Category: Barnicle on Baseball

Originally published October 14, 1993, by Mike Barnicle for The Boston Globe

This is important. Before we get to the silly business of the day we must send a young boy to the ballgame, the first game of the World Series Saturday night in Toronto.

His name is Peter Gabarro. He is 12. He lives in Dover, New Hampshire. He is the oldest of three children and he spent the summer pitching his team to the Dover South Side playoffs.

However, in August, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Doctors at Children’s Hospital say it is inoperable.

You wake up this morning and think you’re having a bad day because you nick yourself shaving, have a fight with your spouse, bounce a check to the phone company, get a flat tire, get stopped for speeding on I­93, get into an argument with the boss or get the flu. Think again.

An outfit called Make­A­Wish is helping Peter with the biggest dream of his short life. The boy wants to see a World Series game in the dome.

The foundation will provide air fare. They will cover the cost of a hotel room, too, but so far they have been unable to get tickets to the game.

Peter isn’t thinking much about next year’s series. As a matter of fact, he isn’t spending a lot of time assembling his Christmas list, either.

He is 12. He loves baseball and he wants to be there Saturday when the first pitch is thrown. That’s not exactly an unreasonable request.

If someone comes up with the tickets, Peter will see two different teams in Toronto, each playing its own brand of baseball. He will witness American League ball against National League baseball.

One is far superior to the other. The National League plays a better, quicker, more fan­friendly game.

Obviously, there must be a reason why one league excels. And, of course, there is.

It has little to do with talent. You can find as many gifted athletes in Seattle, Chicago, Toronto and Texas as you will in Atlanta, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Montreal.

Speed isn’t a factor, either. For every National League guy who takes the extra base, scores from second on a ball in the gap or goes from first to third on a shot to right, there is a guy in the American League capable of similar effort.

Even the strike zone isn’t an excuse. It’s the same in both leagues, but National League pitchers use it rather than nibble at it, knowing a batter can only do five things (swing and miss, swing and foul it off, watch it go by for a strike, or a ball, connect for a base hit) and the odds are with the pitcher. So they work quickly and games conclude in less time.

No, my friends, the No. 1 reason for the difference is quite simple. It is the size of the manager’s arse.

That’s correct. After a lifetime of extensive research and a summer of exhaustive analysis, I tell you today the rump of your average National League manager is smaller than the blimp­sized behinds of their counterparts in the American League.

This is because National League managers stand during a game. They walk in the dugout. They pace, think, react and perform.

On the other hand, American League managers sit as if they were waiting for the crosstown bus. By the sixth inning, most of them look like Big Macs on the rack at a McDonald’s.

You want proof? Check out the playoffs. In Atlanta and Philadelphia, Bobby Cox and Jim Fregosi were always at the dugout steps.

In Chicago and Toronto, you had human bookends. Gene Lamont, the White Sox manager, sat, arms folded, mulling over his options: extra cheese and anchovies or today’s special?

Meanwhile, Cito Gaston looked as if he were in the front room at Waterman’s. Calling hours 2 to 4 and 7 to 9.

Cox of the Braves is older than Lamont, yet his ample arse is not nearly as wide as the huge bum belonging to the White Sox manager. Fregosi of the Phillies and Gaston of the Blue Jays are of a similar age, yet Fregosi ­­ a chain­smoking, pasta­eating, beer­drinking lunatic ­­ looks better from the hip through the thigh than Gaston, who requires a push from a John Deere tractor to get through the locker room door and onto the field.

Go through each league’s teams and you will see I am right. It is indeed rare to have an American League manager standing and participating throughout the game.

In Boston, Butch Hobson is the oddity. While he doesn’t sit, he is still under the mistaken assumption that he is coaching a Southeast Conference football team instead of managing a pack of slow, aging, ailing, boring baseball players.

Therefore, to pick the Series winner, toss logic out the window. Go with the size of the manager’s arse and you’ll know why the flag goes back to the National League.

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Originally published March 30, 1993, by Mike Barnicle for The Boston Globe

BRADENTON, Fla. ­­ A few hours before yesterday’s game between the Pirates and the Red Sox, everything that is wrong with baseball had assembled at the players’ parking lot. There, a pack of parents were using their kids as props, pinch­runners in a game of autograph hunting.

One woman had two kids and a gym bag filled with balls and three bats. Standing next to her was a guy with a little boy about 10 years old.

