We all have memories. They’re in every form imaginable.
Some are faded and fuzzy while others are brilliant and defined. There are the fond ones that make us laugh or cry, and the terrible ones that make us weep or tremble or seethe. Some slip from us, no matter how much we wish to keep them, sometimes receding even faster the harder we try to hold on to them. Others stick with us despite our best efforts to bury them deep and wish them dead.
They have complexity and they evolve, shifting in detail or clarity as we recall or retell them, our minds pushing and pulling them and making them even our own no matter what the truth of them was at the outset. Someone else who was there when the memory was made might have an entirely different version that their mind had formed, or might have none at all.
I have many memories about baseball. I’ve written about some of them here, and I’ll certainly do so again. I’m sure all of them stray from reality at times, and might be recalled differently by someone else, but never intentionally. That’s just how our brains work.
I couldn’t tell you the earliest memory of baseball that I have. Probably playing in the local Little League when I was five or six or whatever age kids start those things. I recall playing in that league, and being pretty bad at it. There’s a photo of me with terribly stooped shoulders, standing on first base in a purple t-shirt and ugly green jeans, circa 1974 or so. I’ve got a helmet on that’s far too large and an expression on my face that says “Why the hell are you taking my picture?” Our team name was the Phillies, and those t-shirts and a matching snapback cap were the only uniform we were issued. We didn’t even wear cleats, just regular tennis shoes.
But I don’t know the date of that memory. I’m not even sure of the year. In fact, there’s not a single memory from the first seven years of my life that has a date stamp for me. Some of the snapshots have dates, back when cameras would stamp them right onto the film, but there’s nothing in my memories to confirm them.
That remained the case until the night of October 21, 1975. That date I know for certain, because I had been looking at the calendar for days. See, that’s the day they finally played Game Six of the 1975 World Series. It’s the day Pudge Fisk hit his famous home run. And seven-year old me was allowed to stay up to watch it.
The game had been scheduled for Saturday, the 18th, and I was thrilled. The three previous games in Cincinnati had been played on weeknights, and I’d missed most of them. I had just started the second grade and my parents didn’t let me and my siblings stay up to watch. I had cheated, of course, as both my brother and I snuck to the top of the staircase and strained to listen to the television downstairs, but our parents caught us eventually and sent us back to our room. We had to find out the final scores the next morning.
But Game 6 would be different. It was going to be played on a Saturday afternoon. I’d get to watch the whole thing.
And then it rained.
Well, okay, that sucked. The game was moved to Sunday, which meant that if the Red Sox won it, the deciding Game Seven would be pushed to Monday night and I’d probably miss it. But I’d worry about that if it happened. Before that, at least I’d still get to see Game Six on Sunday afternoon.
And then it rained again.
My parents had a wall calendar in the kitchen, one of those that folds open with some kind of photo or advertisement on the top half and the calendar for the current month below it, one little box for each day of the month. It hung next to the beige phone on the wall, it’s long coiled cord dangling down to a little step stool below it. I kept climbing onto the first step of that stool to read the calendar better, as if checking it repeatedly would somehow change the sequence of dates.
It didn’t. Every time I looked, Sunday the 19th led directly to Monday the 20th. Which means Game Six would now be a night game played on a school night, and I would miss it.
And then it rained again. That’s right, three straight rainouts.
I found out from my mother once I got home from school that the game would be postponed yet again, and I immediately went back to that wall calendar. You know, just to confirm that the day after Monday was, in fact, a Tuesday, and therefore another school night. Seeing that it was, I slunk away up the stairs to my room, stooped shoulders more rounded than ever.
The rain finally stopped. Game Six was officially going to be played, at what in retrospect seems to be the utterly preposterous start time of 8:30 PM. Boy, Major League Baseball really didn’t give a rat’s ass about turning young kids into fans back in the ‘70s, did they? My bedtime was nine o’clock, so I’d only get to see the first half-hour of the game.
I have no memory at all of what I did before the game started. I’m sure there was homework. A little thing like the World Series wasn’t going to stop the nuns from assigning homework in every subject, heartless old crones that they were. We probably also watched some sitcom, maybe “Happy Days.” I honestly don’t know. But I know where I was at 8:30 PM.
Our little Cape Cod-style house had four rooms on the first floor. There was a living room in the front of the house, and on the other side of the staircase was my parents’ bedroom. In the back was our big eat-in kitchen, and across from it, past a tiny bathroom and hallway, was what we called “the den.”
A year later it would be turned into a nursery for my not-yet-conceived little brother, but on that night it was still set up as a little rec room of sorts. It’s where we had a toy box my dad had built, stacked high with toys for four kids. And it had a little loveseat along one wall, and a little table with a reading lamp next to it. Across from the loveseat was the only television in the house, a 19-inch black and white Zenith, complete with rabbit ears to tune in the signal. To change channels, one of my parents would tell the closest kid to turn the dial.
My parents got the loveseat, with my younger sister stuck between them, because she was only in kindergarten and still small enough to fit. I was stretched out on the floor, as were my older brother and sister, laying on the sort of braided oval rug that seemed to be standard issue for every home in New England. You know the type…
I won’t recount the whole game for you, because it’s possibly the most famous game in World Series history. But I will remind you that the Red Sox grabbed an early 3-0 lead, lifting everyone’s spirits as the beloved Luis Tiant tried to hold on to that lead and carry the Series into a seventh game.
