Swing and a Miss

“Baseball been berry, berry good to me.” —Chico Esculea

I was seven years old in 1954 and I watched part of a World Series game on our television set one autumn afternoon after getting home from school. I believe that to be my oldest memory of baseball.

A year later my father took me to Ebbets Field in Brooklyn and I saw Jackie Robinson get hurt running into a wall chasing a foul ball and a short time later we went to the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan where Willie Mays seemed to cover all three outfield positions at once. A year after that I was in Yankee Stadium with my grandfather for a World Series game in which Mickey Mantle played. The next day Don Larsen pitched his perfect no hitter.

With every passing year I am certain there are fewer of us who can make such a claim to have seen three of the game’s most legendary stars perform in those hallowed but demolished stadiums.

I’m a baseball fan. I played the game into junior high school but lost my position on our team due to a tonsillectomy. I never earned it back after recovering either and have always imagined that the pitchers I was facing had learned to throw real curve balls during the two weeks I was gone.

My interest in the game has ebbed and flowed through the years. I was a big Dodger fan as a kid and then a fair weather Phillies follower for a while. When I moved to Los Angeles in the late seventies and eventually had my own son I could take to the ballpark, I was all in with the Dodgers again.

My work as a producer for ABC News rarely involved covering sports and so in 1998 I was given what I considered a plum assignment when I was told to go to San Diego to watch baseball.

It was the last month of the season and Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs were closing in on breaking the single season home run record of 61 set by Roger Maris.

I’d never experienced a Major League baseball player’s work day before and discovered it involved a good deal more than just the time spent playing on the field. A 162 game regular season had taken its toll physically by September and there was a parade of walking wounded among the Cubs who were on their way to be worked on by the team trainers.

There was also, I sensed, at least one player who appeared injured in another way. He was a relief pitcher, the Cubs’ closer named Rod Beck. When our eyes met as we passed each other in a hallway I think we both thought we’d seen a ghost.

On the other hand Sammy Sosa, the player ABC News sent me to watch, looked in great shape both physically and mentally and to be truly enjoying his heightened celebrity status. Sosa was built more like a football running back than a typical ballplayer.

In fact I noticed another Cub who beside Sosa looked like a tetherball pole. His name was Mark Grace, a team leader, and a few years later when the use of steroids in the big leagues was exposed I remembered him and Sosa and realized I had been seeing the difference between an abstainer and a steroid user in that locker room.

My camera crew and reporter and I arrived hours before game time just like the players and for the three games we watched I took on the role of caterer. At the ballpark in San Diego that was easy duty since we could avoid the usual hot dogs and burgers and get really good fish tacos.

The stadium was at the time one of the regrettable dual purpose facilities (now all but extinct) that were built primarily for baseball but could also accommodate football. This meant some of the seats around home plate and along the dugouts for baseball were moveable when the field was converted for playing football. We were positioned in the photographer’s well just beyond the Cubs’ dugout and to go get the fish tacos I walked on planks on the ground laid under the moveable stands that stretched back toward the Cubs’ locker room.

On one evening while I was walking the planks I spied Sosa off to the side a few yards away with his back to me. I had a policy of never asking anybody for an autograph when I was working but impressing my son got the better of me and I thought to myself, “Well, just this time,” and approached Sosa. In an instant I backed away when I saw Sammy apparently hadn’t wanted to make it all the way back to the locker room to urinate.

Almost a decade later I got another call from the ABC News bullpen to cover a home run quest for baseball immortality. It was 2007 and I was sent to San Diego again. By now, the Padres had a new stadium and the potential record breaker and the record being pursued had both become controversial in the era of suspected steroid use.

On August 4, 2007 I was in Petco Park when Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants tied Hank Aaron’s Major League career home run record by hitting his 755th over the fence in left center field.

Afterward Bonds, not known for his graciousness or congeniality held a news conference. Obviously, I was not a baseball writer who had covered him all season or for all his seasons but I had a question for him nonetheless.

Before the game I had picked up a Giants press kit that included a list of the 754 home runs Bonds had hit up to that night with thorough annotation– Dates, against what team and which pitcher and even the count and the score of the game at the time the home run happened. The first one had been in 1986 and I quickly calculated that when Barry Bonds had rounded the bases after his first homer in the big leagues Ronald Reagan had been president and since then the nation had elected three others.

So, don’t ask why I asked but I did…

“Barry, do you remember who was president when you hit your first home run in the Majors?”

I knew immediately I had blundered. Bonds gave me that, “Who the fuck are you?” look. And he wasn’t the only one.

“I’m not here to talk about the president. I’m here to talk about my home run,” was all he said… Next!

I got back to my hotel and called home. Bonds’ press conference had been carried live on ESPN. My son’s first words cut to the heart.

“Did you ask Bonds the stupid question about the president?”

Three days later I was in the press box again in San Francisco’s AT&T Park when Bonds hit number 756 to right center and I joined what I am sure is by now another dwindling group of people who witnessed both Bonds’ tying and record breaking homers.

I attended his press conference after the game and kept my mouth shut.