When I was three years of age my father underhanded the first ball to me, armed with my first bat, in a little fenced-in enclosure across the driveway from our house on Division Ave, Millington, New Jersey I do not recall the type of ball or bat used. Perhaps I was wielding a broomstick for a bat and he pitched a simple rubber ball. Or, as he was handy, he may have made me a bat. But I do recall how the ball shot off the bat after what were no doubt several swings and misses. My initial exhilaration is preserved in my memory— the first memory in my life and our short few years in that little Cape Cod-style home. My two younger brothers and I, all born in the spring a year apart between 1948 and 1950, spent our earliest years there before moving to a much larger house in 1953 upon the death of my great-grandfather, who bequeathed the house to us through his son, our grand father.
There were other memories from Millington. I remember my parents were strict in enforcing a bedtime of 7:30 to our great annoyance. We recited the old children’s prayer every night before bed: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” One day at four years of age I ran away but not purposefully. I was just wandering and curious. I took an extended walk because it felt natural to me. I remember my mother’s hysteria when I returned after half a day exploring the frontier beyond my back yard, a vast overgrown tract of idle farmland (soon to be developed) with a small creek that ran through it.
There was the day we three brothers commandeered my visiting uncle’s station wagon while he was visiting my parents inside the house. My brother Dav was in the driver seat where he could not have possibly seen over the dashboard and unknowingly pulled the shift stalk out of park. The car rolled down the hill where it crashed into a set of metal swings. I was in the back seat when the car began to roll. In a panic I escaped out a back window, scraping my knees and elbows as I hit the driveway.
We were children, We misbehaved. Once I decided I was old enough to self-administer a haircut which earned me a shaved head at the local barber shop.
But swinging that long-lost baseball bat for the first time is my most prized memory from those days. It was my initiation into a life with balls— any ball that was available. In my future were all kinds: baseballs, tennis balls, wiffle balls, footballs, basketballs, dodge balls, volleyballs, ping pong balls, softballs; even balls you don’t chase: bowling balls, medicine balls, pinballs, bocce balls, golf balls. I’ve thrown, dribbled, shot, caught, spiked, rolled, bumped, set, dinked, driven, putted or batted each of them as required— let me count the ways! All this in the pursuit of pleasure in sport. I never wanted for pleasure in sport. Yes, there was some pain along the way, but that was always a pittance compared to the fun that came with it. There is always an abundance of tragedy, loss, disappointment, failure and regret in life. Fun is an antidote for that.
I refer to playing sports with a ball generally as “chasing the ball.” Of course in competitive sports you are not always chasing the ball. Sometimes you are driving it, shooting it, throwing it, carrying it, protecting it, dribbling it, kicking it, dinking it, slicing it, hooking it, spinning it, passing and catching it. Metaphors are often imprecise. The fact is that you are always interacting with it so you or teammates might manipulate it to score points or gain some advantage for yourself or your team. The ball is the focal point of most sports. Its movement dictates the action in team sports. In a way you are chasing it, or someone with it. At miniimum you need to follow it. You need to know where it is.
Our lives would be radically different without balls. They would be decidedly less joyful.
My father was an accomplished sportsman himself. He had been a sprinter, baseball player and football player at Wardlaw School in Plainfield, N.J. He was an experienced fisherman and hunter. His enthusiasm for sport was at its peak when at the age of 20 he married my 18 year-old mother, who was herself very athletic as a drum majorette and a springboard diver. (Her mother refused to let her be a cheerleader because their skirts were too short.) She had a brother who was a New Jersey state wrestling champion. I was born a year after their marriage and was bathed in the waters of their youthful love of sport. I am grateful to them for that gift.
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In 1951, my sister Sarah was born. In 1953 my mother was expecting another child when my father’s grandfather passed away, leaving vacant a large craftsman-style house on Valley Road in Watchung, N. J. My great-grandfather had built the house in 1909 and raised his six children there. One of them was my grandfather, his only son. My great-grandfather was a man of some note. He was a Baptist minister to the congregation at Madison Avenue Baptist Church in New York City and also a columnist and editor at Leslie’s Magazine for a time. He later won a seat in Congress in 1924 and represented his district in New Jersey for 28 years until his death at 83 in 1953. He was a member of the American delegation that wrote the United Nations Charter at the founding of that institution in San Francisco in 1945.
At the passing of his father Charles Aubrey Eaton, Charles Aubrey Eaton Jr sold the ten-bedroom house to his son, Charles Aubrey Eaton III, my father. In the end, four generations of Eatons lived in that house and three generations of children, twenty in all, were raised there or on houses built nearby on the property. The estate covered 400 acres in its original configuration. My great-grandfather when he was not publishing or ministering oversaw a dairy farm there for many years and also a woodworking shop.
The front yard of Sunbright (as the house was called) facilitated our growing devotion to baseball. it was nearly the size of a Little League field. It had a four small maple trees lately planted in the middle and a row of conifers along the street, but for the little Eaton boys it was perfect. We would spend entire days playing a cramped form of baseball. You had to contend with a small maple tree to make a catch on occasion, but we made due. Soon we had friends up and down the street who would join us.
