My Baseball Odyssey - the 'pubished' essay

 

My Baseball Odyssey – Starting Autumn 1944 and going strong after 81 years

 

OMG, how fucking philosophical I appear to be.  That picture was taken in 2015, in Bangkok. I'm not sure if this picture was taken before or after a photoshoot in the men's room of the most successful bar/whore house on Soi Cowboy, Bangkok.  Two of the 'staff' took pictures with me (with a shirt over the T shirt) but that one picture which became the cover of my 6th book and nearly cost me a divorce........

Sometime during September, 1944 - I am not sure when, exactly - my mother and two of her three sisters went to Ladies Day at Ebbetts Field.  Elder sister Sarah had Barbara, age 12 and Margie, age 3.  Younger Sister Fay had Kenny, age 6. I was just shy of my second birthday. The St. Louis Cardinals won that day although I have no idea about any of the details other than that it cost none of the three Shumsky sisters anything and they supposedly had a great time.  Obviously I do not remember a thing.

I do remember the day after my 5th birthday, 18 September 1947.  My father and I walked the mile between our home, apartment D-10 at 853 Empire Blvd, Brooklyn 3, New York and Ebbetts Field for the morning portion of a morning/afternoon double header between our team, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Boston Braves.  We lost. But I did get to see Jackie Robinson play that day! We were trounced. 8-0.  Pitcher Johnny Sain of Boston beat Brooklyn's Preacher Roe.  I doubt that we stayed the entire game - Daddy took me home and then went back for the second game.  Regardless, that started me as a fan of the game with a developing appreciation of radio broadcasts that continually provided (especially in a close game) the element of suspense that you simply do not get when you watch the action.

Of course we watched the home games televised on WOR in New York City and environs. There were only 13 home night games a year at that time. All other games were on radio and our radio was continuously playing the Dodgers.  Red Barber, with a southern drawl, was the lead Dodger broadcaster.  Connie Desmond was number two. Desmond had a drinking problem and I was fortunate to be listening the night that Desmond, drunk out if his fucking mind, just didn't show up.  It was that night in 1953 that Vin Scully, fresh out of Fordham University, did his first game.  No, I do not remember any of the game details but I definitely remember hearing Vinnie do his first!

And then in 1955, as a 13 year-old, I experienced the thrill of Brooklyn winning its first, ever, World Series.

OK.  Here we come to 1955.  I became aware of baseball in 1947 and by 1951 I was going to Ebbetts Field by myself during summer weekday afternoons, sitting in the bleachers for $0.50 - yeah - tickets cost 50 cents!  And it seemed that each and every year we had the same lamentation:  'Wait 'til next year!' as their final games each year turned out to be losses.

We moved in 1953 and I remember hanging out with neighbors Eliot Feinberg, Louie Palermo and Steve Brownstein.  While 1954 saw the Giants and Indians (It's difficult to get used to the Guardians name change), 1955 turned out to be next year and while there were no World Series parades that we new of, the thrill of finally winning meant that we, the four 13 year-old neighbors were marching and cheering from our East 53rd Street homes to the intersection of Utica and Church Avenues where like-minded  13 year-olds from the neighborhood did our own makeshift carnival that night....it was distinct enough for me to have remembered it.

Disaster of epic proportions hit Brooklyn in 1957 as the Dodgers and the Giants moved west.  Books, books and more books have been written about New York land 'czar' Robert Moses who simply did not want the downtown Brooklyn stadium that Walter O'Malley wanted and during these 'battles', a gutsy, young L.A. City Councilperson, Roz Wyman,  got Walter O to see the light of the sun setting over the Pacific and the Dodger future out west.  

The New York Giants baseball team played ball at the Polo Grounds, the playing field right and left field lines were 250 feet from home.  There was no center field footage as this park was as oddly shaped as one can envision.  And then the Dodgers found a home field in L.A. even odder than the Polo Grounds:  the Los Angeles Coliseum where a 50 foot high fence separated the left field line from the fans in the football seat configured stands.  Left fielder Wally Moon developed the art of catching balls off of that 50 foot high wall and returning the ball to play with an uncanny accuracy that simply befuddled the Dodger opponents who had no idea how to play a hit ball off of a chain link fence.