The boy wore a Pirates hat and carried a glove under his arm. The father had a Steelers cap and held an autograph book that was just a little bit smaller than both the Old and New Testaments.

“Let’s see if we can get Andy Van Slyke today,” the father said. “Dad, I want to go inside,” the boy replied.

“Later,” the father told him. “Let’s stay here for a while and see if Andy Van Slyke shows up. We don’t have him.”

“We got him in Sarasota last week,” the woman told the father and his son. “Didn’t we, honey?” “What?” her little girl asked.

“Andy Van Slyke, honey,” said the woman. “Didn’t we get his autograph last week?” “I guess so,” the little girl mumbled.

Saturday, outside the Minnesota Twins complex, the scene was even uglier. The field is set in the middle of nowhere, convenient only to an interstate highway. It has an outfield fence that separates cows from ballplayers in a spring training state where half the population resembles those seen in a hospital emergency room.

However, it is a pleasant place to watch a game. Everyone is extraordinarily polite while the stadium itself is spotless. The players’ parking lot runs behind the first base line and after the game a crowd began gathering by the chain­link fence.

There were perhaps 30 fans. Half of them were adults. And every time a player appeared, some parent would alert a kid who would get ready to sprint alongside the athlete’s car, screaming at him to stop and sign the bats, balls, gloves, books, T­shirts and cards the kids were holding up.

Watching them, I tried to remember the first autograph I ever got. I’m pretty sure it belonged to either Ferris Fain, a first basemen who used to play with the old Philadelphia Athletics, or maybe it was Billy Goodman.

I know I didn’t get it at Fenway Park, because that’s where amateurs went looking for signatures. Kids who knew what they were doing stalked the coffee shop of the old Hotel Kenmore.

That’s where most major league teams stayed. For some reason that has never been quite clear to me, the Yankees were different. They stayed at the long­ gone Statler Hilton in Park Square.

Autographs weren’t worth money 40 years ago. And players didn’t get paid thousands to attend card­signing shows.

There were no autograph books, and nobody I knew had the foresight to have a player sign a TOPPS baseball card. More often than not, you used whatever was available: a piece of paper, a napkin, a matchbook.

You never had a guy sign a baseball because balls were meant to be played with, not autographed. Players seemed to be nicer guys then, too. They made fewer demands and had fewer demands made upon them. There weren’t 300 TV guys and 450 sportswriters clamoring for interviews, trying to dissect a botched double play as if it were Operation Desert Storm.

Sure, the players made great money, more than anyone’s parents did, but nothing compared to the millions they get today. There was more loyalty in those days, too. And it was a two­way street because it was long before free agency liberated the athlete, allowing him to play a couple of years here and a couple of years there before moving along to a new town and a new team with new contract terms.

Guys seemed to stay around forever. A lot of them even held parttime jobs that kept them in town throughout the winter. They showed up at communion breakfasts and Little League banquets. I bet everyone in New England had at least one Jimmy Piersall autograph.

And if you didn’t have him, Warren Spahn owned a diner on Commonwealth Avenue across from Braves Field where you could get a donut, a glass of milk and, if you got lucky, his signature.

The best, of course, was Ted Williams. But you had to know how to approach him. For a while, he lived in the Somerset Hotel, and if you were willing to wait near the parking lot, No. 9 would give you an autograph if you promised not to tell any other kids where he could be found.

All of them are gone from the game now. And so is a lot of the fun, replaced by a constant commercial whirl that has even managed to invade the sacred approachable spirit of spring training.

The fans know it; the players do, too. And many of them are just as reluctant to sign autographs in March as they are during the heat of a pennant race. And, truth is, who can blame them?

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Originally published June 1, 1993, by Mike Barnicle for The Boston Globe

There were only seven of them but they sure were trying to play a game of baseball, certainly our best game, yesterday afternoon out on a field where each strong breeze sent swirls of dust billowing around the young shortstop. One of them had a portable radio and it was tuned to the Bulls and Knicks in Chicago where Michael Jordan was having himself a normally incredible first period, but on the sandlot­bare skin of the Faneuil Street playground in Brighton they were hardly paying attention and the announcer’s voice was only background music for kids looking to hit.

“One more,” the batter yelled.

“You already had three,” the pitcher told him.

“You was wild,” the batter insisted. “Come on, one more.” “Give him another one,” a kid at second base agreed. “OK,” the pitcher said. “One more.”

