The Yankees as Evil Empire

For days I’ve been putting off this post, but with news of the Tigers trading Pudge Rodriguez to the New York Yankees, I can hold out no longer.

The Yankees are the Evil Empire of baseball, an eternal force against which all others must contend. The Yanks are the archetype of the invincible. If they didn’t exist, we’d have to invent them.

At right is the Yankees helmet my son picked up as a freebie on helmet day at the Big Stadium in the Bronx. It was a day game in 2003, and the Kansas City Royals crushed the Yankees 15-3 or something close to that.

With a pair of free tickets in hand, we took the No. 4 train from Midtown to the ballpark, a total urban experience. I’ve driven to plenty of ballgames and hiked in from parking lots, but for me nothing beats the thrill of riding a train or subway packed with fans to and from the game.

Having spent a good five years working at Rockefeller Center, I’ve soaked up thousands of tabloid baseball headlines on the backs of the Daily News and New York Post. Over the years I’ve formed temporary allegiances to the Mets and even rooted for the Yanks, indulging in a healthy respect and admiration for them and their fans, maybe the most passionate in the game.

So any victory against them — and one is never expected — is all the sweeter.

Below is another view of the Yankees batting cap, and I dare anyone not to liken it to the helmet of Darth Vader.

The Cubs in ‘08: It could be, it might be…

Is this the year for the Chicago Cubs? As the all-star break wraps up, one of the big questions in baseball is whether the Cubs can end their 100-year drought and win the World Series.

To add atmosphere to the frenzied speculation, I present a relic from a quarter century ago.

Cubs cap, circa 1984

I bought this mesh-back cap in 1984 on my first (and so far, only) visit to Wrigley Field. A couple of Chicago-area buddies and I bought standing-room tickets for the privilege of watching from the back of the lower deck seats, behind home plate.

It was the full Wrigley experience that Saturday afternoon as the Cubs played the Philadelphia Phillies. It was the first National League ballgame I ever attended. Mike Schmidt, the Phils’ slugging third baseman, belted a home run into the bleachers. Cubs fans scornfully rejected it by throwing the ball back onto the field. At the seventh-inning stretch, a tottering Harry Caray — “Cub fan, Bud man” — led the crowd in singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

I lived just over a year in Illinois, long enough to absorb the intensity of the Cubs’ rivalry with the St. Louis Cardinals. My first Cubs hat was a wool one, but it was just a bit too tight and I eventually tossed it or lost it. So when I had the chance to buy a new cap at Wrigley a few years later, I jumped at it.

Mesh-backed caps flourished in the late 1970s and early 1980s, ultimately fading away. The first mesh hat I had was almost certainly intended as a fishing cap, but I wore it daily to the pick-up baseball league I played in as a kid in the mid-1960s. The red cap had a crown made entirely of mesh. My teammates called it (and occasionally me) “fly trap” because I learned how to trap flies with it on the bench and on batting helmets.

This Cubs cap is my only remaining mesh-backed cap, although there may be a few stashed somewhere that I’m forgetting. The cap brings back good memories of the Ryne Sandberg/Lee Smith/Rick Sutcliffe era. If the Cubs make it to the series — and I’m not trying to jinx them — I’ll definitely be rooting for them.

A salute to Yankee Stadium

In honor of the 2008 All-Star game that ended early this morning — the last to be played in the House that Ruth Built — I offer this old-style Yankees cap as tribute.

I picked up the cap in New York Chinatown in roughly 2002. It’s one of scores of variations on the classic Yankees ballcap available from street vendors and shops throughout Manhattan. Pink, yellow, green, red — whatever your color of choice, chances are you can find the famous “NY” stamped on a cap of that color.

I picked this one because the tan twill crown and muted navy blue bill give an old-time baseball impression.

Safe at home: The Milwaukee Brewers batting helmet

Milwaukee Brewers batting helmet

Batting helmet. Talisman. Object of veneration.

This plastic replica Milwaukee Brewers batting helmet holds a special place in our family. As we’ve moved about the country, the helmet has come with us as a sort of cornerstone, which bears some explanation.