And I remember driving up to Chavez Ravine and watching Dodger Stadium being built.  Eric Nusbaum wrote a brilliant book, 'Stealing Home', about the community that was 'kicked out' in order to complete building and transferring ownership of the land of the Dodgers to the O'Malley family.  Hey, That's Los Angeles - it got to be what it is through privatization, corruption and water rights and the powers that were then seem to be still silently in control......such is life.......

Anyway, one more Dodger/Dodger Stadium story before going into more World Series stuff.....

My mother saw her mother for the last time around 1 September 1965 in New York.  Mom returned to L.A.. knowing that her mother's death was imminent.  Grandma died on 9 September 1965.  My father had tickets for the Dodgers-Cubs game that night and we convinced Mom not to stay home alone that night but to go with us to the game........Sandy Koufax's perfect game with Bob Henley, pitching a 1 hitter.  The Dodgers won, 1-0.   Lets face it,  that game (for which we have a framed ticket - best seats at $3.65) I paid $200+ for tickets to the one game I went to this year) is something I will remember the rest of my life.  Linked to that is Grandma's death - ain't no way I'd remember her passing without that link!

 Baseball most definitely is life.  Baseball - at least to me - is also a religion - witness the million or so who showed up for the Dodgers World Series Parade in Los Angeles on 3 November!) feeling the same way I did, No, I am not a lunatic when I say this - think about it.........

Baseball-wise, I was groomed the perfect way, going to my new-found 'temple', aka Ebbetts Field a day after my 5th birthday.    By age 10 I was regularly going there and while getting to a ball game in L.A. was a whole lot different from Brooklyn, Dad, working in Beverly Hills as a loan officer to the entertainment industry, now found it a whole lot easier to be given tickets for all the home games he wanted to go to and I happily joined him going to Dodger Stadium night games (primarily) 6 months a year.    

The Dodgers were a dynasty in the mid-60s.  I went to World Series games every year the Dodgers were there.  But I remember 1965 not for baseball play but for my baseball knowledge (I've always been a baseball history nerd):  Games 3,4 & 5 were at Dodger Stadium.  During game 3, the video board asked a question regarding Dodger World Series history hitting.  During game 4, the video board asked a question regarding Dodger World Series history pitching.  I 'predicted' before the start of game 5 that not only what the question would be today be about Dodgers World Series history fielding but that the answer would be Billy Wamsgams.   Billy Wamsgams made an unassisted triple play against the Cleveland Indians in the 1920 World Series.  Of course I was right! I felt damned good about it - good enough to remember this 59 years later!!!

I was not in Los Angeles during the 1988 World Series between the Dodgers and the Oakland Athletics.  I was at one of Petaluma's two Chinese restaurants, sipping won ton soup while listening to the game where, as Kirk Gibson came up, I sensed what was going to happen - a walk-off home run that ended any Oakland aspirations that year.  But I really do have to write about the 1989 World Series between Oakland and the San Francisco Giants - I was at the one Series game that year of true historical significance - game (and Series) postponed due to an earthquake during the game.

As a 'prelude' to that earthquake game:  I went to a whole lot of games during the summers I spent in Petaluma, Ca.  One of my tax clients from Petaluma had a pair of season tickets to home games at Candlestick Park, the second of three home fields the Giants have had in San Francisco.  Hall of Fame player and manager Frank Robinson and his wife Barbara were friends/clients from my Los Angeles days and after taking that Petaluma client an aisle away to introduce him Barbara Robinson, that Petaluma client wanted to take me to a game any time he could!  I also had Wednesday getaway game tickets at the Oakland Coliseum for 8 Wednesday, noontime games for many years - Rick Zalon, who I met in 1981, and I had these mini-season series tickets. And fellow Probate Court Referee Al Nicora was an Oakland-based attorney whose firm had a private sky box in Oakland, too.  Thus, I was not lacking baseball after moving out of Los Angeles.