He posed for a moment on the flat mound before throwing the ball. The pitch arrived on an arc, slow and fluttery, and the bat whipped through the air, causing a “ping” as it met the horsehide, the ball rushing off the aluminum like a rocket in between short and second base.

The boy at shortstop reacted immediately. In one graceful move, he stepped toward the middle of the infield and, bending, came up with the ball in a single fluid motion.

“Where are you from?” the shortstop was asked later. “Over there,” he replied, pointing to the projects. “No,” he was told. “What country?”

“Oh,” he laughed. “Cambodia. My whole family is from Cambodia.”

He is 14. He said he was born in Battambang Province in a country ruptured and destroyed by a whole community of nations. He said he was only a year old when his mother, father, three sisters and two brothers headed west toward Thailand. He said he has no memory of their misery. He said his mother, one sister and a brother died en route to freedom. He said all this quite matter­of­factly, too.

The boy who hit the grounder was black. The pitcher was Hispanic. The second baseman was the shortstop’s older brother. The three other players were white. A league of nations in the middle of Brighton.

All of them played on a day committed to recalling the sturdy sacrifice of people who never sought death in defense of democracy. The names on all the markers everywhere are those of ordinary citizens who paid an extraordinary price simply because their country requested service.

Yesterday, with past wars remembered around the sound of a present trumpet, the empty city had a lazy, small­town feel. Many of its playgrounds were alive with the sight of innocent youngsters in uniform, practicing and playing a sport, baseball, that makes a spectator smile.

And there was basketball, too. From the edge of Chinatown to the heart of Roslindale, it seemed, for at least a moment, that the guns had been stored, that the violence that has stolen so many lives and deprived so many people of the basic civil right of feeling secure and safe on their own streets and porches had abated in honor of Memorial Day.

It is always a bittersweet Monday, this last one in May, when old parents, surviving brothers, sisters, sons, daughters and widows gather to spread flowers on earth pulled over young men, frozen forever in time; their lives chiseled in granite on tombs that sit aside quiet lanes of cemeteries. The last murder, the latest casualty in our ongoing urban wars, had occurred early yesterday morning in Dorchester.

Sylvester Brantley died before the parades began. He was 19. He was shot once, right in the head, which did the trick. He was declared dead at 1:30 a.m. He was the newest reminder of how much and how quickly things have changed in a nation now nearly anesthetized to violence. One minute we pause to pray for those lost in battle. The very next we bury someone else killed in a country exploding from within; the carnage senseless, sinful and nearly without respite.

The hope ­­ and of course there is always that ­­ seems to lie with those too young yet to be caught and swallowed whole by the streets around them. Kids who symbolize better than any politician’s speech the unbounded optimism this land has always represented: The Cambodian shortstop, the Hispanic pitcher, the bleeding colors of children too gleeful in games to ever consider hate or bullets as a way of settling argument.

Unfortunately, the holiday passes. The small­town air gives way to business as usual, to the petty neglect of politics and the institutional indifference that allows so many of our young to disappear from playgrounds, then from school, from the honor roll of employment and, sometimes, from life itself.

It used to be that, in America, the good could always grow and prosper. Now, sadly, we settle for the lucky merely surviving.

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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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Originally published July 5, 1994, by Mike Barnicle for The Boston Globe

CHATHAM ­­ Last night, they played a game in this pretty old town where a bandstand adorns main street and a ballfield sits at the edge of a road not far from a cove filled with small boats rocking back and forth in the twilight breeze. Orleans took on the locals in a Cape League contest that attracted hundreds on a beautiful evening when the sound of fireworks mixed with spectators cheers.

The scene stood to remind you that baseball is still our best game, by far, and that no matter how hard they try to screw it up at the major league level, the sport will survive. It will be there after all the greed, ignorance and selfishness of millionaires representing both management and labor end up in the dust of history.

Baseball was meant to be played on the Fourth of July. And it was meant for postcard perfect parks filled with people who look the way families used to look in America: grandparents sitting on lawnchairs alongside their children and their children’s kids who run freely after foul balls or popsicles sold off an ice cream truck.

It is a lazy kind of game for an increasingly lazy country. It is a wonderful sport we take for granted, the same way we take liberty, prosperity and peace for granted. It’s all just there for us.

In Colombia, they killed a soccer player when he helped lose a game in the World Cup. Imagine if we took things that seriously in the United States. Why, Jeff Russell, the relief pitcher with the room temperature IQ, would have been dead for years now.