My father inherited my great-grandfather’s study mostly intact in the new house. It was at the end of a long hallway that meandered past 7 bedrooms. I suppose his father had removed a few cherished items, but there was probably an attempt to preserve the space in memoriam as it was. My great-grandfather had a doctorate in theology and was well-read in other subjects so the study was lined with shelves weighted with books collected over many decades. There were so many books that two sets of shelves had to be built that lined both sides of the section of hallway leading to the study,. The room was large, probably 20 feet square, had a fireplace (one of five in the house) and two closets which expanded outside the square. One of the bookshelves was hinged and could be pulled out to reveal secret shelves in the wall behind. The room had a large elegant desk in the center with a console table at its back that displayed a collection of hand-carved smoking pipes. My father was a gun collector; the room overflowed with shotguns, rifles, old muskets and at one time a light German field machine gun he had purchased after World War II that was illegal to own. Over the fireplace was a large, early 1900s photo of my great-grandfather playing golf with John D. Rockefeller who had been a parishioner of his at Euclid Avenue Baptist Church in Cleveland before Doc Eaton (as he was known) was hired as pastor at Madison Avenue Baptist in New York City.
But what drew me to the study in the mid-1950s was something else that had been newly introduced by my father. He had collected baseball periodicals all through the 30s, 40s and early 50s as a boy and a young man. There was a a whole shelf of Who's Who In Baseball and similar competing periodicals. My father grew up a New York Giants fan but also closely followed the Yankees who eventually became his favorite team after the Giants left for San Francisco in 1957. He was born in 1927, the year Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs. His favorite players were Mel Ott and Carl Hubbell, who were, like him, left-handers. When I wasn’t outside playing baseball, I was a fixture in the study pouring over the annual compilations of major league statistics and the handful of photos in each issue. I dreamed of having my name and statistics in one of those periodicals one day. If I was lucky and won the Most Valuable Player award, I would have my photo enshrined in print! As Thoreau said, “Dreams are the touchstones of our character.”
My first year in organized baseball was not in the nationally incorporated Little League which was new but not fully established in the 1950s, but in what was called the North Plainfield Small Fry League. The Borough of Watchung was loosely connected to adjoining North Plainfield. Until 1957 when Watchung Hills Regional High School opened, students from the Borough of Watchung went to North Plainfield High School. A Small Fry League was created in both North and South Plainfield in the early 1950s because, apparently, the organizers didn’t want to be constrained by some of the rules in the Little League charter. The Little League organization was created in Williamsport PA in 1939 and not incorporated until 1947. Why North and South Plainfield didn’t initially join Little League is unknown. Perhaps they didn’t want to pay membership fees. I found some background information on the North Plainfield Small Fry League in the 1950s, but there is ample information on the one in South Plainfield (founded in 1953), on the internet.
My father was a friend of Rodney Ford, the coach of the Watchung team in the Small Fry League, and convinced him to let me join the team in 1957. I believe I was the only 9 year-old on the team. Most players were between 10 and 12 years-old. We were called the Dodgers and had Dodger blue t-shirts and blue and white hats. There were three Dodger teams from Watchung: an A, B, and C team. Rodney Ford coached the B team. All the other players my age were on the C team. I remember very little of that year and probably didn’t play much. I do, however remember that I was allowed to pitch in one game and my father shot a photo of me in action with a small Brownie camera. That same evening we went to Muhlenberg Hospital in Plainfield to visit my mother, who had just given birth on June 1st to her 7th child, a boy named John. He was named after the first Eaton to come ashore in North America circa 1640.
The following year in 1958 at age 10 I began to play regularly for the Dodgers B team. I was the third baseman, a position for which my father believed I was suited. I was not as good as most of the older boys, but I got better as the season progressed. In the championship game that year against the undefeated Reds, we fell behind 7-0. I got up in the fifth inning (of seven) and hit a three-run homer that ignited a nine-run inning which eventually resulted in a victory for us by the score of 16 to 9. For this I achieved some small notoriety in our little town of Watchung (population roughly 2000 at the time). We had beaten most if not all the North Plainfield teams in the North Plainfield Small Fry League.
The Courier News regularly carried cute little box scores for our games. 1958 was the first year my brother Dav (his preferred spelling) played in the Small Fry League. In my research I found a little box score that described his first outing as a left-handed pitcher:
I was the catcher in this game for the first and only
time in my life. I'm guessing my father thought Dav would feel more comfortable in his first game if I caught him. He pitched pretty well for a small 9 year-old by
throwing three scoreless innings at the start of the game and then
hanging on for a 9-6 win.
In 1959, my final year in the Small Fry League, I dominated as a pitcher. I had grown larger than many of those my age and was stronger. I won 4 games and lost 2. My four wins included three one-hitters and a no-hitter. I have no recollection of how well I might have hit. I just remember striking out a lot kids on other teams. I had developed a curve ball courtesy of a friend and neighbor named Pete Scott who was a grade ahead of me and had pitched many games for the Watchung Dodgers in previous years. We also played together in grammar school and later in our Pony League and high school teams. I had another year of eligibility coming up in 1960 but disaster struck and I was unable to play. More on that later.
l always carried the statistic of having thrown three one-hitters and a no-hitter in the 1959 season. I wondered at times if I had made it up. So I consulted old copies of the Courier News and found this at least partial verification:
Apparently it was a four-inning game. It probably got too dark to play because our 12-run inning in the second took a long time,
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In 1960-62, I was in the seventh and eighth grade at Watchung Borough School, which had recently built a new wing with a gymnasium, a remarkably well equipped shop and several new classrooms. It was an elementary school at the time that served kindergarten through 8th grade. In fifth and sixth grade we competed against a few other teams from Berkeley Heights and North Plainfield. In 7th and 8th grade more serious competition against other schools in Somerset and Union County was scheduled. We played flag or touch football, basketball and baseball. At one point soccer was added. I played them all. I couldn't stop chasing the ball.
