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BAT DAY
In 1951 Bill Veeck ("as in
wreck") owned the St. Louis Browns, a team that was not the greatest gate
attraction in the world. (It's rumored that one day a fan called up Veeck
and asked, "What time does the game start?" Veeck's
alleged reply was, " What time can you get here?")
Veeck was offered six thousand bats at a nominal fee by a company that was
going bankrupt. He took the bats and announced that a free bat would be given
to each youngster attending a game accompanied by an adult. That was the
beginning of Bat Day. Veeck followed this promotion with Ball Day and Jacket
Day and other giveaways. Bat Day, Ball Day, and Jacket Day have all become
virtually standard major league baseball promotions.
"CAN'T ANYBODY HERE PLAY THIS GAME?"
In 1960 Casey Stengel managed the New York Yankees to a first-place finish,
on the strength of a .630 percentage compiled by winning 97 games and losing
57. By 1962 he was the manager of the New
York Mets, a team that finished tenth in a ten-team league. They finished
601/: games out of first place, losing more games (
120) than any other team in the 20th century. Richie Ashburn, who
batted .306 for the Mets that season and then retired, remembers those days:
"It was the only time I went to a ball park in the major leagues and nobody
expected you to win."
A bumbling collection of castoffs, not-quite-ready for-prime-time major league
ball players, paycheck collectors, and callow youth, the Mets underwhelmed
the opposition. They had Jay Hook, who could talk for hours about why a curve
ball curved (he had a Masters degree in engineering) but couldn't throw one
consistently. They had" Choo-Choo" Coleman, an
excellent low-ball catcher, but the team had very few low-ball pitchers.
They had "Marvelous Marv" Throneberry, a Mickey Mantle look-a-like in the
batter's box-and that's where the resemblance ended. Stengel had been spoiled
with the likes of Mantle, Maris, Ford, Berra, etc. Day after day he would
watch the Mets and be amazed at how they could find newer and more original
ways to beat themselves. In desperation-some declare it was on the day he
witnessed pitcher A1 Jackson go 15 innings yielding but three hits, only
to lose the game on two errors committed by Marvelous Marv-Casey bellowed
out his plaintive query, "Can't anybody here play this game?"
DUGOUT An area on each side of home
plate where players stay while their team is at bat. There is a visitor's
dugout and a home-team dugout. They were originally dug out trenches
at the first and third base lines allowing players and coaches to be at field
level and not blocking the view of the choice seats behind
them.
JUNK
MAN
Eddie Lopat was the premier left-handed pitcher for the
New York Yankees in the late 1940's and through most of the 1950's. He recalls
how he obtained his nickname: "Ben Epstein was a writer for the now defunct
New York Daily Mirror and a friend of mine from my Little
Rock minor league baseball days. He told me in 1948 that he wanted to give
me a name that would stay with me forever. 'I want to see what you think
of it-the junk man?' In those days the writers had more consideration. They
checked with players before they called them names. I told him I didn't care
what they called me just as long as I could get the batters out and get paid
for it." Epstein then wrote an article called "The Junkman Cometh," and as
Lopat says, "The rest was history." The nickname derived from
Lopat's ability to be a successful pitcher by
tantalizing the hitters with an assortment of
offspeed pitches. This writer and thousands of
other baseball fans who saw Lopat pitch bragged more than once that if given
a chance, they could hit the "junk" he
threw.
ONE-ARMED PETE GRAY Born Peter
J. Wyshner (a.k.a. Pete Gray) on March 6, 1917,
Gray was a longtime New York City semipro star who played in 77 games for
the St. Louis Browns in 1945. He actually had only one arm and played center
field with an unpadded glove. He had an intricate and well developed routine
for catching the ball, removing the ball from his glove, and throwing the
ball to the infield.
POLO
GROUNDS During the 1880's, the National
League baseball team was known as the New Yorkers. There was another team
in town, the New York Metropolitans of the fledgling American Association.
Both teams played their season-opening games on a field across from Central
Park's northeastern corner at 110th Street and Fifth Avenue. The land on
which they played was owned by New York Herald Tribune publisher James Gordon
Bennett. Bennett and his society friends had played polo on that field and
that's how the baseball field came to be known as the Polo Grounds. In 1889
the New York National League team moved its games to a new location at 157th
Street and Eighth Avenue. The site was dubbed the new Polo Grounds and eventually
was simply called the Polo Grounds. Polo was never played
there.
Harvey
Frommer is now in his 38th
year of writing books. A noted
oral historian and sports journalist, the author of 41 sports books including
the classics: "New York City Baseball 1947-1957," "Shoeless Joe and Ragtime
Baseball," “Remembering Yankee Stadium” and Remembering Fenway
Park,”
his book on the first
Super Bowl will be published fall 2014.
The prolific Frommer’s work has appeared in such outlets as the
New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, New York Daily News,
Newsday, USA Today, Men's Heath, The Sporting
News,Bleacher Report.
FROMMER SPORTSNET (syndicated) reaches
a readership in the millions and is housed on Internet search engines for
extended periods of time.
*Autographed copies of Frommer
books are available direct from the author.
This
Article is Copyright © 1995 - 2013 by Harvey Frommer. All rights
reserved
worldwide. |
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Inside
Baseball Lingo the Sometimes Untold, Fairly Fascinating, Oddly Amazing, Stories
of How They Came to Be That Way (PART 1) / Skip to
PART
6
