Mickey Mantle

Source: Public Domain

At the time I came to this country in 1948, baseball was unrivaled by other sports, and it seemed to my 11-year-old self to be at the very center of American life. I remember it well, staying at the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue and hearing about it in the lobby and on the radio: The Yankees had lost the pennant to the Cleveland Indians, now called the Guardians due to political correctness. The Indians went on to win the World Series against the Boston Braves, a team that I think is now called the Atlanta Braves, a miraculous refusal to capitulate to woke demands.

In 1949, by now an old hand at being an American after having been sent to the Lawrenceville School, I attended my first major league game at Yankee Stadium. What a treat that was. The Yankees were playing the Washington Senators, and a wild pitcher named Tommy Byrne was pitching for the Yankees. I had become such a baseball fan that my father thought it unhealthy. He, of course, followed classical sports like track and field, boxing, and a sport that didn’t exist in America back then, called football in Europe and soccer in America. He told me that baseball was a made-up sport and made fun of players trying to hit a ball with a “piece of wood.”

Never mind. There was nothing to compare to baseball back then, father or no father. And it was a remarkably different America then, when the game was played during the day and broadcast on radio instead of television. There were only about eighteen major league teams—or perhaps there were sixteen—and the farthest-west major league franchise was in St. Louis. New York had three teams: the Yankees in the American League, and the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers in the National. The most famous baseball star was Joe DiMaggio of the Yankees, paid $100,000 a year by Yankees owner Dan Topping, whose brother Bob was married to actress Lana Turner. Management, not players, dictated salaries, and alcohol, not drugs, was the most bothersome addiction. But players played hard, and I never saw anyone jog to first base as they do nowadays, or ever look at a ball whether it is a home run or not before running.

There was an innocence to the professional sport of baseball, with an aging but still graceful DiMaggio heroically struggling with a crippling foot injury, the good-looking-like-a-movie-star gifted and brash Ted Williams fighting with the Boston press and refusing to doff his cap after being cheered to the rafters, and the “Say Hey Kid” Willie Mays catching uncatchable balls in the outfield of the Polo Grounds and hitting where “they weren’t” like no other.

The great philosopher of that time happened to be a Yankee catcher, future Hall of Famer Lawrence “Yogi” Berra. He came up with such pearls of wisdom as “If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him”; “It gets late early now”; “It’s so crowded, no one goes there anymore”; “You can observe a lot by watching”; “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”; and “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Yankee Stadium on 161st Street in the Bronx, the Polo Grounds on 155th Street, and Ebbets Field in Flatbush, Brooklyn, were hallowed places without any of the modern conveniences. Bleacher seats were less than a dollar, and in Brooklyn, if a home run hit the Howard sign in center field, the hitter got a suit from the Howard Company. Players were paid peanuts but played as if they were being paid millions.

None of these stadiums still exist. The reason I’m writing this is because the last so-called old-fashioned sports stadium, the Oakland Coliseum, known by fans as the “giant concrete toilet bowl,” is about to lose its team, the Oakland Athletics, to Las Vegas. The A’s were once in Philadelphia and were managed and owned by the great Connie Mack, who led the team dressed with a stiff white collar and three-piece suit from the dugout. The Oakland Coliseum is a hulking mass of concrete, with chairs coming loose, lights failing, and trough urinals. This is the way the old stadiums all were, when the minimum salary was $5,000 and players played rough. Now it is all about commercialization and sterilization of the fan experience and of the once-upon-a-time national pastime.

Baseball is no longer the national pastime, its stadiums resembling theme parks and built for comfort; their goal, it seems, is to attract casual fans into the priciest seats. Players no longer hustle or play as hard, yet the salaries are in the millions. Ticket prices far outpace inflation, and stadiums no longer are designed for people to simply watch sports. They are no longer grungy, unpretentious, and cheap, and I no longer attend.

In 1957, while on a date with Tyrone Power’s ex-wife Linda Christian, the greatest of them all, Yankee Mickey Mantle, sent us a drink over in a nightclub. I asked him and his buddy second baseman Billy Martin to join us. They did and were obviously after Linda. Then I heard Mickey whisper to Billy that I was just a kid, and let’s lay off. I invited them to El Morocco the following week and it was the start of a wonderful friendship. Both Mickey and Billy are now gone, as are the stadiums and my love for baseball. But my father must have known something was wrong, and it took only seventy-some years for him to be proven right.