Wonder Days of Ye Olde Good Life

[Eugene Church]

vonryan posted the old APBA diamond on the Logos and Graphics forum and it really brought back memories to me.

I am a sentimental romantic...I have been known to shed a tear at the movies while trying very hard to hide that fact because a real man just doesn't cry...so I thought I would share our "Wonder Years" with the younger fellas who share OOTPB with us old geezers and codgers.

I remember playing APBA in 1953...on rainy days when we couldn't go to the playground and play "Scrub" or "Screen Ball"...two games we created when we didn't have enough players to play a complete game with two full teams.

In Screen Ball we had to have 4-6 players. We would bat from second base toward the backstop/screen. There would be a pitcher on the mound and 1 or 2 fielders just in front of the backstop/screen. If the defense did not cleanly catch the ball, the batter got on on an error...if the ball got past the fielders and hit the screen on the ground, it was a single...the screen had 3 levels...if you hit hit it in the air to the first level, it was a double...to the middle level, a triple...and to the top level, a home run. But if you hit over the top level, it was all 3 outs and the inning was over. If you hit a ball that would have been to the left or right of the screen/backstop, it was foul and an out.

In Scrub, you needed a minimum of three players...a batter, pitcher and leftfielder. The pitcher would be the umpire and make the call if it was a hit or not. If your ball was caught in the air, you were out and the pitcher would go bat, the outfielder to pitch and the batter would go to leftfield. As more players joined the game, we would add positions...shortstop next, then catcher, centerfield, third base and finally second base and rightfield. If you hit it where there was no player, you were out. As long as the batter did not make an out, he continued to bat. When we had enough players to man all 9 positions, the extra players would be batters and we would actually run the bases then...just like a real game.

We also played Whiffle Ball and Cork Ball.

In the afternoon around 4 pm we would play for Crawford or Galvez Park teams in the Mobile Recreation Department leagues.

At night we played for Central Baptist in the Church League...some of us 15 and older also played for the Men's team in the Church League...but they wouldn't us start even though we were better than many of the old codgers.

After the Church League game, we would head over to Hartwell Field, home of the Mobile Bears of the Southen Association, on our bicycles...we rode all over town on them...this was a day and time when it was safe for young kids to be on the streets...even at night. After the 7 inning the gates would be opened and you could get in free.

It was a great time to be alive. If we didn't have a game, at night we would go see the Mobile Bears in the grand old Southern Association and they would play the Atlanta Crackers, New Orleans Pelicans, Chattanooga Lookouts, Little Rock Travelers, Memphis Chicks, Nashville Vols and Birmingham Barons. When the Bears were out of town, we would go to sleep listening to the radio...to Jack Bitterman on WABB as he recreated the game in the studio (we thought it was live...it never occurred to us that the incessant clicking in the background was the teletype machine)...or we listened to the St. Louis Cardinals and Harry Caray on KMOX.

Life doesn't get any better than that...but OOTPB thankfully brings back a little bit of it to my life.

Thank you, Markus.

[Malleus Dei]

More history from another one of the dinosaurs....

I played elementary school baseball, junior high school and high school baseball, Little League etc. baseball, and later on college baseball. We kept the same infield all the way through high school that our ex-college-baseball-player schoolteacher put together in 4th grade on logical principles...the powerful guy who couldn't field well at all at first, the slick fielder with the weaker arm at second, the slick fielder with the better arm and speed and more range at short, and me, the big guy who could field and hit and who was the only guy who could throw the ball from third to first on the fly, at third base. We picked up our catcher in junior high. By the time we were seniors in high school we were so attuned to each other that it was like mental telepathy on the field, and we turned some plays that were worthy of Ozzie Smith and the Cardinals at their best. The catcher, second baseman and shortstop are all dead - war, overdose and a traffic accident - but the first baseman and I still email back and forth almost daily and are still as close as we were as kids.

As to pro baseball, I grew up with the Dodgers and the Cardinals.

My father was a college sports star, a multi-sport athlete who played amateur and semi-pro baseball in his twenties and thirties and who turned down a contract offer from the Dodgers because he made so much more money as a businessman than he ever could in baseball (how times change!), and it seemed like he knew everyone in the Dodger organization. As a small boy, I got to meet almost all of them (my favorite of the bunch being Don Drysdale, who was a wonderful person off the field). I still have a bunch of Dodger team autographed baseballs from those days, but having heard the players talk about how such balls are signed, some of the signatures are questionable. (At least the ones I have that I actually watched being signed by the players I know are real - Koufax, Drysdale, Podres, Hodges, Howard et al and even the one that I got one lucky day from Wille Mays, Juan Marichal and Willie McCovey and the rarest gem of all, one I got with a smile from the great Bob Gibson.) My father took me to some Dodger games, but not enough for me. One day I figured out that the rest of the infield and I could cut junior high, hop a train from the tracks near the school, get to Dodger day games on our own, and then hop a train back, and our educational lives were never really trouble-free afterward. To this day - sadly - I remain a Dodger fan.

My mother's family were all Missouri Germans, and seriously devout Cardinal fans; they all hated the Dodgers. One of my uncles took me to virtually every Cardinal game on the West Coast. When they would do a road trip to the West Coast, off we went to see them play the Dodgers - him as a hostile fan, me being pretty much silent the whole game - and off we went to Candlestick to watch them play the mutually hated Giants. He wore all red; often my mother would go with us to a Dodgers game in one of her bright red dresses. She would go to all the Cardinal home games in St. Louis whenever she went to visit and would arrange her visits to fall during Cardinal homestands; all of her family there had season tickets.

Years later I was overseas and there was a Cardinal playoff/WS game on television - it was tape delay or perhaps even primitive satellite, this was a long time ago and people were shooting at us - and I was in a heated poker game that I was winning far too much money to get out of while still trying to catch glimpses of the baseball game on in the background and someone yelled "Look at that crazy woman!" I looked up at the TV, and there was a woman in a red dress standing on top of the Cardinal dugout waving a Cardinal flag on a flagpole back and forth and trying to start a rally.

It was my mother.

[Eugene Church]

MD, thanks for sharing that with us.

You really have had a special life in baseball...with your teammates...and going to all those Dodger games...and knowing them in person...up close.

I especially like the story about the "lady in red"....plus I'm a Cardinal fan...Stan the Man Musial is my alltime favorite player...although former Mobile Bear players, Bill Dailey (Minnesota Twins) and Gary Bell (Indians and Red Sox) come close to him because I spent a summer with them as a ballboy for the Bears.

[Malleus Dei]

I never realized how lucky I was until I got older; everything just seemed so commonplace. Today, people are amazed that I used to know real baseball players; at the time they were just some guys who played ball for a living and who made a lot less money than my father did. They were very kind to me; that's the thing that stands out in my memory.

I never realized how special our infield was until I played college ball later in life and had to play with infielders who weren't predictable, who couldn't be relied on, and who didn't know what to do instinctively. It was quite a shock.

The "lady in red" died not long ago. There was a Cardinal pennant taped to the wall by her bed.

Edit - I wish could spell more consistently.

[Eugene Church]

Originally Posted by Malleus Dei

I never realized how lucky I was until I got older; everything just seemed so commonplace. Today, people are amazed that I used to know real baseball players; at the time they were just some guys who played ball for a living and who made a lot less money than my father did. They were very kind to me; that's the thing that stands out in my memory.

The "lady in red" died not long ago. There was a Cardinal pennant taped to the wall by her bed.

Sorry to hear about your mom. She sounds like a very special lady.

I would have liked her...any friend of Stan the Man...is a friend of mine.