Dodgers mania takes reporter's mind off bad news
When I was a kid growing up in Eastern Montana in the 1950s, I was a big Major League Baseball fan. I read biographies about famous ballplayers and listened to St. Louis Cardinals games on the radio from a St. Louis station that came in well at night in my hometown of Miles City. I liked following Stan Musial, one of the greatest hitters of all time.
I had never been to a major league game but hoped to see one in the summer of 1960 when our family drove to Los Angeles to visit relatives. The Dodgers had moved there from Brooklyn a couple years earlier and I was eager to see them.
I got to thinking about this recently during the surprising and amazing run this summer by the Los Angeles Dodgers for the National League pennant. I not only followed the race closely but noticed it was taking my mind off all the bad news in the world, if only for a while, and bringing back memories of long ago baseball years with real heroes before steroids and obscene sports salaries.
There are daily stories about bad news in Syria, Egypt, the U.S. Congress, the National Security Agency and elsewhere. I follow it all closely, as my curse, I guess, as a retired newspaper reporter.
But sports news, including the Dodgers, quickly makes my cares of the world go away. The Dodgers not only are winning, but have some refreshing players (Yasiel Puig, Hanley Ramirez and Clayton Kershaw, among others) who are fun to watch and we don’t have to think about performance-enhancing drugs (I hope) as do New York Yankees’ fans with the Alex Rodriguez soap opera and other teams with players suspended recently.
During our 1960 L.A. visit, the Dodgers were playing the then Milwaukee Braves. I was 16 and went to the game in the old Memorial Coliseum with my 12-year-old brother, taking a bus across the vastness of L.A. I recall seeing the legendary Hank Aaron and famous pitchers Warren Spahn and Sandy Koufax.
To refresh my memory, I tracked down the box score of the game of July 30, 1960, at baseball-almanac.com. Koufax started for Los Angeles, and Spahn came in for an unusual inning in relief for the Braves. The Braves won and Koufax didn’t pitch well, but I was happy just to get to see him and doubly elated when Spahn came into the game. Aaron was already a legend then. All are in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
The highest paid player that year for the Dodgers, according to Baseball Almanac, was Gil Hodges at $41,000. Aaron was only making $45,000 with the Braves. Joe Torre, who later became a famous manager with the New York Yankees and then the Dodgers, made only $6,000 that year with the Braves. No obscene sports salaries or steroids in those days and thus no cheats. The only scandals I recall were drinking parties by Mickey Mantle of the Yankees.
Back in Montana after our trip, I remember throwing a tennis ball against our back steps in imitation of Spahn and Koufax and another famous Dodgers pitcher of that year’s team Don Drysdale. Like lots of kids, I was fantasizing playing in the big leagues.
I ended up as a writer: mostly serious stuff like scandals in Washington and on Wall Street. But once in a while I liked to write a sports story to get my mind off the negative news. I once interviewed Aaron and another time the Baltimore Orioles’ Cal Ripken. I wrote a profile of Muhammad Ali for The Wall Street Journal before his first fight with Joe Frazier in 1971.
Once as a young reporter in late 1967, a plug for sports came to me from an unusual source. Working for The Sacramento Bee, I got to interview Supreme Court Chief Justice and former California governor Earl Warren on a holiday visit to the state. He liked to talk sports and said he was going to the American Football League title game, to the East-West Shrine college football game and to the Rose Bowl game. “Sports are a good influence on our nation,” he said. “In times of stress it is a real purposeful thing for people to be interested in sports, as participants or as spectators.”
That’s the way it is for me this summer as Dodgers baseball takes my mind off all the negative news. I watch a Dodgers game on TV and read about it in the paper or on the Internet and the cares of the world go away for a while.
It’s a welcome relief, this unexpected Dodgers run for the pennant and possibly (fingers crossed) the World Series. And a clean one, too, that hopefully will help improve the image of the sport. The kid in me would like baseball to go back to the image it had when I listened to Musial playing for the Cardinals on the radio in Montana in the 1950s and when I saw my first major league game in L.A. back in 1960 with Koufax, Spahn and Aaron — in the days when sports stars were a good influence.
Gapay is a freelance writer in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He grew up in Montana and has been a reporter for various newspapers including The Daily Inter Lake and The Wall Street Journal. Gapay happily reports that the Dodgers made the playoffs!
C. 2013 Les Gapay