archives -GL

 

THE BASEBALL HISTORY COMES ALIVE BLOG

Please note: As we compose new blog entries, we will now send each one out to all our subscribers as we post them. Here’s a link to see the entire Blog Archives -GL

March 23, 2021

 New Blog Topic: BECOMING A BASEBALL FAN IN THE 1950s

All longtime baseball fans have vivid memories of how it all started, whether it be collecting baseball cards, watching games on television, playing ball with your friends, having a catch with your dad, and especially going to your first big league game. The whole is really the sum of all the parts, and the parts are what make us baseball fans for life. What we did as kids often correlates with the era in which we grew up, so while some of the memories will be the same, others will be very different.

I know I’m dating myself, but my love of baseball was firmly cemented in the 1950s, when the game and the world were very different. At the beginning of the 1950 baseball season, I was just seven years old and just starting to have an awareness of the game. Of course, it helps if your father is a big fan, which mine was. He was a high school classmate of Hank Greenberg and was lucky enough to attend Lou Gehrig Day at Yankee Stadium in 1939. And he was always ready to have a catch with me in the backyard. That started early and I often used those wonderful words from Field of Dreams. “Hey Dad, you wanna have a catch?” The answer usually was yes.

I have a vivid memory of watching the 1950 All-Star Game at a neighbor’s house. When I saw Joe DiMaggio make a catch in centerfield, I mistakenly called the American League stars the Yankees. I still didn’t quite get it but was coming closer. A year later, I ran home from school on an early October afternoon just in time to

watch Bobby Thomson hit his Shot-Heard-Round-the-World home run. By then I did get it because I said to my mother right before he hit it, “Only a home run will save [the Giants] now.”

[Ed. note: In the featured photo above, we see a scene of fans flocking into the 1950 All-Star game, which Bill Gutman remembers watching on TV. It was played at Comiskey Park with the National League winning 4-3. -GL]

In 1952 my father took me to my first game at Yankee Stadium, a night game. I can remember walking up the ramp and getting my first glimpse of the field. I couldn’t believe the brightness of the lights and bright green color of the grass. Talk about a wide-eyed kid. After that, we went to quite a few games. Living in

Stamford, Connecticut, we had about an hour’s ride to the Bronx. We would talk baseball during the entire trip with me asking question after question. He also took me to a number of Old Timers Days in the mid-1950s and I can recall seeing both Ty Cobb and Cy Young coming out on the field. They didn’t play, of course, being too old at the time. But what a thrill for a young kid who was already reading all about them.

Yep, by then I was devouring everything I could about baseball and its history through books and magazines. And it didn’t hurt that my grandfather, also a lifelong fan and supposedly a fine player in his day, told me stories of the old days, a great oral history that gave me a feel for the old game during the Dead Ball Era. There was a television show back then called Joe Franklin’s Memory Lane. It dealt mainly with movie stars and entertainment celebrities. Franklin would often show close-ups of photos that he’d have mounted on some kind of cardboard. Sure enough, I began cutting out photos of baseball players from magazines and mounting them on cardboard.

And then there were baseball cards. No one I knew thought about collecting them in those days. We’d buy them, read the backs of the cards religiously, memorizing statistics and birth dates. But we also played with the cards. We’d flip them, trying to match the fronts and backs that were already on the ground. If you matched, you won the cards; if you didn’t, you lost them. So you might have 50 or 60 one week and only 25 the next if you weren’t on your “game.” We’d also flip them out overhand, each player taking a turn, and the first to get a card to land on another one would take the whole pot. And, of course, we attached them to our bikes with a clothespin so that the spokes of the wheel would snap the end of the card making it sound like a motor. Needless to say, the cards we used didn’t fare too well. At the end of the year, the old ones somehow disappeared and we’d buy the next set that came out the following spring. P.S. I never liked the bubble gum that came with them.

Baseball on television was a whole different story then. One camera behind home plate in glorious black and white. It didn’t give you the multi-views and slo-mo replays they have today. But we still devoured the games, imitated the batting stances and pitching motions of our favorites, and loved the announcers then. For me, living in New York with three teams, it was the likes of Mel Allen, Russ Hodges, Jim Woods, Ernie Harwell, Red Barber, Connie Desmond, and a very young Vin Scully. They all put today’s broadcasters to shame. 

Sometimes we’d turn off the sound and “call” the games ourselves. We pretty much knew all the players so it was great fun and we all felt we were already very good at it. Wish I had a tape recording of how I sounded. That would sure be interesting. And, of course, we listened on the radio when we couldn’t watch on TV. It was the same group of announcers and they painted beautiful word pictures of the games to the point that you felt you were there. And at some point I got my own scorebook and would sit and keep score of the games, learning all the symbols and shortcuts that are still used today. Mine had a spot for balls and strikes, so you knew the count when the batter finally made contact.

And we played as often as we could. Sometimes just four of us would play “two-a-cat” on the street. Pitcher, hitter, catcher, and one fielder. Or we’d go to a nearby park and play a real game. I also went to day camp several summers back then and our camp team would play some other camps. We played both hardball and softball, whatever the situation called for, sometimes playing until it was almost dark outside.

So it was all baseball back then. I even had a small pinball machine, not an electric one back then, and it had a baseball game on it. I would create fictitious teams, keep records of each player and then figure out his batting average and the earned run average of the pitchers. That taught me all about the statistics of the game long before there was that confusing thing called analytics. Of course, we went from season to season then, throwing a football in the fall instead of a baseball and later playing basketball. But it was baseball that was the favorite and there was always something special about watching the last game of the season and opening day the following year. That became a ritual that continued right into adulthood. In some ways, when baseball was back, all was right with the world.

I was fortunate enough to be a New York Yankees fan then, so I knew mostly winning, at least until 1955 when I was just about 13. By that time I knew I’d be a baseball fan forever and when I began writing about the game and its history it got even better. I even still have the glove I bought back in 1963. I can’t use it now, but I admit I still put it on my hand every now and then and smack a ball into it. And it feels good.

Of course, the 1950s was a very long time ago and I’m sure things were different for young fans in the ensuing decades. If you have any stories about how your own childhood helped make you a lifelong fan feel free to share. I’ve love to hear them.

Bill Gutman

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