Silly as it may seem, I was elated to get this helmet at age 22. I was finishing up my master’s degree at Marquette University in 1979 when I went to a Yankees-Brewers game at Milwaukee County Stadium. My friend Larry Muri, a college classmate then at DePaul law school in Chicago, came up for a visit. We sat in right field, where we’d get a good look at Mr. October, the Yanks’ Reggie Jackson.

A Yankees fan from Connecticut, Larry claimed never to have seen the team lose a game. But this night was different. I don’t remember the score, but the Brewers won. And there was much rejoicing in southeastern Wisconsin.

Within two years, I would get my master’s, move to Illinois, get married and move back to Milwaukee. By ‘83, our young family was on the move, to Omaha, Neb. We moved into a rental house in 1984, and it had a small alcove above the fireplace. As we unpacked, I hung the Brewers helmet there to signify that we were “home,” and we’ve kept that tradition up every move since.

Midwest. West Coast. East Coast. West Coast again. The Brewers helmet means “this is home.”

Your (well, mine, actually) San Francisco Giants cap

This orange and black beauty was a freebie I picked up on moving to San Francisco and the Bay Area in 1993. Of all places, I got it at the tony Nordstrom department store in downtown San Francisco, just for trying on a pair of Bostonian dress shoes. I was not shopping for shoes that day, but for a free baseball cap, I’d try on a corset.

The cap was produced right after the Giants reverted to this seriffed logo, which hearkened back to the old New York Giants logo. With or without seriffs, the Giants’ logo is instantly recognizable, bringing to mind* Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, and many others.

While the San Francisco Giants have had few cracks at World Series glory in my lifetime, it’s a time-honored franchise. I saw the Giants often in the 1990s at “the Stick” — Candlestick Park, where the unpredictable bay breezes were as much a factor in the games as was Barry Bonds. Now the Giants play at AT&T Park, the Nordstrom of modern ballparks. The Seattle retailer started out as a shoe store in 1901 just as the American League was getting started. Nordstrom evolved into a department store. For most of the 20th Century, a ballpark was just a ballpark. But for the 21st Century, it must be a shopping mall.

I finally got inside AT&T Park at a game last September, and it was a memorable trip with my son as we took the ferry from Alameda to the game. What struck me on arriving was how many lures the team laid out to separate you from your money. Restaurants, souvenir shops, video games — I was on sensory overload within two minutes when all I wanted was garlic fries and my seat.

While I suppose it’s great to be able to buy Asian fusion cuisine or sample Sonoma chardonnay between innings, just give me a beer, a hot dog and an unobstructed view of the diamond. What matters is between the foul lines.

*Depending on your age, feel free to substitute Will Clark, Robby Thompson and Rick Reuschel.

The Tris Speaker Baseball League cap

For those of us who grew up in Cleveland Heights and University Heights, Ohio, the intertwined “T” and “S” logo of the Tris Speaker Baseball League is a powerful icon. Everyone who played wore the same red and black wool cap.

Here, my Adam’s apple jutting prominently and skinny belt sagging,  I’m wearing my first uniform in 1968. I played for the Red Sox in the Junior American division, and we were one of the top teams. The league in the 1960s manifest the first stirrings of the “don’t hurt the kids’ self-esteem” fad that was to flourish two or three decades later. No official standings or statistics were kept (although I recorded every victory, loss, at bat and error in a small spiral-bound diary). The league’s idea was not to let the players get too big a head for winning or be wounded too much for losing. The season was rife with rumors that top players from the best teams would be traded to the lesser teams to balance things out, although no one was traded to or from our team.

I suspect the caps were uniform throughout the league to save money, but they were nice hats with a partial leather sweat band in front and elastic in the back to accommodate all head sizes.  We had to raise money to pay for the uniforms, and for many years a springtime ritual in Cleveland was for players in uniform to go knocking door to door and ask for donations into a canister emblazoned with the Tris Speaker logo. If you contributed, you’d receive a TS decal to affix in a door window so other players would know not to come begging.

