Originally published August 7, 1994, by Mike Barnicle for The Boston Globe
In the dream, it is one more muggy day right in the middle of a summer where it seemed as if the season of youth would never, ever end. There is a radio perched on a windowsill and the voice of Curt Gowdy can be heard above the occasional “thwack” of a rubber ball being hit by a cutoff broomstick as four kids play an asphalt version of baseball on a street uncluttered by the demon of traffic because not that many people own cars.
The roar of the crowd comes through the Philco, so constant, loud and unrelenting that it resembles the sound of an angry current, a huge river of energy. It is July 1953 and No. 9 has returned from Korea.
He is back in uniform for the first time in more than a year, back at Fenway Park. Finally, Ted Williams is where he belongs, where he lives forever: in the lefthand batter’s box at the Basilica in Back Bay.
The people will not stop cheering. Williams has been gone since April 30, 1952. On that day, on his last at bat with the score tied at 3, he hit a home run into the bullpen to beat the Detroit Tigers. He circled the bases, disappeared like mist into the dugout without tipping his cap and left for the Marine Corps and a war that nearly cost him his life.
In the dream, the applause never ends. The Olde Towne Team is playing the Cleveland Indians. They had a great club too, with Al Rosen, Bobby Avila, Larry Doby, Luke Easter and Lynn’s own Jim Hegan behind the plate.
Hegan caught one of the best pitching staffs in the American League. He called signals for Bob Lemon, Early Wynn, Bob Feller, Art Houtteman and, on this particular afternoon, Mike Garcia, a huge bear of a righthander, was on the mound as Ted stepped in the box for his first Fenway appearance of 1953. Naturally, the great man hit a home run.
As Gowdy’s call described the arc of the ball landing in a cluster of fans gathered in the bleachers, the boys in the street began yelling, screaming and imitating a swing that was the baseball equivalent of a Picasso or a Monet. We would always be young, always be up, so long as Teddy Ballgame was around, a solo symbol of our marvelous summer game.
But dreams fade and people die. The years have a way of becoming bitter reminders of our frailty and, sometimes, our failures. Nobody stays a kid forever. Innocence is lost in the dust of history and idealism becomes a casualty of reality.
Now, 41 Julys after No. 9 strode back on stage with incredible style, our summer is about to be stolen by something called a work stoppage, a labor conflict. The theft is described as the work of greedcrazed players or bottomline management morons seeking to roll back the clock.
In truth, it is merely the stupidity of both, ballplayers and owners, who have handed our game over to lawyers who bobble the toss daily like some Aball shortstop with stone hands. Both sides are an accurate reflection of the times, the 1990s, when everyone and everything is a special interest and litigation is the accepted response.
Baseball, our greatest game, has always been a mirror of society’s progress or inaction. It was first to reflect the tide of immigration to this country at the turn of the century. And it was too slow to assimilate the superlative skills and strong character of athletes who happened to be black or brown and had skin color used against them their pigmentation becoming a permanent passport to obscurity.
It is no stretch to claim that baseball is more than an American sport; it is a huge piece of our history played out on grass. Read David Halberstam’s wonderful new book, “October 1964,” as well as his earlier work, “Summer of ’49,” and it becomes clear that box scores can be viewed as social accounting.
Now, in August 1994, baseball is a mirror image of our present culture’s selfishness, indifference, petulance, amnesia and an outlook that defines the future as next week or the following month: The strike that ends the year is everybody’s fault, yet it is nobody’s fault. It is the result of a lawyer’s threats combined with an accountant’s bleak imagination. The players are no longer athletes; they are actually a collection of individual corporations with huge assets and minimal loyalty. They are not much different from companies that pick up and move to more profitable climates, leaving layoffs and fractured lives in their wake. The owners are not in it to win so much as they are in it for ego and tax writeoffs.
Yet, no matter what they do, they can never really kill the game or diminish the dream. Because No. 9 did hit a home run his first game back after Korea. And this morning, there are kids playing a game that will never die despite the best efforts of all the assembled shortsighted parties to ruin it. Major league owners and players come and go but baseball survives, always a part of us.
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