In Boston, we are outraged because the Olde Towne Team doesn’t have a lock on the American League title at the halfway point. We are so spoiled, so silly and so provincial that we figure we’re the only fans and only city to miss out on a World Series victory. We watch the Red Sox with an unearned crankiness, always more eager to scratch a sore than simply appreciate a sport.

For some bizarre reason, too many fans seem to feel .500 baseball is an indication of a club’s lack of character; that the real reason some players make errors is they are bad guys.

We cannot accept the fact that Roger Clemens is no longer young and pushing the ball past batters at will. We don’t understand why he does not win 20 every year and strike out 10 during each outing. In our minds, he must be hurt, not telling us something when the reality is he is like the rest of us: a great pitcher getting old on an old team.

I don’t really know what it’s like to invest so much of yourself in what athletes do in towns like Chicago, Philadelphia or New York. But I have to figure that Boston leads the league in negativism.

We carry this false pride and love to read or hear that we are the best baseball city in the country when we are simply the noisiest. We shout and scream on talk shows. We arrive at the Basilica in the Back Bay with an angry edge, almost wanting the boys to blow one in order to provide proof of our cancerous cynicism.

And this is what Red Sox fans truly hand down across generations: the somewhat despicable legacy of a perennial­losers culture.

The young general manager is entrusted with the job of dragging the organization into the 20th century. The team is slow and lacks the kind of athleticism that results in a string of successes. The ballpark is going to have to be replaced but from Vermont to Cape Cod we sit and wallow in false tears, figuring no flag will ever fly here because we are doomed, subject to a stupid curse.

What nonsense.

There are a lot of things wrong with baseball in Boston, and every other major league city too, but the game is not one of them. The umpires are mediocre and operate without accountability. The players are spoiled, have the loyalty of vagabonds and assemble daily as 24 corporations instead of as a team. The owners are merely dumb.

The game, however, remains great. Eyesight alone tells you that when you sit on the side of a hill a hundred miles from Fenway Park and watch college kids and minor league hopefuls play harder and more happily than the vast majority of millionaires who take their skills, their riches and the rewards of their talent for granted.

It’s a little like life: players in the Cape League want to get someplace, they want to succeed, move up, get noticed, go to the big leagues. They work at baseball the way most Americans used to work at their jobs: harboring the belief that effort would result in excellence and security.

Even here though, on a soft July night when youngsters gather to play catch behind the backstop, emulating the moves of bigger boys with greater dreams, the prospect of a strike lurks in the distance like the threat of angry thunderclap. And if it happens that a handful of people steal our summer, they will only be picking their own pocket and helping to kill one of our last great treasures: a marvelous game called baseball.

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Originally published September 20, 1994, by Mike Barnicle for The Boston Globe

So, I am lying on the couch last night watching Ken Burns’ marvelous documentary, “Baseball,” when I am seized by nervousness over the fact it’s been 12 hours since Bill Clinton announced it’s OK for the baby­killers to hang around Port­au­Prince until the middle of October. PBS would never interrupt a great show for a bulletin and, for all I knew, Clinton might have changed his mind and decided to simply kill Cedras, who looks like a night doorman at some second­rate midtown hotel, to get a quick bump in the polls.

Reluctantly, I surfed over to CNN, where they had clips from yesterday’s White House press conference, and there was the Commander­In­Chief, Colin Powell. Standing next to him was the president of the United States, and it appeared to me he was shrinking before my eyes with each sentence Powell uttered.

Man, this was something to see: Jimmy Carter, who doesn’t like Clinton to begin with, and Colin Powell, who is A MAN, trying to make sure they put the proper spin on their mission, which was, in effect, to save Bill Clinton from himself. The idea of sending 15,000 American troops to fight in a place where there are more witch doctors than pediatricians was ludicrous. How would you like to have been the parent of the only Marine killed in a battle over credibility?

Now, the casualties of Haiti include health care and welfare reform because the only focus of Congress and the country will be that tiny island and our people on the ground there. It is a poor, sad place ­­ always has been, always will be ­­ whose principal export is something I didn’t miss that much until Ken Burns’ wonderful epic on TV: Baseball.

Actually, his film isn’t about a sport so much as it is about our history. It is a wonderful, sprawling video essay on the best game ever created, one that disappeared six weeks ago, kidnapped by greed.

When you see “Baseball” the documentary, you realize it’s not the Red Sox or White Sox, the Orioles or Yankees that have left your life. Today’s teams have become homes for 25 individual corporations: the players who no longer have much loyalty to a town or its fans.

