Thinking about the character of the quintessential American male of the first three quarters of the past century, I’m acutely aware of a pulse that encompasses and unifies the rhythms of its myriad manifestations… a bridge that spans vocation and varied mien. That pulse—that bridge—is baseball.
I was just recently watching one of my all-time favorite sports documentaries. 1991’s When It Was a Game, the powerful and moving HBO Sports masterpiece written by Steven Stern, presents a telling of MLB history during the period of 1934 through 1957 via 8mm and 16mm home movie films shot both by fans and by the players. The individual homemade films featured in the compilation are in their original color, and their visual clarity and detail are breathtaking. They deliver not only the remarkable mechanics of the game as it was played throughout those most golden of Big League years, and the athletic grace of the men who played it, but the character—the constitution—of those legendary heroes.
The internal makeup of such greats as Lou Gehrig, Bob Feller, Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays, Ted Williams, and many more, as reflected so faithfully in their faces by these earnest and plaintive reels would be sufficient to tell this tale, but the addition of the documentary’s audio component adds the bat-on-ball crack that, for me, launched the masterpiece out of the park. A bolstering musical score and narration by orators (and baseball lovers) like James Earl Jones, Jason Robards, and Roy Scheider set the tone of this great work and serve as both its backdrop and an eloquently-guided tour. But what delivered the audio part of the production from my eardrums to my ticker about a million times faster than a Bob Feller speedball are the segments of recorded remembrances by a number of those Big Leaguers themselves. Holy cow, to watch Duke Snider’s facial expressions on a sunny day in Brooklyn in the early-1950s while his 65-year-old voice cracks in 1991 during his recollection of the cumbersome bulk of the Dodger uniforms, or to hear Enos Slaughter, at 75, recounting, also in 1991, the duties and obligations of a player to both his team and to the game, while he smiles at the camera, tips his Cardinals cap, and passes a hand through his prematurely thinning hair on game day in Sportsman’s Park, c. 1940.
Those voices—The Duke’s and Country’s—and those of so many of their fellow contributing legends featured in When It Was a Game, remembering diamond-hard trials and glories while the camera played across the faces of Major League Baseball of yore, on the blinking of those razor-sharp eyes, on those furrowed brows beneath the bills, on those rakish, gamin grins, on the certitude of graceful, ambling movement that delivered the poetry of a national pastime to an adoring, yearning multitude.
There’s a bandwidth of nostalgia in these films that even today carries my heart and mind far beyond the stands and bleachers, and draws, simultaneously, an inescapable parallel between, and an undeniable convergence of, the character of those men who shaped the game of baseball, and of the men throughout my own life who have in turn shaped me.
My dad, George Stamos, and his brothers, Sam, the eldest, and Pete, the youngest, were rabid baseball fans (as well as Little League players). Growing up in Chicago during the 1920s and 30s, they were faced with the choice of backing one of two home teams: the Cubs or the White Sox. My dad and Uncle Sam sided with the Cubbies, and would ride a series of streetcars from 93rd Street on Chicago’s South Side all the way up to the distal flank of busy Addison Street to pull for Billy Herman, Lon Warneke, and company from within the friendly confines of Wrigley Field. Uncle Pete’s lodestar was Comiskey Park’s pitcher’s mound, and his team was the White Sox. Although his trip to watch heroes like Frank Grube and Luke Appling was shorter, and needed fewer streetcar transfers than a haul up to the North Side, it required not a single ounce less of conviction than my dad’s and Uncle Sam’s. There was an imposing line of demarcation between these two fraternal camps and intense fistfights occasionally erupted among the brothers at points of perceived encroachment.
Paying for streetcar rides and game tickets wasn’t easy during the years of the Great Depression, particularly for young guys like the Stamos brothers. All three kept jobs from an early age, and they used their wages to finance game day outings whenever they could. Although they could’ve easily sneaked in to their respective teams’ venues, they never did. It was important to support their clubs financially as well as morally. Like those great players showcased in When It Was a Game, my dad’s and his brothers’ commitment to Big League Baseball was steadfast, and true.
Commitment. Can a man demonstrate this element of human character more emphatically than proudly and unquestioningly risking his life for his country? Men of the Greatest Generation did this. Bob Feller of the Cleveland Indians did. Joe DiMaggio and Yogi Berra of the New York Yankees did. Enos Slaughter of the St. Louis Cardinals did. Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox did. George, Sam, and Pete Stamos fought in World War II. My dad and my Uncle Sam saw action in the Pacific Theater. My Uncle Pete earned a Bronze Star on D-Day on the beaches of Normandy and was gravely wounded, so he came home with a Purple Heart, to boot. These brothers are the same three who were willing to bleed for their teams in the 1930s. If I were a better writer, I might be able to create for you a seamless synthesis relating, in fancy words, the parallels between human character as it was demonstrated by heroic men both in times of war on the battlefronts, and in times of peace on the ballfields. But I’m not, so I’m simply laying these facts on you and once again directing your attention to When It Was a Game. The players you’ll watch and hear there will pull it all together for you. You’ll sense the pulse, and you’ll feel the solidity of that bridge beneath your feet. You’ll understand commitment.
