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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