On 17 October 1989, at 5:04pm, on a relatively balmy and, in the late afternoon, definitely sunny day, the stands were packed and the world changed over the next 20 seconds, perhaps the longest 20 seconds of my life:  earthquake - 6.9 on the Richter Scale.

Picture if you will the vast parking facilities of Candlestick Park turned into one big beautiful tail gate party.  There were 4 of us in the station wagon from Petaluma - the three others were meeting with others for their tailgate festivities - we were there at noon - we all started early because this was going to be fun.  One of the three was a member of AA - he was sober all day long.  The other two were PFD (pretty fucking drunk!).  I met others at a designated location in the parking lot for our weed-based tailgate party.  I met the others from Petaluma and around 4:30pm, we found our way to our seats - three rows from the top of Candlestick, on the right field side.

What can I say about those 20 seconds of shaking?  I think I might have discovered the instantaneous cure to constipation because this more effectively scared the shit out of me than anything else I've ever encountered.  Were it not for the fact that the attendees of this packed baseball stadium  were either stoned or passively drunk out of their minds after a day of tail gating, I really think it could have turned riotous.  Yet without stadium lights or public address  system functional (hey, all power was out - seemingly everywhere!  There were no traffic lights and a portion of the Oakland Bay Bridge collapsed) - this was something no one ever anticipated nor an event that any of us would ever forget.

Oakland won the Series after it resumed 10 days later - at least that is what I just refreshed my memory by reading.  Who cared ?  We survived 'the' earthquake and I drove the four of us back to Petaluma, no traffic lights functioning anywhere along the route.......that, I can never forget

 Some are either blessed or cursed in life because of the weird manifestation of  their mid-life crises.  Hands down, I had the weirdest and I challenge anyone to come up with something stranger:  I left the US for China, Hong Kong and Thailand at the end of 1990 and with the exception of 7 two week trips to the States over the next 33+ years, I didn't return to live there again until the end of 2023......and that return was something I never, ever anticipated.

Of course I still watched baseball!  Joanna and I went to our first ballgame in Japan together, in 2006 at the Kyocera Dome in Osaka.  The two of us, guests of the Japan High School Baseball Federation, saw Shohei Ohtani pitch his final high school game during the August, 2011 National Tournament at Koshien Stadium in Osaka.  That day was filled with truly memorable events but what do both of us remember?  We didn't take sunscreen and came home with horrid sun burn!

I do remember one other baseball 'event' at the Tokyo Dome truly worth remembering:  It was 2014, the  Japan - US baseball series.  Game 1 in Tokyo - Katherine and Joanna opted to shop.  I sat in the stands and watched Team Japan pitch a no-hitter against the best that America could offer..........I was wearing a Japan jersey and rooting for that successful no-hitter, the third I've attended:  Sal Maglie vs the Phillies at Ebbetts Field in 1955;  Sandy Koufax vs the Cubs at Dodger Stadium in 1965; and Team Japan vs Team USA at the Tokyo Dome in 2014.

And during all this time, what about the Dodgers?  What about MLB??  When I had video access and when the time was convenient, I read, I watched, I tried to stay knowledgeable about what was happening but it really was not a priority.  I was very much involved with baseball in China leading up to the 2008 Games in Beijing.  I lost count of the times there were only three of us in the stands at a Guangdong Leopards game in the Chinese Baseball League:  a scout from Japan, a scout from Korea;  and ...... me.  Hey, I pitched batting practice at age 65, marveling about actually being able to reach the plate......most of the time.....

It was also during this time period that Evergrande Group of Guangzhou pyramided towards  becoming the world's  biggest urban real estate developer and put some of its cash into fielding a world-class soccer team that played less than a mile from where I lived in Guangzhou. The sad reality is that this conglomerate defrauded tens of thousands of would be home owners before crashing into bankruptcy - that is definitely worthy of a stand-alone essay about fraud, Chinese-style.  Yet the stands were filled back in those good old days with local, loyal rooters -~50,000 in the stands...I doubt there were 10 of us white guys amongst them....but it was really fun!    I also saw world cup cricket in Mumbai and Test cricket at Lords in London (which was a great way to sip wine all day long!) so I was never lacking for a good sporting event and MLB was truly on the back burner of my mind for around 3 decades.