When It Was a Game wasn’t a standalone production. When It Was a Game 2, also written by Steven Stern, followed in 1992 and expanded the years of its coverage to 1928 through 1961. The third and final installment, released in 2000, and again by Stern, focused entirely on MLB’s evolution through the 1960s. The production values and format of the first When It Was a Game continue in these two subsequent works, and 2 and 3 are each just as powerful a testament to the character of the men who played the game as the original. And it was, in fact, in the late-1960s (maybe ‘69—but more than likely 1970—still, close enough, I think) that I had the honor of not only being on the receiving end of two separate demonstrations of that legendary Big Leaguer character, I also got my first real sense of the almost mystical unifying power of baseball as it stitched together, with unbreakable scarlet thread, my childhood understanding of the makeup of the men who played the game, and of my everyday heroes who were my father and his brothers.
My uncle Pete, the Sox fan, one day took me to a home game at Comiskey when I was five or six. His boys were playing the Minnesota Twins. This was an important fact, as I’d received as a gift earlier that year from my older Cousin John (Uncle Pete’s youngest son) his Wilson “Harmon Killebrew” model baseball glove. The fact that his boy’s old glove as now my own wasn’t lost on my Uncle Pete, and he recognized the relevance of this particular game: Killebrew himself, 13-time All-Star and a big leaguer from 1954 through 1975, was the Twins’ third baseman. The gist of the story is this: Killebrew saw me waving my Wilson around during player warm-ups (we had first-row seats not far from the first base line) and he came over, tipped his cap, shook my hand, saw his name on my old Wilson, and asked me if I’d like to see his real signature right there on that glove. I couldn’t speak. After he signed the glove, tousled my hair, shook my Uncle Pete’s hand, and went back to lobbing a hardball around pre-game, the miracle registered with me. And it’s never left my mind. Or my heart. I was in the company of two great men that day in Comiskey Park. There’s a faded autograph on an old hand-me-down Wilson baseball glove that proves it.
Ernie Banks, aka Mr. Cub, Major Leaguer from 1953 through 1971, 14-time All-Star, United States Army veteran, Chicago Cubs shortstop and, later, first baseman, was the most genteel and humble of MLB royalty. He was also a neighbor. At least he lived in the immediate vicinity of my family’s South Side neighborhood while I was a student at Joseph Warren Elementary School, and while his own son, Joey (four or five years older than me), was, too. My folks were at a parent-teacher orientation event on my behalf at Warren one early fall evening (the year was 1970), and Ernie Banks was there, too. For Joey. At the conclusion of the conference’s initial presentation in Warren’s auditorium, my dad spotted Mr. Cub several seats and rows away, nudged my mom, excused himself, introduced himself to the baseball legend, and asked him if he wouldn’t mind signing an autograph “For my boy, Johnny.”
Not only did he sign the autograph for me that fall evening in 1970 per my dad’s request, he asked after me by name when he ran into my folks at the parent-teacher meet-up the following spring, in 1971. “How’s Johnny doing, Mr. Stamos?” Ernie Banks, one of the greatest, most celebrated players in all of Major League Baseball history, remembered my name. And my dad was bursting at the seams to tell me about it. Those meetings between Mr. Ernie Banks and my father—the intersections of the lives of those two great men, with that greatness, precisely in those moments in time, measured only by the size of their hearts, and defined solely by the depths of their character—was recorded in history by the graceful, swooping lines of a very special signature, in black ink, on the blank back page of a grade school parent-teacher orientation pamphlet. And the sport of Big League Baseball, as it existed during those hallowed years, was its catalyst, its backdrop, its pulse, and its bridge.
The character of the men on the diamond who made baseball great during the first three quarters of the 20th century is made of the same stuff as the character of the men who made everyday life in America great at the same time. Heroes to their fans. Heroes to their country. Heroes to their sons. Sometimes, they’re even the same man. I can feel the pulse. I’m standing on the bridge. And I can catch the wave. It’s as easy to field as a lazy pop fly to short center.
—John Stamos is the publisher of The Renaissance Garden Guy (renaissancegardenguy.com)