Still Pitching Read Online Free PDF Page A

when Duke Snider camps under a lazy fly ball “it’s an easy can of corn.” When we were beating Cincinnati by five runs in the ninth, Red would say that we’ve got the Redlegs “sewed up in a crocus sack.” After the eighth place Cubbies beat us, Red’s recap informed us that we lost it in a “squeaker.” And when Cardinal lefty Howie Pollett threw a bean ball at Jackie Robinson’s head, Red described the bench clearing brawl as “an old-fashioned rhubarb.” My favorite Barbarism was his description of those games when the Dodgers were beating up on their opponents. That’s when he’d announce that “the Brooklyns are tearin’ up the old pea patch.”
    That same summer, I invented board and street games that revolved around the Dodgers. I also began to learn more about the other major league teams. I read the sports pages in the New York papers as well as old yearbooks and programs. I collected Topps and Bowman bubble gum cards and stashed them in cigar boxes under my bed. I subscribed to The Sporting News , the Bible of the sports world. By mid season, I knew the uniform numbers, bios, and batting averages of everyone on all three New York teams. And, of course, I’d memorized every piece of trivia I could uncover about the Dodgers.
    By the end of the summer, I’d become an expert, a walking encyclopedia of information about the Dodgers and their legacy, and about baseball lore in general. A whole new world, it seemed, was beginning to open up. In less than two months, I’d gone from being a curious observer to a baseball fanatic.
    As soon as fifth grade was out, I begged my father to take me to Ebbets Field. But he was already scheduled to be on the road for the entire month of June. So in early July, just after I turned ten, he gave me permission to accompany Heshy, Kenny, Billy, and Ira—neighborhood boys, all of whom were a year older than I was.
    The two brothers, Kenny and Heshy, wore yarmulkes (scull caps) and went to shul regularly. Ira was a science nerd with acne and a bad haircut. Billy was skinny and gawky looking. He had a drooping jaw and his shirts always looked too baggy. Some of the kids on the block referred to him as “slow.”
    This group of outcasts was even lower on the neighborhood food chain than I was. I felt superior to all of them. Even at my age I was so much more informed about baseball than they were.
    It is a crisp, unclouded mid July Saturday morning, and the Dodgers have just returned from a nine game Western swing. After a sleepless night, I spring out of bed at eight o’clock, my stomach churning so hard that I cannot eat breakfast. I’m headed for Ebbets Field to watch my first unchaperoned Dodger game.
    After I grab my blue Dodger cap and baseball mitt from the hook on the cellar stairs, grandma Tessie hands me an oil-stained brown paper bag, the mayonnaise from the tuna salad already leaking through the wax paper. I then sprint up the block to pick up Heshy, Kenny, and Billy, and we trek through the dew-stained vacant lots and past the shuttered houses until we get to Beach 138th Street. When we get there, Ira is still asleep. Mildly irritated, I wake him up. Then we have to watch him eat his soggy Kix and Cheerios.
    I strum my fingers on the kitchen table wondering how in the hell he can be so damn blasé about something so sacred as an excursion to Ebbets Field. A half hour later, we finally head for the bus stop at Newport Avenue and 142nd Street.
    This would be the beginning of a series of summer pilgrimages that would soon become a ritual, one that I’d perpetuate until the Dodgers moved west seven years later. Every Saturday home game until late September we’ll ride the Green Bus Line to Flatbush Avenue, then transfer to the IRT where we’ll stand perspiring in the stifling heat and humidity of a packed subway car, just so we can buy seats in the third base upper