An MMO Fan Shot by MetsFanInParadise
The love of baseball runs through families. It’s passed from grandparent or parent to child. The bond baseball can form between between a father and child can be a special thing. It’s often portrayed in various art forms, and sports can be one medium across which the bond is built. The recent publicity about Adam LaRoche and his son is proof of this. One of my favorite movies is “Frequency,” which uses the 1969 World Series as a plot device, as a son tries to save his father’s life via a magical radio connection.
This will be the first baseball season I won’t be able to share with my father, Charles Martin Rosenblatt, who died a few weeks after the World Series ended last fall. Like many of us, the love of the game was passed down through the generations of my family, though it wasn’t a shared love to the extent that it is in some families.
As children, we think of our grandparents as, well, grandparents. The word often conjures up magic. Our memories of them are the sum of the hugs we sometimes didn’t get from our own parents, of kitchens smelling like sweet baked goods or savory holiday meals, of birthday and holiday cards with checks or $20 bills in them, and, for my generation anyway, of the rare airplane trip to Florida to visit them in Miami Beach-during the school year if you were REALLY lucky. We would return with exotic stories of Monkey Jungle and Sea World, airboat rides and alligator wrestlers But we don’t necessarily think of them as people, with complex personalities and relationships, particularly with their own children, our parents.
As I got older and understood the friction between my father and his parents, it made sense that Grandpa Abe was a Yankee fan, while my father grew up bleeding Dodger blue. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that it had been an intentional choice on my father’s part, to oppose his father. The Dodgers had moved west before my arrival on this earth, which was almost simultaneous with the Mets taking the field for their first Spring Training. (In fact, the start of Spring Training is annually my greatest birthday gift.) By that time my father, like most NY-Metro area NL fans, had transferred his allegiance to them and eventually it found its way deep into my soul.
We only went to one Yankee game with my grandfather. It was in 1970 or 1971. I know that because it was Bat Day. Can you imagine giving out usable wooden bats to a stadium full of children today? Not miniatures, but right-sized for kids to use competitively. My brother was fortunate enough to get one with Bobby Murcer‘s autograph stamped on it. Murcer was maybe the biggest name on those putrid Yankee teams of the Interregnum, between the wild Mantle-Ford teams, and the champion Bronx Zoo teams made possible by the advent of free agency and George Steinbrenner’s deep pockets and obsession with winning. Some of the other stalwarts of those late 60s-early 70s teams were Horace Clarke, Walt “No-Neck” Williams, and Roy White, a steady performer who was good enough to hang in there long enough to reach the mountaintop a few years later.
For a long time there was a Rodney Dangerfield element to me. The world didn’t seem to respect me, so it’s no surprise my bat carried the faux autograph of…Curt Blefary. Who? Lets just say the name didn’t fire my imagination. So rather than hitching my fan wagon to the Yankees’ star I puttered along as a casual fan, reading biographies of everyone from Stan Musial (my favorite, who received minor-league tutelage from Dickie Kerr, one of the few good eggs from the 1919 Black Sox) and the Splendid Splinter to New York icons Ruth, Gehrig, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays and more.
I watched and listened to whatever games my father put on the TV or radio, which consisted of Mets and World Series games, and we went to Shea from the Jersey suburbs periodically, whenever my father (or school, or summer camp) decided to get a trip together. But it wasn’t at my instigation. My baseball knowledge expanded incrementally in other ways, too. Everyone in my family shares a love of words, so we would play games like Hangman, and my father’s puzzles would sometimes consist of historical baseball players with unusual names, like Sibby Sisti.
So baseball was part of the background of my life until Aug 31, 1973, when my imagination was fired up by the battle cry, “Ya Gotta Believe.” From then on the Mets were a daily obsession, and of course the family was clustered around the TV for the entire postseason. Pete Rose, Bud Harrelson, Jon Matlack, Willie Mays, Mike Andrews, Catfish Hunter, Darold Knowles, and Reggie Jackson were some of the players who stood out, for better or worse.
In 1974 I started collecting everything Mets I could get my hands on — mostly freebies, because I had very little money. I stood in line when Rusty Staub signed photos at the Menlo Park Mall that winter, wrote to the Mets for decals and schedules, piled up the free portrait photos with reproduced autographs given out at the Getty gas stations for a summer or 2—I had stacks of Mike Philips, Doug Flynn, Skip Lockwood and Dave Kingman photos, and tried to collect at least one card from each year of the team’s existence.
One of my treasures was a 1962 Chris Cannizarro — the catcher Casey Stengel referred to as “Canzoneri” (a boxer of the time). I even acquired NYC subway car ads from somewhere.
The family was breaking apart slowly, which seemed fairly common in the 70s, and I was unable to get us out to Big Shea as a group too often, but I remember a game in 1975.