Oh how my dad loved Luis Tiant. His Fu Manchu mustache, his potbelly, his habit of turning his back to the hitter before he delivered the pitch, the huge cigar he smoked after each victory, all of it. Dad particularly liked the way Luis shook his glove as he came set on the mound in the stretch position, peaking over his shoulder at the runner on first base. He’d sometimes imitate it for us in the middle of the kitchen, and we’d crack up laughing.
That night, Dad was locked in on Luis. I’d never seen him so animated watching a game, contorting his body on the loveseat as Luis did on the TV screen, and giving a little happy shout as each member of the Reds was retired. He was so into it, in fact, that when our bedtime arrived, and our mother told us it was time to go upstairs, he stopped her and said “You guys want to watch another inning?”
I couldn’t believe it, but happily said I would. So did my siblings. We had to run to our rooms to put on our pajamas between innings, but then we were allowed to come back to the den and stretch back out on the floor, only with pillows from our beds now to prop up our heads towards the television.
Each inning seemed to bring some new excitement, and at the end of each we wondered if we’d finally be told to head upstairs. Each time, our parents said nothing and we kept our places until the next inning began. Once the Reds tied the game, and then took the lead, chasing the gallant Tiant from the mound, we were sure that would be the end of our late school night.
But it wasn’t. We stayed where we were, without another word from either of my parents. It was as if they silently decided at some point that this was a game that their children simply had to see, and if they yawned their way through school the next day and incurred the wrath of the nuns, so be it.
And so we saw Bernie Carbo’s pinch-hit homer to tie the game in the eighth, and we jumped up and danced around the little room. We were crushed in the bottom of the ninth when Denny Doyle was thrown out at home, and elated in the top of the eleventh when Dwight Evans made his miraculous catch and doubled Ken Griffey off of first.
Midnight came and went, the latest any of us kids had been up, but on they played. We’d shift our bodies from time to time, because that braided rug wasn’t exactly plush on top of the hardwood floor. The glow from the little television was the only light in the room when the bottom of the twelfth inning arrived. It was 12:30 in the morning, and up stepped Carlton Fisk.
He’d grown up in New England, just like us and the people in the stands. He was tall, and determined. We called him Pudge, a remnant of the baby fat he had as a rookie years before, but by this point of his career he was a lean, hard man playing the hardest position in a hard game. He was one of us.
The first pitch was high, and Fisk didn’t offer. We all knew he was a low ball hitter, so when that next pitch came and it was right at his knees, of course he swung at it. I will not pretend that I knew the announcer on TV was Dick Stockton. I know it now, because I’ve watched the clip approximately eleventy jillion times, but at the time all I knew was that his first words after Fisk took his swing were “There it goes!”
We were all off the floor or the loveseat immediately. A version of the body english Fisk applied to the ball on his way up the first base line was being applied by each of us as well in that little den, because Stockton had also said “If it stays fair.” We leaned and waved for what seemed an eternity, but it couldn’t have been since the time between Fisk’s swing and the ball bouncing off what is now officially labeled “The Fisk Pole” was no more than three or four seconds.
We couldn’t have heard Stockton yell “Home Run!” We were all too busy yelling it ourselves. We didn’t notice he then remained silent as Fisk rounded the bases, but that was a wise choice on his part since any words would have been wasted. When the Fenway Park organist struck up the Hallelujah Chorus, we didn’t notice that either.
Our little TV room, the room with our toys stashed in the handcrafted box our father had lovingly made for us, with it’s little loveseat along the wall (not a sofa or couch, but fittingly a loveseat), and it’s braided rug where we all huddled together as our parents watched over us each night, was now a happy, leaping, screaming circle of pure joy.
He laughed and yelled and hugged and danced. Finally told to go to bed, it was a long, long time before sleep finally came. I have no memory of the next day at school, but I assume there were a lot of tired kids there, and maybe even some tired nuns, too.
Game Seven was a disappointment, we all know that now. I don’t really have the same sort of memory of it, though I’m sure our folks let us watch that game, too. It was a loss, and though those are sometimes memorable this one wasn’t, certainly not the way Game Six still is for me.
Of course, it isn’t really the game that’s burned into my memory. Moments of the game are, like Pudge’s home run, but mostly my memory is of being with my family, of my dad’s investment in Luis Tiant that night, of my parents breaking the bedtime rules to let us stay up, of laying next to my siblings on the floor with only the glow from that tiny Zenith lighting the room. The perfectly-named den, a place where animals nest or shelter with their young.
Maybe that memory would be just as vivid for me if Fisk hadn’t walked the game off in the early morning hours. I’ll never know because he did. That moment is why I have this mug to drink from some mornings, and it’s why this newsletter is named after the left field where he hit that ball. It’s why I have always loved baseball. It’s the game itself, sure. But it’s also the warmth and happiness I felt in that den that lingers with me whenever I watch a game to this day.
So thanks, Pudge. Here’s to you.
Beautiful, beautiful story sir. I am in tears. Thank you🙂❤️⚾️