There’s plenty of statistics and Hall of Fame talk in the book, but thankfully Posnanski doesn’t settle for a repetitive formula or go overboard with numbers. The stats are fascinating though. Like this one: in 1947, Johnny Mize (no. 64) hit 51 homeruns and only struck out 47 times. Today’s sluggers strikeout 47 times in a month.
Posnanski dives deep into the stories that allow even the most avid baseball fan to learn something new. For example, Charlie Gehringer (no. 87) grew up in Fowlerville, MI, less than 20 miles from the tiny town of Hartland where I lived for four years as kid.
One of the recurring themes in the book is the role that dads played in getting their sons to the big leagues. The fathers taught, inspired, and practically willed kids like Cal Ripken (no. 44), Warren Spahn (no. 49), Chipper Jones (no. 54), Gaylord Perry (no. 68), Brooks Robinson (no. 73), Carlton Fisk (no. 80), and Phil Niekro (no. 81) into the big leagues.
If my dad had Major League aspirations for me, he never filled me in. But he did set me on a life-long, baseball-loving journey. Like the wise friend who introduced me to Beautiful Karla, without hinting at her secret plans to set us up, my dad jumpstarted my heart’s passion for the pastime. He did it with the simplest of acts. He put a ball in my hand. And then we played catch.
Playing catch has an evolution, similar to how a child moves from crawling, to walking, to running. It started indoors, with my dad gently tossing a ball into my mitt, like lobbing apples into a basket. I would then shotput the ball to him, covering the five-foot distance with a three-hop roller. In time, I learned to catch the ball and return it safely without breaking any living room lamps. Then the fun began. Playing catch moved outside.
Under a blue midwestern sky, my dad took a knee and threw slow overhanded rainbows at me. Eventually, he could stand up and put a little extra umph into his throws. He taught me how to turn the glove for backhand grabs and preached the priority of always using two hands. He taught me how to catch grounders and pop-ups. You don’t always have to talk when playing catch. It’s a wordless connection of hearts. But interestingly, the better you get at playing catch, the farther away the participants stand.
My dad bought me my first mitt. It was made by Cooper, a now defunct Canadian company known for its hockey gear. Then he got me a pitch-back. The pitch-back featured netting tightly stretched across a self-standing metal frame. If I threw the ball precisely, the pitch-back would zing the ball right back to me. He probably bought it to hone my accuracy because he was tired of retrieving my overthrows from the corn stalks in my mom’s garden. Or he bought it so I could play catch by myself. Nevertheless, it did hone my accuracy. Because if my throws didn’t hit the netting, I had to chase my overthrows into the corn stalks.
He signed me up for little league and for a couple of years coached my grade-school teams. In second grade, I was a light-hitting, defensive master. In one game, Dad moved me from second base to left field when the opponent’s top slugger came to bat. And on the days without games or practices we continued to play catch. After working as Southeast Michigan’s top medical textbook salesman, he’d come home, unload his books, and crouch down like my favorite Tiger Bill Freehan as I practiced my 32-mph fastballs.
He taught me how to read a box score and he let me fall asleep to Ernie Harwell turning Tiger games into poetry on the radio. He drew pictures on napkins to explain why right-handed hitters prefer left-handed pitchers (and vice versa). And we continued to play catch.
He took me to my first game at Tiger Stadium in which Reggie Jackson (no. 59) hit a homer. A few years a later we saw Mark “the Bird” Fidrych beat the Yankees. At another game he encouraged me to approach Carl Yastrzemski (no. 38) for an autograph. And he bought me two more mitts (a Wilson and a Rawlings), after each of their predecessors wore out.
But somewhere on the journey we stopped playing catch. Exactly when, I’m not sure. Was it in 5th grade when we moved to the suburbs, and I suddenly had plenty of neighborhood buddies to play with? Or was it that our father/son time simply morphed to tennis court clashes at the swim club and to one-on-one basketball battles on the driveway?
You know where this is going, right? It’s time for us to play catch one more time. I’ll take my glove on the next trip to Monterey. We’ll find a corn stalk-free zone outside his home. We’ll begin by standing close together. We’ll soon be able to increase the distance, but we’ll also be going back in time as we resume an activity that started a half century ago. The familiar thwack of the ball hitting our mitts will sound like a sweet summer symphony. We won’t need to say much because each throw, each catch, will be a non-verbal chorus of thank yous from my heart to his.
When we’re about done, I’ll crouch down like Johnny Bench (no. 30), and I’ll wipe a tear from my eye before he unleashes his best Nolan Ryan (no. 50) fastball. It might not top 32 mph, but it will feel like 100. And it will become the No.1 memory in my baseball-loving life.