My first genuine coach in my three favorite sports in scholastic athletics—football, basketball and baseball— was a sixth grade teacher named John Tierney. He was a big, muscular man who had been an all-state athlete at Plainfield High School in the 1940s and three-sport athlete at Lafayette College where he attended on an athletic scholarship. He was a veteran of the Korean War. I did not know any of this when he began coaching me circa 1958. He was an intimidating man then, quick to anger if you were not learning as quickly as he wished. He had a reddish face that got even redder when he got angry. He chewed tobacco and spit regularly on the baseball and football field. During indoor basketball, he spit in a cup. At first I was afraid of him but eventually overcame my fear. I was improving quickly and I could tell he thought i might become a good athlete. When he yelled I just accepted it and tried to do better. It seemed natural at the time. Authority had its privileges. The country had been widely militarized in the previous decade and the drill instructor mindset was considered normal. Discipline was a way of life.
Coach Tierney was one of those men who knew the value of listening and following instructions. His service in a war where such discipline could save your life had no doubt impressed upon him the importance of rapt attention and obeying orders without question. As I progressed through three years of his coaching I became his best athlete, despite being his worst listener.
Growing up in a house which contained 8 children by the end of 1960 gave me what is now called attention deficit disorder (ADD) but was then described simply as, “doesn’t pay attention,” or “doesn’t listen.” My attention was lured away by pretty much any kind of distraction. Much of what Coach Tierney taught me took several iterations before it fully sank in. He would chide me: “Eaton, you’d forget your head if it wasn’t attached to your shoulders.” Eventually I earned his begrudging respect and by the end of the seventh grade I felt he viewed me as his best player on his football, basketball and baseball teams. That didn’t spare me loud dress-downs but I didn’t mind. It was obviously working. I was becoming confident in my abilities.
Around that time I discovered that as an athlete you were also an actor on a stage. There may be only half a dozen spectators, but you are still performing and people were studying you. The difference between sport and dramatic acting is that in sport you have much more ability to ad lib your performance— to tailor it to changing circumstances. In dramatic acting you have a script you memorize word for word. I know this because in a fifth grade drama staged at Watchung Borough School titled “How Boots Befooled the King” I woefully flubbed my lines in the final scene. Sport doesn’t have a script. In has a game-plan which is adaptable. In my case that was an advantage. I began to enjoy performing for people.
I have occasionally thought about John Tierney In the sixty-plus years since he coached me. He did referee a couple of our high school basketball games and was glad to see me. At times I wondered what became of him, but as I was far removed from New Jersey for most of that time, he fell further back into the depths of memory. In preparing this memoir in the fall of 2025, I decided to look him up to see what became of him. Like a lot of veterans in those days he was a smoker, so it didn’t surprise me to learn he had died. He was born in 1928; my father was born in 1927 and died at the age of 96 in 2024, so the chances of John Tierney being among the living were slim.
I found his obituary after a search on the internet:
John Tierney Obituary
John M. Tierney, 85, passed away on Saturday, July 27, 2013, at Somerset Medical Center in Somerville, N.J. He was born and raised in Plainfield, N.J., and had resided in Middlesex, N.J., since 1961. Funeral services will be held on Tuesday, July 30, 2013, at 9 a.m. at Higgins Home For Funerals, 752 Mountain Blvd, Watchung, N.J., . . .
John attended Plainfield High School and then went on to earn a sport scholarship from Lafayette College in Pennsylvania for basketball, football and baseball. Mr. Tierney served in the United States Army during the Korean War; he was a member of the Middlesex American Legion and a charter member of the Middlesex Elks. John taught sixth grade and history at Valley View Middle School in Watchung, N.J., for 39 years, retiring in 1992. John began his officiating career in 1947 and continued officiating for over 50 years. He was an avid poetry reader and admirable gardener. John was predeceased by his wife, Patricia, in 2001. Below that there were tributes from former friends, players, coaches, family and other acquaintances that added more detail:
Mr Tierney's memory will live on forever for me as the answer to one of those password recovery security questions, "Who was your favorite teacher?" Hands down, after 19 years of education, it was Mr.Tierney. John was one hell of a leader. I enjoyed playing basketball for him
John Tierney was a great man and an inspirational "coach." I knew him most as a basketball official, but when I first began coaching at WHRHS [Watchung Hill Regional High School] he would talk to me about sideline management, etc. And he always asked about the kids who came up to the high school from Valley View. It was always about what was best for the kids. RIP John.
Mr Tierney was a Great Teacher !!!!
john was one of the five best athletes to graduate plainfield high.all state in football,&baseball. worked on the super crews in college football.officiated 2 rose bowls,also 2 army-navy games. worked hundreds of top college games around the country. will surely be missed by many.
I was one of Mr Tierney's students. I always remember the poetry that he taught us. He was a great teacher. Rest in Peace Mr Tierney
John was a unique person. He set a standard for sportsmanship that should be taught to everyone who is at all involved in youth athletics. An outstanding athlete himself, he used the opportunities he had as an official to help the youngsters he was overseeing understand the mistakes he called against them. A true teacher.
This 150th anniversary year of the battle of Gettysburg is significant. John's sense of the importance of the Civil War and his love of the history of America will never be forgotten by his students or his friends.Here's to you John and Patty, dear friends, for lives well lived.
Mr. Tierney was one of my favorite teachers at Valley View. Watchung residents were very fortunate to have him teaching their children. Rest in peace Mr. Tierney. To the Tierney Family,We only knew John as an ump through Friday night softball. He was a man of few words and he always called a good game. He was a gentleman and a gentle man. He will be truly missed by all.
