The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn An Afternoon With the Dodgers It was not until I viewed that game from an upper-tier box at Ebbets Field the other afternoon that I adequately appreciated...
...At that game the other day, there was no trace of any sort of segregation...
...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn An Afternoon With the Dodgers It was not until I viewed that game from an upper-tier box at Ebbets Field the other afternoon that I adequately appreciated professional baseball as pattern...
...Millions have been through the chairs—and no one is disbarred...
...As we sat in boxes or bleachers and looked down on the players doing their sharply etched and strictly formalized dances on the field, we were conscious of other hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, who were following the proceedings by television and radio...
...The expanse of blue sky above enclosed the whole great design and seemed to shut out the external world and close in the 30.000-odd onlookers of the afternoon's grave proceedings...
...Below me, the sun burnished the bright green lawn of the diamond and the outfield so that it gleamed a near-yellow...
...This game of baseball, more than most sports, is cushioned in mystery and chance...
...The other day, when the Dodgers went down one-two-three in the ninth and left the score 8 to 7 in favor of the other team, my companion, a big Brooklyn Italian, flopped down disconsolately in his chair with a look of disgust and frustration and murmured: "Tha's baseball for ya...
...But we felt especially fortunate to be the preferred ones at the very heart of the ceremony...
...If a fellow knows Sal Maglie's history or can remember Jackie Robinson's batting average, his fellow viewers will take it for granted that he is an all-right guy...
...The fans had deserted their individual affairs to gather here and attend to a weighty community project...
...People are likely to get the notion that the outcome of baseball games is determined by which organization has the most money or the smartest manager...
...That is the final word...
...The night before, the Dodger heroes had beaten their rivals by a score of 4 to 2. The ten people in our two boxes lightly assumed early in the proceedings that this victory would be repeated...
...The tiny dots of blue, white, yellow and red amalgamated into a mixture richer than any color in the spectrum...
...If the game is played in Brooklyn, most of them talk that rich over-the-river lingo...
...Among the onlookers, the races vied goodnaturedly in shouts of criticism and encouragement...
...Long before I reached the field...
...All the reasons which are given sound silly...
...On the diamond, Negroes and whites performed equal deeds of valor and received equal plaudits...
...Some of my superior friends would say that Henry David Thoreau would never have approved of it...
...Some few, of course, are upper-class...
...Before the game began, five colored men and five whites in adjoining boxes were talking, joking, exchanging bits of information about the players...
...I have been watching them since the time of Cy Young and Christy Matthewson—and I haven't the least notion why some teams win and some lose or why one team will win today and lose tomorrow...
...In a general way, of course, the spirit of the players is important...
...This is a sort of enormous masonic order...
...At the end of the day, the score was 8 to 7 in their favor...
...You are there with the thousands...
...But soon the boys from Milwaukee had four...
...I felt the minds of my friends and persons I met along the way straining toward it...
...Beyond home plate stretched two great parallelograms of kaleidoscopic colors composed of thousands of shirts and blouses...
...I know all the arguments against this mass recreation, this professionalized sport...
...There is another aspect of baseball which we Northerners have taken for granted but which can bear pointing out in these troubled times...
...One player was run down between second and third, and a Milwaukee player let a sharp grounder sizzle between his feet...
...At the start, there was promise of this happy result...
...These champion players made some plays which reminded me of things I saw when our village boys used to play on the nearest pasture lot...
...The Yankees win, partly, because they expect to win...
...At a baseball game, everyone carries his credentials with him...
...and this year, with practically the same players, they can barely crawl to the top of their league...
...The game which I saw was played by the Dodgers and the Braves, the as-of-now almost even contenders for the championship of the National League...
...But last year the Dodgers tramped roughshod over everyone...
...For the time being, all are held together by the talk which preceded the game and by the flashing deeds of the heroes on the greensward below...
...There is, as Walt Whitman testified, a deep satisfaction in losing oneself in the mass...
...From my point of vantage, I was looking down on first base...
...The great majority are real, basic folks...
...would have gloried in forming a pattern along with massed thousands of the common people...
...The Brooklynites, last year's world champions, galloped across for three runs in the first inning...
...But another great champion of the individual—and one who once lived not far from Ebbets Field...
Vol. 39 • October 1956 • No. 40
