Baseball

            I loved, and do still love baseball.  By God I say unreservedly, that baseball is the greatest sport that God ever invented.  He invented it for us just slightly before the American Civil War, to help educate us about what it meant to work together, to strive together, to sweat together, to shower together; to run together, to throw together, to play together, to catch together, to perform together, and to shine together.

            We forget that baseball was around before basketball, football, ice hockey, tennis, but not croquet.  How many American boys have never played catch with somebody.  It's best if they can play catch with their fathers, next their brothers, next their mother's lovers, next their friends, next the spiritual representative, and last yourself, up in the air above your head.  Up and down, over and over, you lay on your back with your glove and toss the ball up in the air, it falls back down and you catch it.  It is great fun and practice even if you do have a father to play catch with, someone will play catch with you.

            But it is the game we date ourselves by.  I watched on Television the 1956 world series game pitched by Don Larsen.  I was sitting there, just this little kid, caught up in the excitement I felt from my father and grandfather as the game went along.  The moment was impressed in my memory. 

            I remember another time, again watching a baseball game on T.V., all of us watching for Rocky Nelson to bat in the World Series.  He was playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1962 World Series.   He came to bat, with that real funny stance he had, and got a home run in that series, I don't remember which game, but it was great.   Our own hometown major leaguer had hit a home run in the World Series.  It made us all feel good.

            I was good at baseball.  I started playing catch as an infant.  At five I remember playing catch with my father in the alley beside our house on Grandview Avenue.  By six I was playing in minor league, as it was called then, I don't think they have anything like it now.   The teams were real teams.  I was always a catcher.  I played two years in minor league and made Little League at nine.  Of course I was still a catcher.  I spent four years playing Little League.  For a number of those years my father was manager of my team.  We were in the Portsmouth Little League Eastern Division.   Our home field was on East Seventeenth Street between Grandview Avenue and Grant Street.  The name of my team for those four years was "ADAMS."  Our sponsor was Adam's Bakery, and they were true Little League partners for years and years.