What you miss the most is stuff like box scores in the morning paper and the magic of sitting in a ballpark where you can talk about the game ­­ the whole history of the game ­­ as one unfurls in front of you. It is a sport that lends itself to stories, anecdotes and observation better than any others.

You miss knowing whether Ken Griffey Jr., Matt Williams or Frank Thomas could have approached 61 home runs. You miss seeing Jeff Bagwell, Barry Bonds, the Atlanta Braves but you miss the actual game more than any of the guys who think they are latter­day descendants of Walter Reuther.

The parties on both sides of this conspiracy called a strike are morons. Many of the players, were it not for the fact they were born blessed with an amazing ability to throw or hit a baseball, would this morning be standing at the end of your driveway with leaf­blowers in their hands.

And the owners aren’t much better. For years, they have acted like arrogant fools because their product was protected by Congress and their profits were guaranteed by people like me who would buy season tickets, hot dogs and caps for the kids even though the level of skill diminished season after season to the point where the major leagues are, in some instances, the same as Triple­A.

The whole mess is pathetic. You have .230 hitters making $3 million a year. You have owners willing to pay it, too. And you have a game with nobody in charge; no commissioner, no strong hand capable of doing what is best for the sport.

If Jimmy Carter and Colin Powell were able in 24 hours to get this country, Haiti too, out of harm’s way, then the idea that Donald Fehr and the lords of baseball couldn’t have found a way to play a World Series is absurd. We’re not talking diplomacy or rocket science here, boys and girls.

Know what would be great for our national pastime? Provide the players with the same economic security enjoyed by the vast majority of citizens: one­year contracts. If they have a great year, they get their $7 million salaries. If not, they get paid chump change. Same with the owners: They can hike prices for tickets and hot dogs annually if the club is competitive; if not, see you later.

One thing is certain: Management and labor combined to kill this game. And while life will go on without it and a lot of people won’t think twice about the hole left in fall without a World Series, sitting and watching “Baseball” on PBS makes you realize how much of America is invested in this simple sport now being so badly abused by a handful of short­sighted fools.

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Originally published May 5, 1994, by Mike Barnicle for The Boston Globe

You can pick up the paper, where each page is like a travelogue of trouble. You can turn on TV and watch society slide into the sewer. You can listen to radio as all these lonely shut­ins fill their daily quota of crank calls.

Or you can simply stand on a sidewalk, viewing a movieola of misery, people honked off about traffic, weather, taxes or the daily acts of incompetence thrown down by government, like some insane gauntlet intended to irritate you right out of your mind. Do any or all of this, and it is easy to get so depressed you might end up tying your shoes with your chin.

That’s why God gave us the Red Sox and Bruins. Both teams are around and playing well in order to send us a message: Lighten up, stupid!

It is amazing but true that when the Olde Towne Team is up, so is the city, the entire six­state region for that matter. People feel better about themselves and the madness around us when Clemens has the heater working, when Mo is hitting and Timmy Naehring is out there regularly, bringing hustle and a smile to each evening’s labor.

Face it: It’s easier to put the violence on the shelf for a couple hours when you have baseball’s best team ­­ so far ­­ operating out of the little ballpark in the Fenway. When that happens, you can send your brain to the bullpen for a breather.

Like the other night ­­ the evening of the great fight, begun by some fool from Seattle who obviously knows nothing about the sport he plays for a living. Forget all this goober malarkey about the trauma it can cause in a young fan’s mind.

Baseball hasn’t had a legitimate fight since Billy Martin smacked the marshmallow salesman, barside. And the last great bout that took place between the lines was probably Bill Lee versus Graig Nettles. That’s when Lee got the nickname Kid Candle due to the fact that one blow and he was out.

Tuesday, when this moron Mariner charged the mound and Paul Quantrill, was no brawl. It was mud wrestling without the water; sort of fight­lite.

But a truly wonderful thing took place: Nearly every member of the Red Sox came out scratching, ran right on to the field to support their guy. Mo Vaughn was first man in, picking ballplayers out of a pile as if they were Kleenex and he was on litter patrol. Clemens, a $5 million contract in his pocket, showed he wasn’t afraid to get his uniform dirty.

The crowd loved it. It was terrific theater. Nobody got hurt badly, choked on a plug of tobacco, got his shirt ripped or had his big toe spiked, the most common injury during baseball fights.

