Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville Read Online Free PDF

exclusive rooting—and Giants fans tended to be scattered throughout the city. Many kids, myself included, rooted for two New York teams, one from each league. Affection for the Yankees and Dodgers proved difficult, for they played each other too often in the World Series (’41, ’47, ’49, ’52, ’53, ’55, and ’56, all won by the Yanks except 1955). By contrast, the Yankees and Giants only met in 1951—on my watch at least, for several Yankee-Giant Series had been played before my birth in the 1920s and 1930s.
    I grew up in Queens, the most “neutral” borough, with no team of its own (the expansion Mets did not begin until the early 1960s, and I have never been able truly to view them as a “home team,” despite substantial affection based on pure accidents of birth and upbringing—and some wonderful memories of going to Shea Stadium whenever Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers pitched against the Mets, and invariably won).
    Memory, of course, is the ultimate trickster, but I do have a very clear impression that at least 50 percent of boy-talk between April and October in Queens focused on the fates of our three teams, with constant bets, threats, and bickerings about pennant races and World Series outcomes. I rooted for the Yanks and Giants. But I even managed to tolerate the Dodger fanaticism of some of my best friends.
    The final point is simply this: All New York City boys of the late 1940s and early 1950s were baseball nuts, barring mental deficiency or incomprehensible idiosyncrasy. How could one not be? This decade was the greatest conjunction of quality and place that the game has ever known. Grossly unfair to the rest of the country, of course, but a fabulous piece of luck that made the “coming of age” for me and a million other New York kids ever so much easier—and what purely contingent blessing of ontogeny could be more precious?

REFLECTIONS AND EXPERIENCE

Streetball from a New York City Boyhood
    I do understand the practical and sensible reasons behind such a profound change. But when I grew up on the streets of Queens in New York City, school ended at 3 P.M ., and then, weather permitting, we went outdoors to play with our friends until our parents called us in for dinner at about 6 P.M . And, yes, most families did then eat dinner together, every single day—no TV allowed (we didn’t yet own one), no newspapers; just conversation.
    My mother still lives in the same neighborhood, and nowadays no kid would venture outdoors alone. Children make “play dates” with their friends, and parental tracking has become ubiquitous. By contrast, and throughout the 1950s until we left for college in 1958, Roger Keen (still my best friend) and I played stickball or some other variety of baseball together practically every afternoon of our lives.
    A lot of different games “erupted” each day in Fresh Meadows, our neighborhood of three-story garden apartments with adequate greenery separating the buildings, and with space aplenty on the streets (and few cars to hog all the potential parking spaces). We boys—and I must speak of “boy culture,” for very few girls ever ventured to inquire about joining us—played so many different games, many just one kid against another, others by teams always “democratically” selected by sequential choices of two designated captains. One did not want to be chosen last—and I still say thank God for Ira, wherever he may be now, the shortest kid in the neighborhood, and almost invariably the final selection; I usually got my assignment in the lower half, but not embarrassingly far down.
    The point has been made many times, in this book and elsewhere, but the phenomenon really did define New York at the time. Throughout the 1940s, and until 1958 when New York City began a serious decline with the migration of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants to California, baseball virtually defined the joys of city life.
    Almost all the neighborhood boychicks