Big Day for Baseball

As a kid, I never had the coordination, the height, the strength or the stamina of any of the guys on the block with whom I hung out (but I did have the grammatical chops to know how to write that sentence from an early age). 

I had and still have a burning competitive desire to do well; when I was younger it was to win at all costs but as one ages, one surrenders certain things from one's youth (except, seemingly, the ability to speak of oneself in the third person). 

I'm not sure if I found baseball or it found me. My father brought home a Whitey Ford (right-handed) pitcher's mitt (Ford was a dominant and dominating left-hander for the NY Yankees in the late '50s and early '60s) that I still have, someplace. Every off-season I smothered it in neet's foot oil, put a baseball in its pocket, wrapped some seriously heavy-duty rubber bands around it and put it in the back mousetrap on my bicycle in the garage and prayed for spring and sandlot baseball.  

I never played organized ball at any level, not that it keeps me, to this day, from stopping as I channel surf to watch a game, major or minor league, that pops up on television or to pull over when I'm coming back from seeing my cardiologist and watch the little league games going on at the fields across the street from his practice. 

Dad was a (San Francisco) Giants fan and Mom a (Los Angeles) Dodgers fan when both ballclubs called New York City home. When the Lords of Baseball allowed both teams to head for California, I'm not sure my parents ever forgave them, but when the NY Mets arrived at the Polo Grounds in 1962, many thousands like my parents embraced them passionately despite the fact that they sucked like no one else in baseball ever had. (I just learned Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? is back in print and it's the best baseball book ever written so you should get it if you love baseball and/or the writings of Jimmy Breslin). 

My team was always the NY Yankees and I had my Whitey Ford pitcher's mitt to prove it. But as I've improved (I don't like saying "aged;" I'm not brie or wine) my devotion has deepened and widened for all teams (well, not so much the Baltimore Orioles or the Miami Marlins, for reasons I'm not really clear about anymore). 

That's why yesterday, more so than either the All-Star Game or that pathetic TV exercise the day before it, the Home Run Derby, is so important to me. It was induction day at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, and is always one of the great days of the year as heroes of my (and your) youth (and later middle ages) are enshrined forever among their peers as the greatest to ever play the best sport in the world, baseball. 

Congratulations to the class of 2019! You are amazing.
-bill kenny