I had the honor of knowing John for almost fifty years. Many stories shared, a lot of long car rides, and a beer or two along the way. Maybe in heaven he will do a game behind the plate. RIP my friend
John Tierney taught me and a lot of other coaches on how to behave on "The Sidelines.” My love and prayers to the Family.
He touched many people. When I knew him he was a gruff and tough young man between the ages of 30 and 34. In the late 50s and early 60s he taught 6th grade and coached sports. When I was 12 years old in 6th grade, he was one of two teachers who taught that grade. There were perhaps 25 students in each class. I had the other teacher, Mr. Davies who was elderly and a rather poor disciplinarian. You spent six hours every school day with your teacher because we didn’t get the benefit of specialty teachers in science, math, and English until 7th grade. I remember my friends in Mr. Tierney’s class had far more respect for him than we did for Mr. Davies. Some were afraid of him and his loud outbursts of temper. I wish now I had had him as my teacher. I might have fared better as I progressed through my high school and college years as a mediocre student.
Like many men with poetry and learning in them, John Tierney it seems aged gracefully. He was an extraordinary man in a seemingly average job, that of teacher. There have been and are millions of teachers and coaches. Most people who achieve mastery and enlightenment are that way because of good teachers. They know the importance of men and women like John Tierney. We worship and endlessly discuss the great professional athletes like Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Larry Bird and others who achieve national fame in their chosen occupations. John Tierney was a lower-tier great athlete who as a coach and teacher devoted his entire life helping his students and athletes succeed. Teachers like him provide the training and inspiration for the well-spring of talented youth who create what we call American exceptionalism in virtually every field. As teachers and coaches, they build the character of America.
As I was the best athlete on the team in grammar school, the boy who could put the ball through the hoop, hit for average or throw a pass for a touchdown. I was honored as most athletic in the class at my eighth grade graduation. Our class sang “No Man is an Island” in unison during the ceremony. Our music teacher, Miss Williams arranged the four part harmony for the song. It was quite beautiful.
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As children growing up less than 40 miles from Yankee Stadium, we fell at an early age under the spell of the New York Yankees, the greatest team in the history of Major League Baseball. Religious devotion to the Yankees was at its peak in the 1950s. Why? From 1921 through 1932, the Yankees won the American League pennant and appeared in the World Series 7 times. From 1936 through 1946, they won the pennant and appeared in the World Series 7 more times; from 1947 through 1953, the Yankees appeared in six out of seven World Series; in the decade between 1955 and 1964, the Yankees appeared in nine of ten World Series, failing only in 1959 when the Chicago White Sox won the pennant. That is a standard of excellence over 43 years that will never be matched by any major league team in the country.
My brothers and I grew up in the latter of those four eras. My father grew up during the second and third. Yankee adulation had been building for decades when I was finally gripped by it in 1955, the year my father took my brothers and me to our first game at Yankee Stadium. It was a Friday night game on July 29th, 1955 against the Kansas City Athletics who had recently re-located to the center of the country from Philadelphia. I will never forget walking through dark tunnels, up concrete steps and emerging into the intense light that illuminated the brilliant green of the vast outfield. Whitey Ford pitched a typically tight game for the Yanks that night as they broke a two-run tie in the bottom of the eighth to win 3-2. Ford gave up only five hits and even drove in a run to aid his cause.
Yankee Stadium, “The House That Ruth Built,” opened for business in 1923. It was voluminous in those days with With the center field wall nearly 500 ft from home plate. Later it was moved in to 461 ft and to 457 ft in left center, still voluminous by today’s standards. And yet you could sneak in home runs down the foul lines where it measured 296 ft to the right field foul pole and 301 ft to the one in left.
My father had been a newspaperman and at the time was working with a public relations firm. He knew a writer from Sports Illustrated who could get us seats in the second row of boxes behind the Yankee dugout. We were sitting there on Saturday, May 9th, 1959 when Harmon Killebrew went 3 for 3, scored 3 runs, hit 2 home runs and drove in 4 runs as the lowly Washington Senators shockingly beat the Yankees 7-0. It was one of the few times the Yankees lost while I was in attendance. I remember that day for another reason; my father as we departed the stadium and likely distracted by the need to make sure he had all three of his sons (ages 11,10, and 9) in tow, bumped hard into Yankee pitcher Bob Turley as he was walking down the tunnel from the bullpen toward the dressing room after the game. We boys were excited by that because Turley had won the Cy Young Award in the American League the previous year.
Yankee Stadium was the Notre Dame Cathedral of baseball. It even had monuments to its saint-like stars in deep center field where balls rarely reached and when they did centerfielders had to circle around the big stones to retrieve them.
The monuments were unique to Yankee Stadium and a testament to the glorious history of the team. They were a graveyard dedicated to greatness without the interred bodies. When I attended games at Yankee Stadium in the 50s and 60s there were only three monuments and a couple of plaques on the centerfield wall behind them. The monuments honored Manager Miller Huggins who died of blood poisoning at age 50, Lou Gehrig who died at 37 of the disease that now bears his name and Babe Ruth who died at age 53 of lung cancer. Two plaques had been added to the outfield wall behind the monuments. One honored Jacob Ruppert, who owned the Yankees for 24 years and had famously purchased Babe Ruth’s contract from the Red Sox in 1920. He built their first championship teams as well as the Stadium itself. The other plaque honored Ed Barrow, who served as business manager (de facto general manager) of the Yankees from 1921 to 1939 and as team president from 1939 to 1945. He is largely credited with building the Yankee dynasty.
