The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn The Fascination Of Baseball AFTER I TURNED off the wild celebration which transformed steel-making Pittsburgh into a state of delirium. I realized that the...
...If a lecturer or writer can tie in what he has to say to a home run or a foul ball, he feels sure that he can put his thought across...
...There is a special sadness at the thought of the cruel jolt suffered by the jaunty Yankee pilot...
...I realized that the shouting and jumping and back-slapping were not limited to the town where the seventh game of the World Series was played...
...Editors have expressed the hope that this 70-year-old sportsman will remain in the game for another year so that he can retire appropriately on a note of triumph...
...many other men—managers, manufacturers, writers, etc.—make professions of the connected activities...
...And in the individual sports, like sprinting and high-jumping, the records have gone up so high that my breath is taken away every time I see one of the champions perform...
...In trying to answer this question, all I can do is to try to see what has gone on inside my own mind...
...And then the last day repeated the pattern until it might have driven a man wild...
...The players, of course, get a fine life and a fairly good living out of it...
...They saw the same plays—in some respects more satisfactorily than the regular customers...
...First the Pirates were ahead, then the Yankees...
...We, too, once had good hearts, good lungs, good muscles...
...What is it that catches their attention and holds it year after year...
...And whenever I see a home run I picture Babe Ruth steaming chunkily around the field along with the man who is actually there...
...At first thought, this whole affair seems an idiotic business...
...There is another, quite different thing, about baseball...
...It is a source of solid satisfaction to us that spread out over all of these playing-fields there are thousands of young men as good as we ever were—and perhaps better...
...Here are millions of spectators spending their time, enthusiasm and in some cases money on a game which cannot possibly be thought of as an aid to their health or success...
...But those who live from baseball money number only a few thousands...
...Superlatives are amply justified...
...In the first place, the two teams went up and down, back and forth, until the final day, when they were all even...
...If I see a football game on television, it comes to me together with the achievements of the pupils of the mighty Point-a-Minute Fielding H. Yost back at the University of Michigan...
...I suppose all of the men of my age get a good deal of satisfaction out of looking at the sturdy and alert young fellows in our great games...
...In baseball, for example, there are all sorts of signals and cooperative plays that we knew nothing about in the old days...
...I never played football and I was never especially good at baseball when we played it in the cowpasture or in the old schoolyard...
...Perhaps their emotions were less stormily aroused, but in many cases I feel sure that the heartbeats were just about the same...
...Casey Stengel...
...We are a united country...
...Wherever you go in this country, you have a universal subject of conversation...
...Certainly the team games are played more cleverly, more trickily...
...The millions who keep the thing going spend money rather than make it...
...What do all of these people get out of this intense and demanding activity...
...He has a common lingo...
...If I see Bill Virdon make an impossible catch against the wall of Yankee Stadium, pictures begin to rush into my mind of Joe DiMaggio making the same sort of catch against that very same wall a long time ago...
...To me the impressive thing was that millions of people all over the land, people who have never been to Pittsburgh and have never seen a professional baseball game, had practically the same experience as the folks sitting there at Forbes Field...
...You would think that I am old enough to have outgrown the pull of such a youthful sort of game...
...But hiking and canoeing gave me the most fun, and these were individualistic sports far from grandstands and crowds...
...The implication is that Pirate manager Danny Murtaugh and his roustabouts should be ashamed of themselves for interfering with a suitable course of events...
...I was something of a sprinter for a while, and later I took my turn at golf—and was, I suppose, about as good as the rest...
...And so it went until the second half of the ninth inning, with the score 9 to 9. when Mazeroski produced that game-ending home run...
...It was a game to take your breath away and exhaust your lungs...
...He and his team have won so many championships that he seems, in the popular mind, to have a special claim on these honors...
...I suspect that old fellows like me see current sports in a framework of past experiences...
...Here in Delaware thousands of usually reasonable persons went quite out of their minds, and I know well that in New York millions of citizens were stricken with distress...
Vol. 44 • October 1960 • No. 41