There wasn’t a game when I didn’t dirty my uniform by sliding or sprawling in the dirt. My mother complained about always having to wash it, but I suspect doing so was a labor of love for her, knowing how much I loved to play.

I can’t swear that I thought so at the time, but I’ve long realized the significance of playing on the Red Sox in suburban Cleveland in a league named for the Hall of Fame outfielder who split his best years between the BoSox and Indians. Alas, the CH-UH recreational baseball league appears no longer to be named for the Gray Eagle. I can find no trace of the name on the Cleveland Heights municipal Web site.

I played one year in the junior divison as an infielder and pitcher, and made the all-star team. The next spring at tryouts, I made a spectacular diving catch at shortstop and knew right then that I’d clinched a spot in the senior division. I didn’t realize I was in for two straight years of misery, getting put on a team where the manager’s son played my position, shortstop. The first year I mostly sat the bench and played the late innings, much of it in the outfield. The second year wasn’t any different.

Forty years later, I still think back how much hinged on spearing that one line drive. If that ball were hit to me again today, I’d still go after it. That’s the only way to play the game.

My first cap

MLB replica caps were scarce when I was a kid in the 60’s. They weren’t mass-produced as they are today. I’ll have to comb through the hundreds of slides my father took to find the earliest evidence I can of my wearing a ballcap. I’m guessing I probably had a small-billed cap with a “little league” (pun on small) kiddie outfit when I was a toddler. At one point I had a “wishbone C” Indians’ cap when I was in grade school, but I can’t remember how I came by it.

I do, however, distinctly remember getting my first “real” baseball cap. It was handed down to me by Butch Lowrie, a neighbor and the father of my friend Bobby Lowrie, who lived down the street from us. Mr. Lowrie worked at the Cleveland Press and played on the company baseball team. He gave me one of his Press baseball caps, which quickly became one of my most treasured possessions.

It was the real deal: a fitted wool cap with a leather sweat band. The cap was black with a red block “P” on the front, similar to a Pittsburgh Pirates cap.

I wore the cap everywhere, all day long, so much so that I can remember adults and other kids warning me that if I kept wearing it, I’d go bald. (I did not.)

That cap presaged two of the great loves of my life: baseball and newspapers. I carried the Press for several years in my neighborhood, and I eventually would make newspapers a career. The industry is in lamentable straits today, and I see many troubling signs reminiscent of the last years of the Press. It gamely tried to innovate and then merely to survive before succumbing to The Plain Dealer and the reality of late 20th Century journalism, which pitilessly decreed that only one newspaper could survive in a market.

This 21st Century will likely determine whether any newspaper can survive in any town.

Phillies cap

One of the great things about parenting is getting to coach your kids’ baseball teams. As a result, I picked up an assortment of big-league replica caps over the years.

I got this Phillies cap when coaching my youngest’s team in Alameda, Calif., in the mid-1990s. Despite the occasional crushing in the closet, this cap has retained its shape very well

From this photo you can’t tell the best bit of detail on the cap: the blue button atop the crown. The Phillies have stuck with this script “P” for several decades, although they wavered a bit with a funky 70’s-style “P” for a while.

The modern-era Brewers cap

This is one of my absolute favorites, on a sentimental level.

I bought this cap at Miller Park in Milwaukee while on a business trip with my boss, who was to die unexpectedly some months later. Both of us bought caps that night and roamed the new stadium, checking out the Gorman Thomas barbeque counter and all the other food booths and sideshows that fill modern ballparks.

Having lived in Milwaukee during the Brewers’ American League glory years in the late 70s and early 80s, I still miss their presence in the American League. But I guess Milwaukee always considered itself a National League town, so the team is probably where it belongs.

The cap itself has held its shape very well, even though I wear it regularly while shopping and on morning walks. Although the Brewers have had this style cap for several years, I don’t think it has the instant recognition that the old m/b mitt cap did. The crown jewel of my collection is a Brewers replica batting helmet in that style, which will be featured in a later post.