Later, three more plaques were added: Joe DiMaggio in 1999, Mickey Mantle in 1996, both posthumously. In an egregious insult to players like Yogi Berra, Derek Jeter and managers Joe McCarthy (the most winning manager in Yankee history) and Casey Stengel, who once won five World Series in a row, George Steinbrenner who became the prototype for obnoxious meddling owners in sport, was awarded a plaque in 2010—thus proving that money talks louder than baseball prowess. Steinbrenner’s winning percentage pales in comparison to that of Jacob Ruppert’s and the ownership group headed by Del Webb from 1945 to 1964.
My contempt for Steinbrenner, his mouth and his methods led me eventually to abandon my allegiance to the Yankees. In the mid-1970s I moved to Massachusetts and began to root for the Red Sox because they were the home team for all New England and I’ve always been inclined to root, root, root for the home team. Furthermore, my ancestral roots are in Massachusetts. Switching loyalties was not unlike converting from a Democrat to a Republican, which also happened to me in the 1970s. It was an easy decision to make because Steinbrenner was at his most odious in those days and seemed oblivious to the meaning of Yankee cool. It was also true that the Red Sox had a great team that challenged the Yankees during the 70s. (Damn that Bucky Dent!)
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Baseball, it is said, is “an island of activity in a sea of statistics.” Not only did I have my father’s library of previous seasons, I had baseball cards and newspaper box scores to peruse. Although I grew up in a family of literate people and published writers, I mysteriously became more adept at mathematics during my education in public schools. I attribute this to my constant study of baseball’s statistics. To this day I can recite who played in every World Series from 1955 to 1980. Pick a year, any year. 1955? The Brooklyn Dodgers and the Yankees. 1967? The Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals. 1979? The Baltimore Orioles and the Pittsburgh Pirates.
After 1979, my memory fails me, although I now have a pretty good grasp on the accomplishments of the Houston Astros since 2016 when I moved Texas, currently my home state. They are the new found home team I root, root, root for. I remember the first summer i lived in a house near the Guadalupe River in Kerrville. There was a sports bar perched above the river. I had only been in town for a couple of months when it became clear that the Houston Astros whose home field was a three hour drive from Kerrville, were fighting for a spot in the playoffs. I went down to the bar on an evening in late August to watch a game they were scheduled to play. To my amazement, the patrons were watching a Dallas Cowboys exhibition game. No one had thought to turn on the Astros game which should have had infinitely more meaning than a Cowboys exhibition game to local sports fans. **********
In grammar school I was a competitive card flipper, a game for which you didn’t need a ball. You would flip and sail your baseball cards on the flat against a wall. The idea was to see who could get closest to the wall. It was a cutthroat sport at Watchung Borough School, one you played before school started and after the school day ended. You could win a lot of other boys’ baseball cards if you were good. That way you didn’t have to spend five cents for five cards and sheet of bubble gum at the confectionery store, in the futile hope to get a Mickey Mantle card. (I swear the card manufacturers printed fewer Mickey Mantle cards than any other to keep you buying.) You could build a collection for free flipping cards. Flipping them, however, did tend to wear out the product. I wonder how many now unimaginably valuable cards in the baseball card market were ruined that way. Cards like Willie Mays’s most valuable card, his 1951 Bowman rookie card which recently sold for $391,000.
My parents fed my appetite for baseball statistics, probably because my monk-like devotion to the material in my father’s study made me quieter than my noisy brothers and sisters. In 1960, they gave me The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball, Revised Edition, a book as big as a Bible. It was inscribed by my mother: “To Dougie, with love. Christmas, 1960, Mummy & Daddy.” It’s a beautiful book in its way and I still use it as a reference. In it I learned such trivia as this entry for Billy Martin:
Alfred Manuel Martin (Billy)
(Real name Alfred Manuel Pesano)
It seems that Martin’s actual father was a man of Italian dissent from the Canary Islands.
Below it were his stats and information for the years 1950-1958. For example, an entry for 1956 read:
Yr: 1956, Cl [club]: NY, League: A, Pos: 2,3,S; G: 121, Rec: .264
A few years after I received the book it dawned on me that the book was useless if I wanted to know stats from the seasons that came after 1958, most importantly the season just concluded. I had to rely on baseball cards for that since if my memory serves, my father had stopped buying the annual issue of Who’s Who in Baseball. As the father of what would eventually become nine children, he had other more pressing concerns.
Most astonishing of the stats in the Baseball Encyclopedia are those for Babe Ruth, or as he is described in the Encyclopedia, “George Herman Ruth (Babe).”
Like his modern counterpart Sho Shohei Ohtani, Ruth was both a pitcher and a fielder, in his case a right fielder. Shotani, when he’s not pitching is usually a designated hitter. Who is, for his time, the better player? One way to determine that is to compare their best seasons with one another.
For Ohtani: In 2024, Ohtani played in 159 games, had a batting average of .310, drove in 130 runs, hit 54 homers had 99 extra base hits, a slugging percentage of .646 and an OPS of 1.036. He stole 59 bases.
For Ruth: The Babe’s best season was arguably 1921 when he played in 152 games (every game the Yankees played that year), batted .378, drove in 168 runs, hit 59 homers, had a slugging percentage .846 and and OPS of 1.359. He stole 17 bases and holds the modern record of 457 total bases and also the modern record for extra base hits with 119.
