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 Garvey's nostalgia-filled new book |
Garvey's book captures the Dodgers as they used to be
of TheColumnists.com
I never saw the
1927 Yankees play. Who cares? So they had Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig
and scared the pants off the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World
Series. So what.
They weren’t Dem Bums, the Brooks, the Flock, the Boys of
Summer, the Brooklyn Dodgers.
When you are six or seven or eight and fall in love, it stays
that way forever. It’s going on seven decades now and nothing
has changed. I’m still in love. Sorry, Janet.
That Yankee bunch was supposed to be the best baseball team of
all time, according to the experts, one of which I got to be
as a working sportswriter about 30 years later.
I’m not talking about the most home runs hit, the best pitching,
the quickest fielding or the most clutch blows.
We’re talking love here.
When you are a kid growing up in Brooklyn and the baseball bug
hits and you get to Ebbets Field to see Dixie Walker and Kirby
Higbe and Hugh Casey and Mickey Owen, the rest can not be explained.
That’s just the way it is and always was. Then Jackie Robinson
comes along and changes the world and Pee Wee Reese is a star
and Roy Campanella is the sweetest and Duke Snider is the most
ferocious and Carl Erskine is the most lovable and they all combine
for endless thrills from 1947 through 1957. Then Walter O’Malley
shattered us with the move west.
The team was gone, Ebbets Field was down, a housing project was
up and the name Dodgers appeared on uniform shirts worn by guys
living in Los Angeles.
There was only one Los Angeles Dodger player who understood this
all. He carried it in his heart and now has spelled it out in
a tender book entitled “My Bat Boy Days: Lessons I Learned
From the Boys of Summer" (Scribner, $21) and it is written
by Steve Garvey.
Steve Garvey was a Los Angeles Dodger first baseman who anchored
an infield with Davey Lopes, Bill Russell and Ron Cey, that stayed
together for eight years, a major miracle in the free agency
era.
Garvey played 1,207 consecutive games before breaking a finger
and was an artist around the bag.
Now he is an artist on paper.
Garvey has captured the Brooklyn Dodgers of 1956 and 1957 as
a bat boy and continued with the team as a spring training batboy
through 1961 after these Brooklyn guys changed shirts for Los
Angeles.
He has picked out seven of these Brooklyn Dodgers and a couple
of outsiders, Mickey Mantle of the Yankees and Al Kaline of the
Tigers, to describe intimately in his work.. Garvey had an inside
look because his father Joe drove a Greyhound bus and carried
the Brooklyn Dodgers and that California team later through the
spring camps in Florida.
The kid from Tampa (though the Garvey family was originally from
Brooklyn via Steve’s grandfather, Joe the cop) took time
off from school in March to ride the bus with his dad.
Gil Hodges was the first player to ask him to have a catch. Have
a catch with a big leaguer? Are you kidding me? So he writes
about the dignity of Hodges.
He writes about the leadership of Pee Wee Reese, the honesty
of Carl Erskine, the passion of Jackie Robinson, the persistence
of Roy Campanella and the faith of Sandy Koufax.
He explores inside tales of these Brooklyn Dodgers and almost
explains why the passion of Jackie Robinson was so contagious
for all us kids in Brooklyn in the 1940s and early 1950s who
also understood passion. Loving the Brooklyn Dodgers was all
about passion.
Sure Mickey Owen missed a pitch in the 1941 World Series when
I was so little and Eddie Stanky and Howie Schultz struck out
against the Cardinals in the 1946 playoff and the Yankees beat
the Dodgers in 1947 despite the Dodgers keeping Bill Bevens from
a no-hitter and Cal Abrams never made it home in 1950 and Ralph
Branca couldn’t get Bobby Thomson out in 1951 and on an
on.
Disappointments were part of being in love with the Dodgers.
Did you ever have a fight with your wife? See. You have to learn
the negatives to appreciate the positives.
Then, of course, the Dodgers made us all kings when they won
in 1955 and made us all paupers when they stole the team away
after 1957.
Garvey understood all that when he started his own Dodger career
in 1969. He respected the Brooklyn tradition by sitting on the
lap of some of the Dodgers on the team bus or having Pee Wee
play jokes on him or posing with Gil Hodges in the kind of photograph
every 10-year-old dreams of hanging on his wall.
“Jackie was a winner,” Garvey wrote of Robinson. “He
was relentless in everything he did, and his passion inspired
those around him. Other players tried harder because he went
all out, all the time.”
Pee Wee, Gil, Carl, Jackie, Duke, Campy and Sandy were special
to Garvey, a pretty special Dodger himself. He clearly loved
them all.
All these years later, a lot of us kids grown old, understand
that very special love nurtured a lifetime ago.
©2008 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen
caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted
April 21, 2008.
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