Does anyone really understand what the switch from working for 6 decades to not working at all and having absolutely no idea what to do with my time in a strange land.? Yes, after all this time, the US is very strange to me and I'm far more comfortable being in an Asian environment!  Alas, circumstances did not dictate this but we were able to choose other aspects of our life.

Did I survive the transition fully intact?  Sadly, hell, no!  Is it still ongoing after 2+ years, hell, yes.  But I am now a student, again, enrolled at Santa Monica College;  We do not have a car but we do have bus and metro passes and use public transportation; and we do not have a television - if  on Netflix, Peacock or Prime or YouTube, we  watch on the computer......  Baseball?  Impossible to get a Dodger game if you live in the greater LA area and are not a subscriber to various systems.  I do get two games a week from the systems I have so I get baseball but not the Dodgers.

Joanna, after four years in the U.K. for school, pursued her dream and went to Sophia University in Tokyo where she completed her undergraduate and graduate engineering degres.  For baseball, that mean full immersion into NPB - Nippon Professional Baseball.  The 'bridge' for American baseball diehards to baseball in Japan has been Bob Bavasi's JapanBall.  Bavasi, son of long time Dodger General Manager Buzzie Bavasi, had a program that scheduled going to baseball games at all twelve home team stadiums (plus a countryside game) in a two week period.  In 2012, I went on that program which ended on 17 September at the Sapporo Dome where I celebrated my 70th birthday with a whole lot of hi-fiving fans as the four of us JapanBallers passed out CrackerJack packets .........birthday parties do not get as unique as this one was!

I never met Bob Bavasi prior to JapanBall but I did meet his father.....and Walter O'Malley.....at the Chock Full O Nuts coffee shop across the street from the office building at 215 Montegue Street where the Brooklyn Baseball Club offices were located, as was the downtown Brooklyn branch of Central State Bank where my father was principal loan officer.  This was in an era long before either Starbucks or coffee machines in offices.  Once upon a time, a cup of coffee (and slice of datenut bread) was a great, inexpensive coffee break that Buzzie Bavasi, that Walter O'Malley, that Joe Lipsher took.    And on a day when I went to work with my father, I met the guys who ran the Dodgers in a coffee shop.  Try that today in an era where a conglomerate runs a mega business that takes in 4,000,000 paying ballgame attendees.  Things sure as hell are different now from 75+ years ago.

We were one of the first families in our 102 apartment building to get a television - in our case, a 10 inch Philco which my parents got primarily because I could be found most afternoons at the open door to Kelly's Bar on Utica Avenue where the bartender, having few customers and nothing better to watch, turned on Howdy Doody for me to watch.   We got that television in time for the 1947 World Series, where the sponsor was the Gillette Safety Razor Company (The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports is on the air!) and Red Barber, broadcaster for the Dodgers and Mel Allen, broadcaster for the Yankees shared both radio and television tasks for the first World Series, ever, that was televised.  The Dodgers lost in 7 games.  I'm not sure but I think that there were only one or two cameras doing the video in what was a grainy black and white.

Compare that with today.......only I can't - I do not have a television - out of personal choice!! Between Netflix, Prime Video, Peacock and You Tube, I can watch movies and news broadcasts and baseball games on my computer.....but not the Dodgers.....and I do not really care because I'm living a deja vu life, sitting out on our front porch as the sun sets in the late afternoon during baseball season, listening to Dodger games, live with radio broadcasters - the very best in the business, separate from the television broadcasters - also the very, very best in that media -the Dodgers are one class organization!

Somebody is assisting you in what you visualize from a radio broadcast.  Two broadcasters, assisted by nearby staff providing various and sundry facts and stories to make 'continuity'.  For a three hour game, that's one thing.....but what about that 18 inning game - that's a hell of a long time for a couple of guys to hold your interest by just talking.......they talk great!  Steven Nelson and Rick Monday obviously held my interest.   With the Blue Jays leading 3 games to 2 and games 6 (and hopefully) 7 in Toronto, I shut down virtually everything else to listen, first to Yamamoto pitching his way to victory in game 6 and then to Yamamoto's coming in for 2+ innings with no rest to end game 7 and get his third victory of this, the 2025 World Series.

