Ambition for the Game

While I don't remember exactly when baseball first gripped me, I did find some clues in letters my mother wrote to my father while he was on a business trip in Asia. "George is still very interested in baseball and plays every afternoon," she wrote in May 1954, when I was nine. Another day she noted, "It's drizzling, and the boys are still outside playing baseball and haven't come home. I hope they're not too wet." Her letters merely indicate that I, like so many American boys in the 1950s, with far fewer alternative games and pastimes than today, had a passion for baseball. At that time I only knew the sandlot variety.

Our field, one block away, was an uneven and rocky stretch of undeveloped land beneath a steep hillside in suburban San Mateo, California. It was slated to be bulldozed for new housing. Contrary to the adult-supervised Little League, we never had more than four or five players on a side. We were of mixed ages, and we made up the rules — hits only to one side of the field, two fouls and you're out! — we umpired our own games, and we resolved our own disputes. Finally, we set the sides as even as we could to keep the games close. The action was swift and continuous; we each got a dozen or more at bats and many chances in the field in a single afternoon. And we didn't pay much mind to winning or losing. I doubt that Little League could have given me the same passion for baseball. Sandlot ball was so much fun that I could hardly wait to get home from school to play. But wanting to pursue baseball as a career was a different matter. For that three vivid memories stand out.

Zion National Park, 1955

The first is from a family camping trip to Zion when I was eleven. I am pitching to my father, who is smoking a cigar, wearing a catcher's mitt, and squatting behind a square of cardboard serving as home plate. I'm throwing pretty hard, and the ball makes a loud pop as it strikes the leather, the sound amplified by the nearby canyon wall. Several Cub Scouts stop to watch. I overhear one of them comment on how hard I throw. I like the attention; it makes me feel special.

Yankee Stadium, 1956 World Series

The second memory is of attending my first Major League game when I was twelve. This isn't any ordinary regular-season game; it is Game Four of the 1956 World Series. The mythic New York Yankees, my team, are playing their cross-town archrivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers. My father, an executive in a San Francisco shipping company, was planning an East Coast business trip and had asked if I'd like to come along and see a World Series game. "Wow, can I?!" I asked. I remember my first glimpse, from a few blocks away, of Yankee Stadium,