I am old enough to remember when baseball was still America’s pastime, back when weekday World Series games were played during the daytime, and young fans smuggled transistor radios into school to listen to them. In the heat of summer, I am often reminded of my favorite baseball memories.
I went to my first major-league baseball game on Aug. 4, 1972. I know the date because I’ve saved the ticket stub. When I was in high school, the company my father worked for got Cincinnati Reds season tickets for my father to give customers. Sometimes, there were extras. The summer after my freshman year, my father gave me a pair of tickets to a two-night doubleheader between the Reds and the Atlanta Braves.
I went with a buddy. We took a city bus to the downtown Columbus Greyhound station, took a Greyhound to Cincinnati, and walked to Riverfront Stadium. It was a great night, and if memory serves, Pete Rose climbed the outfield wall to rob Hank Aaron of a home run.
My next trip to Riverfront came two months later and was part of my best sports weekend ever. On Oct. 21, I watched Archie Griffin and the Ohio State Buckeyes crush Indiana 44-7 while listening to game six of the Cincinnati-Oakland World Series on the radio. After five one-run games, Oakland led the series 3-2, but in game six, the Reds exploded for an 8-1 victory.
That was good news for me because I had tickets for game seven. My father had given out tickets for games one and two because those games were certain to be played, but he held onto the tickets for games six and seven. That’s how I got my pair. And get this. My box seats were $15 each.
I got to see Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Tony Perez and the rest of the Big Red Machine take on the green and gold Oakland As with their mustaches and star power (minus Reggie Jackson, who had torn his hamstring in the league championship series). Sadly, my Reds mustered only four hits in a 3-2 loss. I have two vivid memories of that game. While this is clearly impossible, from the seventh inning on, it felt like every other Cincinnati batter was light-hitting third baseman Denis Menke, who went 2-24 in the series. My other memory is of the Oakland owner, Charlie Finley, dancing on the roof of his team’s dugout after the game. Ugh.
The next season, my father gave me four tickets for a four-game series between the Reds and the Pittsburgh Pirates. Three buddies and I drove down and bunked in the Netherlands Hilton, the best hotel in the city. Our balsa-wood glider races out a tenth-floor window were epic. (On a similar trip the following season, we upgraded from gliders to water balloons, but that is another story …) At one of the games, we were befriended by two guys who taught us a gambling game. Each of the six of us picked an outfielder, and every time a person’s outfielder caught a fly ball, that person got a quarter from each of the other five.
I have plenty of baseball highlights from Cincinnati, and one real lowlight from Cleveland. A friend took me to watch Oakland pitching phenom Vida Blue going for his 20th win of the season against the hapless Indians. At that point, baseball was so dead in Cleveland that only about 6,000 fans showed up. Entire sections were empty. Kids flipped seats up or down to spell out messages across the outfield. To add insult to injury, the Indians beat Vida Blue and the As.
My interest in baseball followed me to college and beyond. In Lexington, Va., after dark, I could pick up WLW, the 50,000-watt clear-channel voice of the Cincinnati Reds. Many a night Joe Nuxhall and Marty Brennaman helped me study. I remember hearing loud cheers erupting from dorm rooms at Sweet Briar as I was walking around the campus during game six of the 1975 World Series, and collecting on a bet when the Reds won that series in the seventh game.
Then there was the time I took an all-night bus ride from Lexington to Boston to visit a college girlfriend. I spent all my money on Red Sox tickets. She forgave me.
In graduate school, at Brown, I twice went to Opening Day at Fenway Park. Imagine that, tickets to Opening Day were accessible and affordable for a penniless grad student. Once I went to hat day at Fenway Park with several fellow students and a professor. Hats were for fans twelve and under, but somehow, my professor scored hats for all of us.
Perhaps my favorite post-high school baseball memory is from Pawtucket, R.I., when I was at Brown. The Boston Red Sox had just signed Mark “the bird” Fidrych — the tall blond former Detroit Tiger who often talked to the baseball — and assigned him to their AAA farm team in Pawtucket. I got to see his first four starts in 6,000-seat McCoy Stadium with its $3 admission and cheap beer. I can’t think of a better way to spend a warm summer evening.