Birthday 1965

Play enough APBA baseball replay games and you’re bound to roll a game on a date on which you lived.  That’s unless you roll more games from the early eras.  If you’re still alive and remember an actual day in your life that corresponds with a game played on a date in 1919, well then, good for you.

I’ve done several replays in years that I was alive. My first baseball replay was 1998. I also did seasons for 1964, 1974, 1977, 1981, 1987 and 1991.

This time, I’m rolling 1965 and I hit games the other day on the date that I turned 5. It was June 29. My family lived in Madison, Wisc. Then, I was a little over two months from starting kindergarten and, while I was still unaware of baseball at any real level, I knew who Henry Aaron was because I lived close enough to Milwaukee.

I remember my fifth birthday, too. My parents got me a Daniel Boone toy musket and a plastic container that replicated the horn-shaped flask pioneers used to carry their gunpowder.

In the days before political correctness, my friends and I ran around our West Lawn neighborhood playing cowboys and Indians. We’d shoot at anything that moved.  Birds, cats, cars and people. At first I even shot at the nuns who walked near our home each day to their nearby Catholic church until I realized you could go to hell for picking off holy people.

In my replay, the White Sox clobbered the Twins, 9-3, in the first game of June 29, 1965, Don Buford hit a grand slam off Twins’ pitcher Camille Pascual in the second inning and the game was pretty much over then.  In the real life game, Minnesota beat Chicago, 7-6, when Zoilo Versalles hit a sacrifice fly with one out in the bottom of the ninth to drive in pitcher Dave Boswell who came in as a pinch runner.

Milwaukee was in New York, pounding the hapless Mets in both my replay game of the day and in the real contest. Aaron went one for four in my game; he went two for four with a home run in the actual game. Cleveland upset Boston and San Francisco edged Los Angeles, 3-2, in 13 innings in my contests.  In the real games of that day, the Dodgers beat the Giants and the Indians scalped the Red Sox.

The games we play overlap life and it gives a chance to reflect on our own lives.  Here, 56 years later, the act of rolling a few games for that day in 1965 brought back the memories of being a child. I didn’t realize it then, of course, but my entire future lay ahead. My dad was enrolled in the University of Wisconsin pursuing a doctorate in music. A year later, we moved to northern Minnesota when he got a teaching job at Bemidji State University. It was there I learned my obsession of sports, fueled by watching Twins’ games on a Duluth television station. I began playing replays, in a sense, on an electric baseball game my parents got me for Christmas in 1969. (Wait until I do a replay of the 1969 season. Nostalgia will flow freely in this blog then!)

The date links us. On June 29, 1965, I was a 5-year-old toddler taking potshots at nuns with Daniel Boone’s musket. There were no worries, other than the approaching wonderment of going to kindergarten and if rain would limit our playing outdoors.

Now, playing more than a half century later, I’m old and a tad more cynical about life. My knees hurt all the time and I worry about making the house payment on time each month. I just got my second Covid-19 vaccination shot, the same concept as in 1965 when I received a polio vaccination. It’s hard to fathom so much time has passed since that fifth birthday.

I’m the same person, but time has changed things. I’m grown up, but there’s still a spirit of the 5-year-old inside of me at times. Playing these APBA games brings back memories of those earlier days. Days of walking to the nearby Henry Vilas Zoo, of playing  with my friends on the block and taking shots at the line of nuns as they marched along Allen Street.