Baseball

The newsman wandered through the grandstands at Yankee Stadium in search of what journalists call color: a cleverly-worded banner, a beguiling child with a baseball glove, maybe a celebrity in dark glasses.

This was the World Series and the underdog Brooklyn Dodgers, later called "The boys of summer," were battling a very good New York team. What struck the meandering reporter then was the quiet, almost a hush. There was a complete absence of all customary background noise.

He looked toward the scoreboard. Dodgers Jackie Robinson, Gil Hodges, Carl Furillo, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Billy Cox and Roy Campanella were hitless against Yankee pitcher Don Larsen. The Brooklyn line score read 0-0-0.

I was that reporter, and I told myself, "This could be baseball history." So I sat down to watch the remainder of the only perfectly pitched World Series game. Larsen gave up no hits; walked no one, and he didn't hit a batter.

Understandably, I treasure the memory of that fall afternoon 46 years ago. Now, when the baseball owners and players determined last summer that there would be no strike this season, two disparate age groups were especially relieved: young kids, and senior adults.

Yes, older men and women are fond of the slow-moving sport; perhaps it fits our preferred lifestyle. Moreover, it links us neatly to our pasts, to a time when we were younger and in the company of a father, big sister, older brother or guiding friend.

Call me addled, or gripped by nostalgia, but I remain an incorrigible baseball fan; the older I become, the greater my obsession. "If you have to have an obsession," Larry King has said, "let it be baseball."

Baseball has given members of the Grey Legion a trove of memories. Come back in time with me to Brooklyn's Ebbets Field; it is the 1950's and Jackie Robinson, for many, is baseball's most complete, and exciting, performer.

"Robinson reached full speed in three strides," wrote Roger Kahn, newsman and author. "The rundown was his greatest play. Robinson could start so fast and stop so short that he could elude anyone in baseball."

There was, in those long ago years when Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and Duke Snider patrolled center field for New York's Yankees, Giants and Dodgers, no more exciting moment in baseball for me than when Jack Roosevelt Robinson led off third base. He was a genuine threat to steal home; and with apologies to Roger Kahn, I believe this was his greatest play.

"Robinson did not merely play at center stage," Kahn wrote. "He was center stage; and wherever he walked, center stage moved with him."

Sitting quietly with Jackie, talking baseball as I did on many pre-game evenings, you had no hint, in that moment, this fierce, proud athlete was history, a pioneer who led the way for black athletes into all professional sports, creating, among other things, a new class of American: today's millionaire black athlete.

The incomparable, acrobatic Willie Mays used to say, "Whenever I look at my house, or my bank account, I think of Jackie."

As another World Series is about to unfold, thousands of fans with white hair, thick waists and keen memories, will stare intently at their television screens, even as their minds slip back to a time when their favorites threw hard, ran swiftly, slid fiercely and hit for distance.

It says here no other sport, save the alleged national pastime, holds its followers as does baseball, the one that is timeless --allowing no clock to measure its beat.