One Two Three Strikes Your Out at the Old Ball Game

Growing up in New York, summer meant baseball.  I was fortunate to have lived between Shea Stadium and Yankee Stadium.  My grandfather Morris loved baseball and I remember when he would come to visit us he would bring his transistor radio and we would sit on the back patio and listen to the games together.  He explained the rules.  He listened to the game rather than watching it on TV because he said it didn’t translate well.  I so agree with him. TV cannot capture the excitement of the game. Bottom line, there was nothing like watching a game at the ball park. Morris was a big Brooklyn Dodgers fan and was heartbroken when they left to go to Los Angeles before the 1958 season. He Grudgingly adopted The Mets and so I became a Mets fan.

I was really lucky.  My best friend lived next door and she had two older brothers which I kind of adopted as my own.  Every now and then they would take us to a game at Shea stadium.  I don’t believe I ever thanked you guys for letting me tag along.  It was great.  We sat in the seats in general admission which was way up at the top of the stadium and I loved it.  I thought they were the best seats in the house and here is why.  There was an overhang so if it started to rain we would not get soaked or if it was really sunny there was a little shade.  Also from that vantage point you could see the whole field.  We had young eyes and binoculars.  What did we know? The price of admission was just a few dollars and with a coke and hotdog I was in heaven. 

I usually got to go to Yankee Stadium with a youth group.  Unlike Shea Stadium, Yankee Stadium was in a neighborhood.  I always wondered what it was like to live across the street from the Stadium.  Shea stadium was built in 1964 and the Mets played there until 2008 so relatively speaking it was spanking new when we went to see games in the late sixties early seventies.  The Yankee’s played their first season at Yankee stadium in 1923.  Originally they played at the Polo Grounds but the landlord, The New York Giants asked them to vacate the premises in 1921 when the attendance to the Yankee’s games started rivaling their own attendance.  In walks Babe Ruth and changed the Yankees forever.  So The Yankees bought the land and built the stadium.

The feel of the two stadiums were so completely different.  Even though I went to watch games in the ” modernized”  Yankee stadium, you could still feel the history of the place.  It was almost like there were ghosts wondering around the stadium similar to the ghosts flying around Hogwarts from the Harry Potter books.

I was reading the Sports section on June 30^th, yes I occasionally read the sports section, and there was an interesting article about baseball that I thought you all might find interesting.  I have included the link below for you to read.  One of the points made in the article was that baseball use to be a sport found in inner cities and then one day it just disappeared.  Kids moved to another sport.  I thought to myself how sad is that?  Baseball use to be America’s game, its pastime, and now not so much.  Football the big goliath has quietly taken over.  The kids on the block I grew up on who use to play baseball on the street in the summer have probably been replace with kids who are now playing football.  Baseball wake up and do something.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nationals/youth-baseball-has-rebirth-in-washington-dcs-ward-7/2013/06/28/4f1f170c-e018-11e2-8cf3-35c1113cfcc5_story.html