It wasn’t hard to get field-level box seats at the time, the attendance was so poor, and they were only about $5.50, so I had a front row seat for the Expos’ Woodie Fryman‘s one-hitter against the Mets in 1975 a game which featured 4 former or future Mets in the Montreal lineup; Tim Foli, Mike Jorgenson, Pepe Mangual, and Gary Carter, in RF. John Stearns broke it up with a double. Fryman’s pitching coach that year? A former journeyman who had passed through Brooklyn at the start of his playing career so my father knew he had a noteworthy name—Calvin Coolidge Julius Caesar Tuskahoma (“Cal”) McLish.
Then I was off to college and pursuing solo adventures, such as driving in from Central Pennsylvania on Opening Day 1983 to find a scalper with a ticket and see Tom Seaver‘s return to the Mets. Getting my 1970 Plymouth Fury over the Poconos was an adventure in itself. I graduated in 1984 and, as previously documented, I went to quite a few games during 1986, but the only experience I got to share with my father that year was watching Game Seven of the World Series in my apartment. A few years after that I moved to Florida and my father stayed in NJ. For the next 15 years all we could do was talk about it.
In 2005 he finally decided to retire to Florida. All three of his children had moved down here in the interim, so he was very welcome. He came down in the spring and I found that the Mets would be here on his birthday, April 21st, so we (my brother also lives in this area) took him. The Mets won, 10-1, with Pedro Martinez starting and getting the win, and ex-Red Sox Doug Mientkiewicz hitting a grand slam in the second inning.
In 2006 we saw 2 or 3 games together. One was Aug 1, when Billy Wagner gave up a walk-off 2-run HR to Josh Willingham. I think that was the last regular season game we ever saw together in person (we also got to see them in Spring Training once or twice while the Baltimore Orioles were still based in Ft. Lauderdale-I never got up to Port St. Lucie until last spring). I fell on hard times for awhile, and my father found a girlfriend. He became a “snowbird,” spending the summer months in her home in Michigan. We watched games together, of course, either over the phone or on TV when he was in Florida, and talked baseball all the time.
Last summer’s glorious events went hand in hand with personal hardship and loss. During the Mets’ midsummer slog my father was rehabilitating from an automobile accident. Since he was in the Rehab facility where i work as Social Services Director, I was able to spend a lot of time with him and sometimes catch snippets of the games on my office computer. But by the time their turnaround seemed destined to land them in the postseason, the news had turned grim.
In August my father, discharged from Rehab and back on his feet, had gone belatedly with his companion to Michigan, to spend the end of the summer at her house. But the idyll quickly turned to tragedy, as he started to fall and lose the use of his right arm and leg, and he eventually checked himself into the hospital.
I was 6 rows behind first base on Sept. 5, the night Bartolo Colon made his famous behind-the-back flip. There was so much going on with our team that it would have been easy to be totally immersed in it: we were in between the 2 sweeps of the Nationals, and that was the weekend the controversy over Matt Harvey‘s innings limit hit the news. But it was also the night I found out about my father’s brain tumor.
The next couple of months were a blur. Trips to Detroit and countless phone calls with doctors were interspersed with “Tears of Joy,” but those weren’t the only tears I cried during that period. Since health care is my profession I took the lead in overseeing his care, signing forms and making arrangements to have him transported down here to spend his remaining time with his family. My brother and I watched playoff games with him in his hospital room in Detroit, and NLCS and World Series games with him from his Hospice room.
He retained enough of himself to be able to croak “Lets Go Mets” as they won the pennant. I was hoping they’d give him a most satisfying send-off, but we all know how their story ended. Soon after, my father’s story also ended.
The Mets carried me through last fall, when my father’s illness and the responsibility for arranging his care could have overwhelmed me. But they brought me a joy that still gets me choked up. I wouldn’t have had the same passion for the game, and the team, without my father, who transferred his rabid loyalty to the Mets from the Dodgers like so many other fans of that time, and nurtured it in me.
Now another winter has passed, more quickly than most thanks to the length of our season. Baseball really is a microcosm of life, as many have written. It stirs when nature is doing the same; animals emerging from hibernation and new plants emerging from under the blanket of snow. It bursts forth in all its exuberance like the fruit and the fireworks of summer, echoed in the carefree freedom of children out of school.
It draws to a conclusion, strewing heartbreak for most and satisfaction for the few, as the harvest closes the chapter on the year’s productivity, and then all the equipment is put away and the long winter’s slumber comes round again. Baseball, like life, provides as many failures as successes.
Unlike the NFL, no team goes undefeated. Every team wins at least 50 games and loses at least 50. Unlike a field-goal or free throw percentage in basketball, a champion batting average contains twice as much failure as success. It’s a test of character; another thing we acquire, in large part, from our parents.
I’m expecting a fantastic season for the Amazins, capped by a more satisfying repeat trip to the Fall Classic. Every time I enjoy another “Happy Recap” I’ll think of my father with gratitude for helping me become the fan I am, and wish he was here to enjoy the season with me.
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This MMO Fan Shot was written by MMO reader MetsFanInParadise. Have something you want to say about the Mets? Share your opinions with over 30,000 Met fans who read this site daily. Send your Fan Shot to [email protected]. Or ask us about becoming a regular contributor.