I listened to it all........and I LOVED EVERY MINUTE OF IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

Listening to the 2025 World Series was sheer joy!  It brought back memories of the last decade of my father's life. Dad had an irregular heart beat in an era prior to pills resolving that irregularity.  Thus, his last eight years were life after a stroke  from which he beat the odds and while invalid, he lived a good remaining life.  Yet his eyesight was mostly gone.  Was it a result of the stroke or from an hereditary gene that caused macular degeneration which is what I was diagnosed with as the 2025 MLB Playoffs were in progress.  

I have inherited AMD and am at intermediate stage - dry.  I am now part of a German developed (and in use in Europe since 2018.......only approved for use in the US this past March) non-invasive program involving infrared spectrum lighting for which I have completed the first 9 of 27 sessions I will undergo this year.......and I am optimistic that programs like this, while they will not cure my predicament, will slow down and limit the degree of blindness that I supposedly will encounter.  Yeah, I do recognize that my eyesight has deteriorated - that's why I made an appointment to see an eye doctor in the first place!  But based upon current research in the field, I am very, very optimistic that I will still be able to bicycle ride and read my weekly print copy of the NewYorker for a long time to come and I sure as hell am not going to limit my activities now........and that included going to the Dodger's World Series Parade in down town Los Angeles on Monday morning after that Saturday evening 7th game from Toronto.  LAPD estimated that a quarter million people, based upon last year's parade, would attend this year.  Post parade analysis:  a million showed up for a morning of joy, love and peace..........at least ICE had the common sense not to do anything that day.........

OK - The Dodgers repeated, coming from behind and winning spectacularly on the road in Toronto.  Last year the Dodgers won the Series and the very next day they were feted with a victory parade starting at LA City Hall with an approximate attendance of 200,000.  Last year was easy.  This year was difficult - very difficult, indeed.  And with an extra day to feel how extraordinary it really was, a whole lot more people than just me were lured downtown in a feeling likely felt by the children of Hamlin as the Pied Piper lured them to his festival........dammit, we had to go!!!!!

If my iPhone is correct, I walked 11,382 steps that day.  I left home at 8:50am and found 13 others - young, financial types from my 'hood’.  We boarded what was then an empty Metro E Line car.  By the time we had gone to 4 more stations, our car was full - all wearing something Dodgers.  It was a carnival in that car - what a joyeous crowd......'fuck work that day.....let's party!' 

Getting off at 7th Street, DTLA was difficult at best at 10am.  Walking through that crowd  would have been impossible an hour later.  Yet I successfully 'negotiated' the crowd and was content to find a place on Hope at 7th where there were street vendors selling bacon dogs at $10 a dog....next to a $5 a can Modelo beer vendor........Hey, this was a mixed crowd all mingling together, throwing footballs back and forth across 7th Street that was blocked for crowd control by LAPD which did a spectacular job at handing a crowd 4 times larger than anticipated.....but did anyone have to worry?  Hell No!  This felt like going to a tail gate party prior to a ballgame at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.....or like going to a Dead concert in the 70s - life was simpler then, the crowds were smaller and passive.....and like San Francisco at all events, the smell of weed always seems to be in the air (which it is not at Dodger Stadium).......but a Dodger Parade in DTLA is not at Dodger Stadium - the food was affordable in the street, the smell of cannabis was prevalent and a better party atmosphere (far better!) prevailed on the streets through the early afternoon, after the 6 busses with Dodgers atop, waving and taking pictures of a joyous  Series crowd that they probably would never ever experience - unless the they played for the Dodgers in future years and they'd win the Series in that future year. 

Postscript to a dream

It is late morning on a wet Saturday as the rains - more than a drizzle but not enough for me to consider taking an umbrella with me were I to go out - have been (more or less) steady since early morning, yesterday.  I'm gonna be indoors all day, today - still in my pajamas - no need to go out.......and our small home is pleasantly, comfortably warm - with a thermal vest atop the pj tops as the central heating keeps our place comfortable.