Why, it was so exciting that Mr. Terry Murray, the boss of Fleet Bank, stood up in his front­row seat to check out the action. Mr. Murray and three other amiable suits with him in a field box were clearly taking in their very first Major League baseball game because all four nearly got booed out of the ballpark for interfering with Red Sox catcher Dave Valle as he attempted to grab a pop foul at the rail.

This resulted in the Mariners receiving the equivalent of four outs in one inning. In the banking world, this would be like giving a customer an extra 90 days to get the check for the car loan in the mail.

No matter. The Olde Towne Team won again. So the evening ended and yesterday began with the odd prospect of living in a city that belongs to a club with baseball’s best record.

And if that wasn’t enough, the Bruins ­­ hockey’s lunch bucket look­alikes ­­ had done it again to the Devils. Playing in the toxic waste site that is New Jersey, the locals went up two games to none by doing something that the other team that shares their building ­­ the Celtics ­­ hasn’t done in a long, long time: giving fans their money’s worth.

The two franchises ­­ the Red Sox and the Bruins ­­ currently have something in common: Both clubs show up and play hard until the final buzzer and the last out.

While this isn’t unusual on the Garden ice, it’s been a while since it has happened at Fenway and customers appreciate it because they know when athletes play like dogs. And they resent guys getting huge salaries who simply mail it in; when you pay for your seat, the last thing you want to see is somebody out there cheating you through indifference or laziness.

Certainly, none of this is going to interfere with reality or slow down the march of numbing madness around us. Kids will still shoot each other. Rwanda will still be drowning in blood. Death will keep on stalking Bosnia and Haiti. Politicians will continue to trim, lie and come up lacking the courage to do the right thing about almost everything that lands in their lap. But for a few shining spring moments, baseball and hockey have added a little light to our day. And there sure isn’t anything wrong with that.

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Originally published May 24, 1994, by Mike Barnicle for The Boston Globe

On the evening of a splendid, sunny day when Roger Clemens won his fifth game of the year, beating the Minnesota Twins in fine fashion, Peter Gabarro lost the final contest of his very young life. The boy was 12 years old and, Sunday, he was finally shut out by a brain tumor.

Now, before you start twitching in disbelief over this baseball metaphor, let me tell you a bit about the dead boy: He had a huge heart, tremendous spirit and absolutely loved this best of all games, the one so many young people play in endless glee in summer twi­light on lots all across the land.

And last fall, as cancer stole his life bit­by­bit, Peter had this wish: He wanted to go to a World Series and, given the speed and deadly danger of the disease within him, he figured he better get to the 1994 series between Toronto and Atlanta.

Well, it was sold out. There wasn’t a seat left in the SkyDome where the first game was going to be held and so this boy who had endured so much was left momentarily with one more disappointment.

But the doctors and nurses at Wentworth­Douglas Hospital in New Hampshire refused to yield to reality. They called their two friends here at the Globe, Barbara McDonough and Rose Berry, the telephone operators who know more about the news business and what people like to see in the paper than any pack of editors.

McDonough and Berry insisted something be put in the paper about Peter Gabarro’s request. And then, as always, there followed a wonderful lesson in human nature.

Charity and compassion, more often than not, bubbles from the bottom. Those who call with offers of assistance are people who know what suffering and sadness are all about: cops, firefighters, nurses, school teachers, waitresses, anyone who has had to cope with the daily rigors of this existence.

Quite quickly, John Harrington, the Red Sox owner, and Lou Gorman, then the general manager, came up with seats and hotel rooms in the Sky Dome. A fellow named Gregg Capelli, who runs a company called Electro Source in Toronto, provided limousine service.

Peter Gabarro went to the ball game.

He was thrilled. His dream was all right there: Autographs and pictures, the sights and sounds of the huge crowd, the electricity of the game.

But nothing is forever when it comes to the insidiousness of cancer. It is a disease that only rarely loses.

Over the winter, it chipped away at the boy’s system. The medicines and treatments slowed him, bloated his body but never beat back his strength of spirit.

A year ago, Peter Gabarro threw a no­hitter on Opening Day of Little League. He made the All­ Star team, too.

Then, only a few days into his final season, he was told he had an inoperable brain tumor. If people have difficulty accepting, comprehending or living with such news at age 54 or 64, can you imagine what it must be like for a 12­year­old boy to handle? But he did, acting like a champion as he rounded third, heading for home.

