On July 4, 1976, the Boston Red Sox played the Milwaukee Brewers at County Stadium. The game took two hours and fifteen minutes. Attendance was 13,552 fans. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t celebrating the USA’s bicentennial either or I probably was, but as only a six-year-old kid can, free from ethnic, family, religious, and national pride/burden. I was on the grass, sliding around or hearing Lake Michigan’s waves, just glad to be alive.
And almost 40 years later, thanks to Baseball Reference, I can find out what I missed. In the top of the fifth on that July, 1976 summer day, Cecil Cooper hit a home run off Brewers starter Pete Broberg. The Red Sox went ahead 3-1 and that’s how the game ended and a few months later, after that season was dead and gone, Cooper was traded to the Brewers.
I don’t know if that home run warmed minds and Brewers Brass said we gotta get Cooper, but they did and he played 11 years in Milwaukee and is it a sin to thank G-d for a baseball player in one’s life? I waited in line for three hours to get Cooper’s autograph at Cody for Kid’s Shoe Store and I mounted his 8 x 12 autographed black and white photo on my bedroom wall. There were no trumpets, no ceremony, but that picture never came down.
Cooper’s low to the earth stance was modeled after Rod Carew and well…….I played Cooper karaoke in the mirror long before I ever tried singing.
And that bicentennial year of 1976 came back to me a few years later, but more as a castigation than a celebration, as a shopping kart fashioned into a hearse, as a megaphone strapped to the spot where kids typically dangled their feet, as a voice. America apparently had a crush on sugared cereal and this symbolized a deep-seeded problem in the country, in its people, in me. The Sugar Smacks, Frosted Flakes and Golden Grahams I had come to love and depend on every morning were on some sort of trial. The first and only place I had ever played Treasure of the Sierra Madre was in the bottom of these very cereal boxes, in search of Kellog’s baseball cards. The foundation of my being was under investigation, but I listened because I’m attracted to people who push around shopping carts.
The voice told me I didn’t know about Red Auerbach, not yet anyway because I hadn’t seen him in the Boston Garden, waiting patiently to light up his end of the Celtics game cigar. I was still a sugar junky and too much sweet makes you greedy for more, said the voice. You suffer from expectation lust and think the world owes you something. And then the voice would take a swig from some moonshine mix made from hair spray, rubbing alcohol and a lemon.
The voice reappeared the other day after hearing baseball’s new commish – Manfred Mann say something about the average age watching baseball’s game of the week last season was 56 or maybe it was 65? He didn’t come right out and reveal that baseball was an endangered species or that baseball’s American origins were not the same as they were in Cuba where revolution and the game would forever twirl like a double helix barber shop pole, inseparable, in the blood and so on. He only hinted that baseball in America was merely a pastime and so like anything else in America, disposable.
The voice insisted there was work to be done, if we hoped to turn that great idea of a constitution into a reality and keep baseball a float and so with that in mind,
Dear Manfred Mann,
It’s only a matter of time before kids are swallowed whole by hand held screens, entering a fourth dimension and loving it and who can blame them! Cyber bionic whatever is seductive. I propose random acts of baseball guerrilla warfare to offset this trend and get kids back outside and into baseball, first as players and then as voyeurs of that big game of the week.
I propose we rent bulldozers and drive them down main streets and then build baseball fields. Build them everywhere, indoors and outdoors, in cemeteries, behind armories, inside Church Bingo Halls. We stuff baseball cards and programs and pennants into the crevices of post office walls, church pews, government buildings and wherever else parents walk around with kids. We strap megaphones of baseball broadcasts to trees and bury them in the bush of the vine so it looks like the tree of life is talking baseball.
And I’ll volunteer to walk around town and impersonate Cecil Cooper’s batting stance. I will do it near bus cabins and across the street from schools and playgrounds and in spring, a bunch of us will take over the schoolyard and play the strikeout stickball variation we call Wall Ball.
Thank you Mr. Manfred Man. I’ll be in touch.
P.S. Could you make baseball cards a little less expensive and put them in cereal again?
sincerely,
Steve Slick Myers.
brewers baseball and things 