It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. — A. Bartlett Giamatti, “The Green Fields of the Mind.”
Bay fans bid Say Hey Kid adieu
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Campers,
Let’s go back 70 years for a true story.
Old Sportsman’s Park on Grand Avenue in St. Louis and one of their Street Cars runs down Market Street today and it was a small place that could squeeze in 20,000 for a Word Series and it saw a numbers as the Cards are second behind the Yanks in total won and the players used to finish the game and go across the street to the bar and drink with the fans and there were no parking lots so it was closer to the People and Babe Ruth once hit a ball over the right field wall and across Grand Street and broke out a Second Story Window in the Y.
So, the Brewery always expected to lose money and kept bleacher tickets at a buck for about twenty years in a row and that’s where I saw Willie in his Prime.
The man was so strong and quick that he could start at the back of the batter’s box and end up at the front to hit a curveball before it broke.
You heard what I said and you may have had to watch lots of ball and played some to realize that you don’t ‘run up’ on major league pitching cause it’s too damn quick.
Mays did.
Ray Sadecki was pitching for the Cards and don’t get me into the story about his trade to the Giants and we got Cepeda but this is about Mays.
Sadecki throws a big breaking curve that Mays runs up and hits over the left field wall of the stadium before it breaks.
Starts lumbering to 1st base and ump calls him back.
Timeout had been called but neither Mays nor Sadecki noticed it.
W/out so much as a whimper at losing the homer Mays steps back into the box.
Sadecki throws another big breaking curve and Mays runs up on it and hits it over the left field wall of the park in the same place.
Giants always packed the Park in St. Louis no matter what city they were representing.
Because of Willie Mays.
Go Giants !!
h.
Why our ballpark hasn’t been called Willie Mays Park since day one is beyond me……maybe just maybe it’s time….