My life is intertwined with baseball tying so much more than the game into it.  Yeah, 'Baseball is Life'.........I wish I still had that T shirt!  I have been on a baseball odyssey from sometime in September, 1944 when my mother and her sisters Sarah and Faye  and  cousins Barbara, Margie, Kenny and me attended Ladies Day at Ebbetts Field where the St Louis Cardinals beat the Brooklyn Dodgers.   Of course I don't remember it!  But it is what I do remember from 18 September 1947 on - far more than just the Dodgers and World Series matters.  I have had some life experiences that, in spite of getting older and battling against the 'senior moment' might be interesting were I motivated to write about it......first things first, I've boxed myself into a corner requiring my completing this part first and then editing and joining all seven writing sessions into a long essay that will be readable....is that possible?  Only time will tell.

And the odyssey  continues - I'm not dead yet!  There's far more to talk about that concerns baseball

**********

Look above and you're gonna see some dark clouds that will not go away:  A week after the Dodgers won the Series, Federal prosecutors announced that two Cleveland Guardians pitchers tipped off bettors about pitches they were going to throw so they could bet on these 'micro-bets'.  MLB's response was to 'regulate' this with the betting industry.   

And a week before that, investigators charged both current and former NBA players with 'betting problems'.

I was gone from life in the States for a long, long time and I came back, remembering no tolerance for gambling because the integrity of the game was more important only to find all aspects of gambling rampant on televised sports.  I am defiantly old-fashioned:  Once investigator’s findings are issued, I believe in a far more rapid due process and those guilty should be banned from sports.........It'll never happen but at least I can voice my thoughts as we look to another season after this coming winter.

In looking at the future of the Dodgers - especially after what that organization has accomplished in  becoming the mega-dynasty of today, I owe a whole hell of a lot to Andrew Gumbel and his NY Times brilliant piece of investigative journalism "The LA Dodgers won the World Series but for Latino fans it's complicated".

Nothing can be taken away from the sheer brilliance of the Dodger organization.  It is class.  It took in over 4 million attendees at Dodger Stadium this year when two MLB teams didn't even reach 1 million.  It had the money to purchase a lifetime of Shohei Ohtani's services (and cover up Ohtani's possible involvement with his interpreter's gambling involvements?) with two more pitchers from Japan that are also potentially of Hall of Fame calibre also signing huge contracts.

Hey, once upon a time I hated the Yankees as the evil empire.   Look at the Dodgers now - they are a dynasty.....are they becoming the new evil empire?  Mr. Gumbel looked at the Dodger ownership: "...the Dodgers are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to media reports and its owned published balance sheets, include a stake in the GEO Group, a private prison corporation that operates ICE detention centers."

When Trump sent the troops into Los Angeles, the two Major League Soccer teams in Los Angeles quickly issued media statements expressing solidarity with immigrant families.  The Dodgers were silent.  A few months earlier, the Dodger organization accepted  a 2024 World Series victory fete at the White House.  Dylan Hernandez of the LA Times called this 'pathetic...spineless...and hypocritical".

Gustavo Arellano, the most widely followed Mexican-American columnist has called the Dodgers 'the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, a corporate entity with an undue, even unhealthy following by too many Latinos".....They've put one arm around Latino fans while picking their pockets with the other for so long because they have been able to get away with it."

What does the future portend vis a vis the love affair between the Dodgers and their community......will it endure?  

What will happen over the winter vis a vis investing in overcoming some weak spots of the past season and the hype leading up to striving for a threepeat..........?????

SCREW THESE PRESSING QUESTIONS!   baseball will go on and on and on regardlss of  grumpy old men like me who will forever be grumpy about gambling.........but I will listen to games as long as I live – how nice to have re-discovered the joys of radio!

.....I LOVE BASEBALL.....I LOVE THE DODGERS.....I LOVE LIVING IN LOS ANGELES.....! And I truly love being able to still write an essay like this………….