The only player ever to equal or exceed Ruth’s 1920 or 1921 season in important categories was Barry Bonds in 2001 when he hit 73 home runs and had and OPS of 1.379. If Ruth had access to the same performance enhancing drugs that Bonds was ingesting or injecting, he would have crushed Bond’s statistics-- proof that Ruth was the greatest hitter in the history of baseball, at least for that season. To put it in perspective, consider this: In the previous season, 1920, Ruth hit 54 home runs obliterating the previous record of 27 hit by Ned Williamson in 1884. *********
I attended what might be called worship services at Yankee Stadium Cathedral at least 20 times in the years between 1955 and my graduation from college in 1970. I was there on several historic occasions including Old Timers’ Day in 1965 and 1966. Old Timers Day is a tradition that dates back to 1947 at Yankee Stadium when the first one in Major League Baseball was held. It is the only such event in the Major Leagues that has been celebrated every year since then except during the covid epidemic Former stars of the team were invited back annually to play a short game against selected old timers from other teams. I have read several accounts of Old Timers Day, 1965 in my research and many of them contradict each other or do not match my memory. What they all get right is that Joe DiMaggio hit a grand slam home run in his second at bat that day, albeit with some shenanigans by professional clown Al Schacht and others on the field. In some accounts, Schacht was pitching to DiMaggio. In others he was umpiring in his inimitable way behind the plate. One account says that when DiMaggio hit a foul ball that was caught by ex-Cincinnat Red catcher Jim Hegan, Schacht ruled it “an illegal catch” In this account Dimaggio reportedly then hit a grand slam home run to left field.
My recollection is that Schacht was umpiring behind home plate and to say he was clowning it up would be understatement. This had been his job for several decades and he had mastered it. He was genuinely funny. Former Giants outfielder Monte Irvin, who was Willie Mays’ mentor in the first two seasons Mays was with the Giants (1951-52) and a stellar outfielder in his own right, was playing 3rd base for the National League All-stars
In DiMaggio’s second at bat, I do not recall Jim Hegan catching a foul ball hit by DiMaggio, but it could have happened. I do recall he hit a foul pop-up on the first pitch in the vicinity of 3rd base where Irvin glided under it, caught it and then purposefully dropped it, which endeared him to the fans, many of whom had fond memories of him when he played with the Giants in New York and was Willie Mays’ protector in Mays’s early years in the league. On the next pitch in the 3-inning game, DiMaggio hit a long, looping fly to left-field that landed just past the short porch wall of the left-field stands. The minor blast ignited the passion of his many fans in attendance, some of whom had seen him play hundreds of times. The crowd roared at full volume and the ever-ready Yankee organist played a bouncy rendition of Auld Lang Syne as DiMaggio rounded the bases and tipped his cap to the crowd between third and home plate. Grown men were wiping tears from their eyes.
A year later, I went again to Old Timer’s Day on July 23rd, 1966. The Yankees had fallen to their lowest level in half a century, but the faithful were still there. I have searched Grok and Chatgpt to find information on that Old Timer’s Day Game, which was a 25th anniversary celebration of the 1941 Yankee team on which DiMaggio had hit safely in 56 straight games, but I found very little. DiMaggio played centerfield for the last time in the game that year and hit a hard drive to the gap in left-center that went to the wall near the 457 foot sign. He then trotted easily into second base with a double, which would easily have been a triple or home run in his prime. The day also provided another fond memory: Mickey Mantle, in the regularly scheduled game with the Los Angeles Angels played after the Old Timers Game, hit a grand slam home run off Marcelino Lopez, a gift to his many fans as he edged into retirement in one of his last seasons. The roar of the crowd equaled the one that followed DiMaggio’s majestic blast.
The most magical of all my visits to Yankee Stadium occurred quite by accident— an accident in which I broke my wrist which caused me to miss the Small Fry League season of 1960. In the front yard of our home there was a splendid old magnolia tree that lushly bloomed every spring. It had a canopy roughly thirty feet in diameter. It had been pruned several times over the years because the branches would grow out and touch the ground. One day I climbed up to the middle branches of the tree, which was probably 30 feet tall. I had a rope. My goal was to attach the rope to an upper branch and slide down to the ground. I foolishly attached the rope to the thick branch I was sitting on, wrapped it twice around my wrist and jumped off. My weight cause the rope to snap my wrist and I went into free fall. I hit my head on the trunk and was holding it with my right hand when I noticed that my hand was dislocated from my wrist. Hours later, it was set in place and encased in a plaster cast that went from my knuckles all the way up to my shoulder.
My accident happened in early April of 1960 in what would have been my fourth year in the Small Fry League. Earlier in this narrative I noted I didn’t play Small Fry League in 1960. The accident is why. Nor could I swim. I had to wear the cast for ten weeks, which prevented me from playing organized baseball that summer because the Small Fry League ended in June. My father still coached the team that year and my brother Dav was on it. In my helplessness, I did the only thing I could: help my father coach. At home I played waffle ball swinging the bat with one hand.
There was a boy on the team named Jimmy Hecox. He was not a very good player, but my father worked with him and made him better. His father, Colin Hecox must have appreciated the effort we put into improving his son’s game. He also must have sympathized with me because my broken wrist prevented me from playing the game I loved. One day at one of our games he told me he had an extra ticket to the Major League All-Star game to be played at Yankee Stadium on July 13, 1960 and invited me to go with him and his son. I enthusiastically accepted.
From 1959 through 1962, the Major League Baseball scheduled two All-Star games per season, each scheduled a day or two apart. The extra revenue was meant to help boost the Players Association and its pension fund. It was discontinued because it packed too much activity into the three-day break for players and interfered with player availability when the regular season resumed. In 1960 the first game was played in Kansas City on July 11th and the second at Yankee Stadium on July 13th. I watched the first game on television and attended the second in person.