The boy’s short life is a lesson. Next time you read or hear something about a basketball player, a major league outfielder or a pro quarterback showing tremendous courage and toughness by taking the field with an injured arm or a painful hamstring, think of all the Peter Gabarros among us: Youngsters who are treated every single day of the week in places like Children’s Hospital for cancers that cruelly steal their wonderfully innocent dreams and then, finally, life itself.

You could win any pennant, any championship at all, with a small measure of the type of tenacity these boys and girls possess. Their desire shames the indifference and apathy so often displayed by so many professional millionaires who take their skills and their status for granted.

Two weeks ago, on a brilliant day, Peter Gabarro attended Opening Day of the Dover, N.H., South

Side Little League, his league. All the players on every team in town stood on the sidelines as Peter was presented with his old uniform, framed, his number retired. Then, he threw out the first pitch of the year to his little brother Seth, the catcher on Peter’s former team.

Peter Gabarro kept a diary. And in it, he wrote that he “likes baseball, basketball, skiing, caring, loves sports, my family, my grandparents, feels happy, proud, lucky, who needs love, peace, a healthy environment, who fears death, world chaos and failure, who loves devotion, pride, who would like to see peace, a healthy community and more caring.”

 

Sunday night, Peter crossed home plate after his final turn at bat. He was 12 and an all­star.

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Originally published June 25, 1995, by Mike Barnicle for The Boston Globe

Part of living here all your life means you spend the summer with one eye on the New York Yankees. You don’t even have to be a big baseball fan to pray, root and hope that the Bronx Bombers crash and burn before the All Star break.

It is healthy to hate them. It is cathartic to depise the team as well as the owner ­­ and by the way, we may as well loathe the whole city while we’re at it.

What other town has metal detectors at communion rails? Or day­care curriculums where youngsters learn how to avoid stepping on victim outlines chalked throughout their playgrounds?

Where else would a lunatic lawyer like C. Vernon Mason constantly get his name in the paper? He is Mike Tyson’s attorney, and a few days ago he spoke at a Harlem Welcome Home rally for the heavyweight rapist and accused the media ­­ naturally ­­ of exaggerating his client’s crime.

“Do you all hear about the woman in South Carolina who drove her children into the river and drowned them?” Mason screamed. “Well, Mike Tyson didn’t do that. Do you hear about the bomb that was dropped on the building in Oklahoma City? Mike Tyson didn’t do that.

“Did you all remember Jeffrey Dahmer, who ate all the people and put them in a refrigerator? Mike Tyson didn’t do that, either.”

Ah, New York, New York. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Even with an IQ of 12. It’s a very special place, filled with some very special people. It’s the kind of place where the New York Post can conduct one of those instant polls trying to determine how its “readers” feel about the fact that Dr. Henry Foster will not be allowed to dress like a bellhop and serve as the nation’s surgeon general. The results: 40 percent said they were disappointed, 15 percent said they were happy, and 35 percent said, “Gimme 5 bucks for crack.”

But it is the Yankees who bind us together in unified contempt. It is the Yankees who truly bring out New England’s historic inferiority complex. Who cares that Manhattan has taller buildings, better restaurants and more sleazeball bond brokers? Who cares that their Italian mayor can pronounce difficult phrases like “Good morning” better than our Italian mayor? Our guy has better hair and an ego that isn’t nearly as out of control as the crazed Giuliani.

It doesn’t matter that New York leads the league in homicide and high school teachers marrying their students. People aren’t bothered that New York has more nuts, fruitcakes and total degenerates than anywhere else.

Ever since Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold The Babe for cash to produce “No No Nanette,” people here have had a fixation with every club that ever played in The House that Ruth Built. And this year’s edition is no different.

So, as the Olde Towne Team lost one in the mist to Baltimore Friday, the real bummer was that the Yankees beat Toronto. You see, we don’t live in the AL East simply to win a division; all we want to do is finish ahead of the swines of Steinbrenner.

And now we have an extra­special reason to excel: His name is Darryl Strawberry.

Darryl represents everything bad about baseball today. He is a convicted criminal, a drug abuser, a cheat, a jerk, a clown, a mental midget, a liar and now, a New York Yankee.

There is something deeply flawed within the best game ever invented when Pete Rose is out of the Hall of Fame while Darryl Strawberry is in right field for the Bronx Bombers. It is ludicrous as well as sad.

His new employer and fellow felon ­­ George Steinbrenner ­­ just signed The Straw to a contract paying the player a minimum of $850,000 for the remainder of the summer. What a wonderful example for all the boys and girls who still think life is on the level.

