Apr 2, 2018 3 min read

The Pirates’ home opener is today, and you can almost feel the air being sucked through the Liberty, Fort Pitt and Squirrel Hill tunnels by the collective sigh of fans as they give up all hope. Won’t matter to me who wins: I stopped caring about baseball when the Atlanta Braves’ Sid Bream slid across home plate with the winning run against his former team in the 1992 NLCS.

I suppose that’s because I grew up when what we once called “the national pastime” was something to look forward to, not with dread, but with anticipation.

My greatest baseball memory still is of Bill Mazeroski’s World Series-winning home run on Oct. 13, 1960. Yes, the Pirates have won the Series twice since then, but 1960 was special: the only time a Series has been won by a walk-off home run in the seventh game. I was 11, still young enough that the dual distractions of girls and the Beatles weren’t even on my horizon. Like most kids my age, I’d grown up playing the game with red rubber balls and cut-off broomsticks on asphalt streets with home plate drawn in chalk, or with real balls and bats on sandlots. Baseball was still attractive.

Only 16 teams made up the major leagues when I was a kid. You could memorize the team names and all their players in less time than it took to sing the national anthem. Games meandered along, yet players managed to complete most in around 2 1/2 hours. Maybe that’s because there were fewer visits to the mound by catchers, managers, pitching coaches and passing umbrella repairmen.

Extra innings were exciting, not an endless parade of relief pitching specialists who are paid millions of dollars to throw as little as one pitch per game separated by multiple ads for virility enhancement drugs. Starting pitchers sometimes went more than six innings. My grandfather told me that Warren Spahn of the Milwaukee Braves once pitched both ends of a doubleheader, staying on the mound between games to have dinner with catcher Joe Torre.

Players earned so little when I was a kid that many held down second jobs to help make ends meet. Yogi Berra delivered laundry when he wasn’t set to bat in the Yankees’ half of an inning. Pirates reliever Elroy Face once struck out the opposing team’s best hitters in the top of the 9th on three pitches – his forkball was so slow and tricky that all three batters swung three times each before it reached the plate – and all while still wearing his painter’s overalls after driving his pickup truck in from the bullpen.

Games were played mostly during daylight hours. In blue-lawed Pennsylvania, games not completed by 5:30 p.m. on Sundays had to be completed at a later date. Sometimes people forgot the score and they had to start all over again. Before lights were installed at Forbes Field in 1940, night games were played in the dark while fans held flashlights pointed toward the field. Catchers delivered pep talks to pitchers using two soup cans connected by a string running from home plate to the pitching rubber. Them was the days, Sparky!

Call me stuck in permanent instant replay, if you must.

I won’t argue with the ump on that.