Entering the stadium, I was prepared to root for my favorite Yankees: Whitey Ford, who was to start for the American League, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Roger Maris, and Moose Skowron, all of whom were in the starting lineup. I was quite unprepared to watch and wonder at another star on the National League team who dominated the game and the hearts of most people in attendance. Willie Mays had only been away from New York, where he played from 1951 through 1957 for two and half seasons, but he still had adoring fans in and outside the City who greeted him with unbridled affection. It was not his fault the team had abandoned New York. Willie was aware of the magnitude of the moment and made the best of it. How? He took over the game.
The buzz of the crowed turned to a roar when he stepped out of the dugout in the first inning to lead off for the National Leauge. They rose to their feet in adoration. On the first pitch from Whitey Ford, he singled hard to left which elicited another roar from the crowd. Bob Skinner singled Mays to second. Then, with Hank Aaron at the plate, Mays “expressed his talent for baseball larceny” as sportswriter Lou Hatter put it and stole third base on Ford and Berra. But Yogi avenged the theft on the next pitch when Skinner took off for second and Yogi faked a throw to second which caught Mays moving to steal home. This resulted in a run down and Mays caught stealing. Mays had single-handedly and chaotically enlivened the game within minutes of its inception.
In the second inning, Ford gave up a base hit to Big Joe Adcock who then scored on a home run by his teammate Eddie Mathews, giving the NL a 2-0 lead.
It would be difficult for the rest of the game to match the electricity of the first two innings. but in several instances it did. In the third inning Mays hit a line-drive home run into the left field stands off the beleaguered Whitey Ford. The crowd was awestruck— some over the horrific unraveling of Ford’s All-Star outing, but most over the power, petulance and brilliance of Mays who had returned to New York on a mission. People were shaking their heads in disbelief over both.
Later in the game, the crowd began buzzing again as Stan Musial left the dugout for the on deck circle as a pinch hitter. He was announced and received a respectful ovation. Musial, who retired in 1963 with a lifetime .331 batting average, was well-known in New York because he had played there frequently against the now departed Dodgers and Giants. The New York crowd respected his accomplishments. On this day he earned even more respect by pinch-hitting a solid home run into the right field bleachers.
Not long after that, Ted Williams was announced as a pinch hitter for the American League. He promptly hit a line-drive single to right that thrilled the crowd. He got a standing ovation as he was removed for a pinch runner. He too had earned the respect of New York fans over the years.
The home run in the the 3rd inning at Yankee Stadium gave Mays the distinction of being the only man to hit for the cycle in a single All-Star year. He did it two games in 1960, but he did it convincingly. He hit a triple, a double and a single in the game at Kansas City on July 11th and then hit a home run and two singles In New York on July 13th. I had watched the game in Kansas City on black and white TV two days before and now I watched in person as he dominated the game in New York.
He played the entire nine innings at both ball parks, which was an accomplishment in itself considering it was record 100 degrees hot in Kansas City and a humid 88 in New York. He recorded six hits in eight at bats in the two games. He always put special effort into All-Star games because he knew he had a national audience and wanted to prove the National League was a superior league. He once said he and Aaron and Roberto Clemente had together requested to be allowed to finish each All-Star game they started because they wanted to be available in case the AL staged a late inning comeback. If I interpret his statistics correctly, it appears that Mays played the entire game in every All-Star game from 1955 to 1969.
The Yankees, my heroes, performed pitifully in the two All-Star games of 1960. Mantle, Maris, Berra, Elston Howard, and Skowron combined for a total of 3 hits in 19 at bats. Skowron got two of them and Mickey just one. On July 13th, the AL was shut out at Yankee Stadium, 6-0. Mays was right. The American Leaguers were inferior in those days.
It became clear to me on that day in Yankee Stadium that Mays was the most dynamic baseball player since Babe Ruth. He was electric. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. He radiated peak energy. His enthusiasm was unmatched by any other player. It may have been the venue and the occasion of his return to New York, but his performance that day convinced me he was the greatest living player or would turn out to be at the end of his career when the statistics and his impact were looked at in hindsight. I had somewhat lost track of him after he left New York for San Francisco. I had worshipped him before then although he wasn’t a Yankee. Those were the days of “Willie, Mickey and the Duke (Snider).” All three were deserving of respect if not adulation. Now my interest in Mays was re-kindled. I followed the remainder of his career closely. The best was yet to come. He was in his prime and would remain there for another eight years.
Looking back on it in 2025 after all these years, I’ve concluded that Mays was the greatest player who ever lived. Babe Ruth was unquestionably the best hitter who ever lived, but Mays excelled in every aspect of the game. He won a gold glove in 12 straight seasons playing in the constant shifting winds of Candlestick Park. (I remember one year when I was living in the Bay Area, circa 1982, the Giants would award those who stayed for an entire extra inning night game with a little orange and black button that was called the Croix de Stick. Only the hardiest of fans would win it. I attended games at Candlestick and played slow pitch softball at night in San Francisco in those years and can testify that the climate was abysmal in the City, but even worse at Candlestick Park.)
In his career Mays counted 7,112 putouts in the outfield, many of them in left and right field although he always played center. He had hundreds more than the next person in the list, Tris Speaker, who retired in 1928. He was the first player to hit 300 home runs and steal over 300 bases. He hit 660 home runs with 335 of them at his home park in the voluminous Polo Grounds (483' to the center field fence) and Candlestick Park where the blustery winds regularly blew hard in from left field. 98 of his home runs were against the Dodgers, the Giants’ bitter rival. Hank Aaron, who hit nearly a hundred more home runs than Willie because he played in friendlier home parks, only hit 95 home runs against the Dodgers.