The Boss claims he wanted to help poor Strawberry, give him a second chance, when this is actually about the 10th shot the fool has been granted. Outside Yankee Stadium, the Grand Concourse is loaded with those who get no chance at all, people who grow up more dangerous than dynamite because they are smart enough to see that too much of life looks like a dead end and you might as well do as you please because even if you get caught, the consequences rarely equal the crime.

Steinbrenner and Strawberry are a perfect matched pair for The Big Town: lawbreakers with a special contempt for rules and the kind of behavior ordinary people struggle to oblige.

Steinbrenner may have wanted a right fielder, but he went out and got an accomplice instead. In any event, these two blowhards are two more reasons to wake each morning asking, “How’d New York do last night?”

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Originally published August 10, 1995, by Mike Barnicle for The Boston Globe

Let’s face it: With picture perfect days, clear, mellow nights and 24 overachievers pushing us toward the conclusion of August, you can’t help but drop the weight of the world by the side of the road in order to devote your energy, attention and imagination to the Olde Towne Team because they have already given us the gift of a great summer.

The Red Sox prove we live in the baseball capital of the world, New England, where front porches, back decks and beach umbrellas everywhere bear witness to the wonderful things that occur whenever we get our money’s worth in dreams and deeds. You can’t give tickets away in Detroit, LA, Chicago, Philadelphia or New York while, here, you have to beat people off with a stick if they figure you have a pair in your pocket.

All this ­­ the attendance, the standings, the fever present since June ­­ prove that it is embarrassing to compare the Patriots to what goes down inside the Basilica in Back Bay. No doubt about it: The Patriots, Parcells and Bledsoe are terrific.

But that’s merely infatuation; baseball is our one true love.

And like anything having to do with the heart, deep feelings occasionally cause people to jump ugly with their loved ones. As a result, the Sox have often been victims of a bizarre form of familial abuse that infects fans from Montpelier to Mashpee.

They get beaten up regularly in the public prints, over the lunch counter, on radio talk shows, from the pulpit, at the gas bay, nearly everywhere by nearly everyone. And like other aspects of our incredibly provincial history as well as perspective, local fans are prisoners of the past.

Can’t blame them. From Enos Slaughter beating a perfectly good throw in St. Louis to Denny Galehouse starting in place of Parnell, from taking the pipe against Joe DiMaggio and the real Bronx Bombers in ’49 all the way through Aparicio tripping as he rounded third and Rich Gedman’s passed ball 14 years later, the Red Sox have always managed to turn September and October into kind of a weird, nightmarish, annual Throat Lozenge Festival.

Of course, the worst part of this brutal biography isn’t the loss of a pennant. It’s the winter of abusive phone calls you get from Manhattan and Chicago.

Crank calls from disgruntled dopes like my friend Michael Breen of Queens, semi­prominent radio reader, who has a neck like a drainpipe and a mind right out of Creedmor. As any psychiatrist would tell you, Breen enjoys predicting the demise of the Red Sox only because he is filled with self­loathing.

Breen, along with Anthony Kornheiser of Washington, D.C., behave in this pathetic pessimistic manner because they have no team to make them crazy. The club they most admire, the New York Yankees, is a troubled franchise run by a greed­crazed, loud­mouthed bully who tries to put fannies in the seats by holding attractions like “Unauthorized Weapon Day.”

Thankfully, things are a lot different around here. For starters, Red Sox fans are called ticketholders and Yankee fans are called parole violators.

Our guys have coaches; their guys have probation officers. We call our owner John; they call theirs a felon.

We have pitchers who make the Sign of the Cross before they throw; they have pitchers who flip the crowd the finger after they lose.

At Fenway Park, Joe Mooney, world’s greatest groundskeeper, marks both foul lines with white chalk; at Yankee Stadium, they have a relief pitcher and a degenerate rightfielder who have put the equivalent of the first and third base lines up their noses.

The Red Sox have real All­America role models like Mo Vaughn and Timmy Naehring; the Yankees have Wade Boggs, whose eyes obviously gave out long ago, and you can prove it by taking a peek at the woman who once fed his sex addiction.

So, let’s stop trembling about what tomorrow might bring. The Olde Towne Team has already given us a summer that will disappoint only cynics and pessimists.

It’s August and it’s exciting. And the best part is that, no matter what happens, it’s only baseball.

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