In 1958, his first year in San Francisco, Mays had not started the season well. San Francisco was Joe Dimaggio’s town and the cognoscenti were taking a wait-and-see attitude toward Mays. In May, the Giants were scheduled to play a four-game series against the Dodgers with two games at Seal Stadium in San Francisco and then two more at the Coliseum in Los Angeles (Both teams’ new stadiums were still in the planning stages.) In that series, Mays hit 7 home runs, 2 triples, a double and two singles. He drove in 15 runs and scored 10. He batted .706 with 12 hits in 17 at bats. In the final game he went 5 for 5, hit 2 home runs, 2 triples, drove in 4 runs, scored 4 runs and stole a base.
That week against Los Angeles may have been Mays’s most explosive hitting streak of his long career. Like most great hitters he would alternate hitting streaks with slumps, although most players would envy his output during slumps. He could beat you in every way: catching fly balls and stealing home runs from opposing hitters, walks, stolen bases, sacrifice flies, hitting behind the runner and other winning strategies.
In the 1960s, Mays continued to do things that defied belief. On September 15th, two months after the All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium, he hit three triples in one game against the Phillies, The third triple that day drove in the winning run in the 11th inning.
On April 30th, 1961, he hit four home runs in one game against the Braves. He was sick with intestinal distress that day and asked for the day off. But during batting practice, a teammate offered to let him use a new bat and Willie loved the bat so much he decided to play.
Two months after he hit the four home runs on June 29th, 1961, he hit three home runs in a game including one that won it in the 10th inning. In his career Mays hit 22 home runs in extra innings. No one has ever hit as many.
On July 2, 1963, both Juan Marichal of the Giants and Warren Spahn of the Braves threw shutouts against each other into the bottom of the 16th inning in San Francisco, a feat that, given the protective handling of pitchers these days, seems incomprehensible. Mays had gone 0 for 5 with a walk in the hard-fought game when he decided enough was enough and hit a home run with one out in the 16th. In the 4th inning of that game, he threw a runner out at home plate from centerfield and later tracked down a long drive to the fence that barely stayed in the wind-blown park. The game lasted 4 hours and 15 minutes. After retiring the Braves in his half of the 16th inning, Marichal tapped Mays on the shoulder and said, “Chico, [they always called each other Chico] I’m spent. I want to go home.” Mays said, “All right. Let me see what I can do.” Then he did what he could do better than anyone else.
Reggie Jackson once said: “Willie Mays could go 0 for 4 and beat you.” Although he didn’t go 0 for 4 that night, Mays proved Jackson’s point on that and many other occasions. In a famous quote, Fresco Thompson, the general manager of the Dodgers said: “Willie Mays’s glove: where triples go to die.” Casey Stengel when in San Francisco managing the Mets in 1963 said he knew Mays well because he had managed against him in many All Star games: “He was a man who looked like he had radar in his glove.” Willie Mays could beat you in more ways than any other player. *********** After missing the Small Fry League season in 1960, I graduated up to Pony League in 1961. That was a league created to allow young
players to play on a field closer to regulation size. (A Little League field had bases 60 feet apart and the pitchers mound was 46 feet from home plate.) Our Pony League was
formed in 1960 and was called the Tri-Boro Pony Baseball League. In the
history of the Pony League which was organized in 1953, I have read
that they increased the distance between bases from the 60 foot standard
in Little League up to 80 feet in Pony League. But in Watchung and
surrounding towns we played our Pony League games at the Major League
standard in which the bases are 90 feet apart and the pitcher’s rubber
was 60 feet, six inches from home plate. The powers that were decided boys from the Watchung Hills area could play on a full-sized field. I suspect that was because all the existing field we could play on were sized to major league standards. The Triboro Pony League included teams
from Warren Township, Stirling, Millington and Gillette. I was again
playing with older players on a field much larger than the one on which I
had performed in Little League. It took some adjustment.
Early
in my Pony League career I have a memory of meeting one of the most
famous players of his time, not so much for his career statistics which
were modest but for one day in which he did something so memorable that
people still talk about it in the New York Metropolitan area as well as
across the nation. Bobby Thompson, the man who hit the “shot heard round the world”
in a playoff game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951 became a
resident of Watchung after his retirement from the game and a neighbor
of my Pony League coach, Red Ford, the brother of my first coach, Rodney Ford. Thompson also volunteered to be the
Commissioner of our new Pony League. He agreed to come to our practice
one day and give us some pointers. This was roughly ten years after he
had hit his famous home run. I was playing second base at the time, a
position he had also played briefly, and he offered to coach me on how
to turn a double play. I was so awestruck to be in his presence that I
don’t think I heard a word he said.
The Watchung team in our Pony League was called the Athletics. We won the league in 1963 against the Warren Township Yankees. Both teams were stocked with players who had competed together on the freshman, junior varsity and varsity teams at Watchung Hills Regional High School. There was a best of three game playoff at the end of the 1963 season. The Athletics lost the first game but won the next two. Ron Peterson, who would become an All-Area pitcher the following year at WHRHS was the winning pitcher in game 2 and Jimmy Higgins, who would make all-Plainfield Area as a running back on the WHRHS football team and All-Somerset as a center fielder on the WHRHS baseball team, shut out the Yankees 2-0 in the final. Here's the boxscore of game 2 because neither of the other two articles on the games had box scores:
In 1962, two years after the All-Star game at Yankee Stadium, I graduated from Watchung Borough School (now Valley View School) and matriculated at Watchung Hills Regional High School. I eagerly anticipated my career as a three-sport athlete there, if not as a particularly accomplished student.
