My Dad

It would have been my father’s birthday last week had he been alive. But even though he’s been gone more than half my life, I still think of him and his influences on me.

And now with Father’s Day approaching, that hollowed, empty holiday for those with no parents, it’s time to reflect yet again.

I’ve written about my dad here before, but as I roll the games in my APBA replays – especially the 1965 season I’m doing because we were both alive in 1965 – I wish more and more that he was still here so he could give me perspectives on the seasons.

I felt that also when I replayed the 1947 season. By that year, my father was as sports obsessed as I am now. He grew up in New Jersey and was a huge New York Yankees fan. There was a chance that he could have even heard the last years few of Babe Ruth’s career on the radio at times.  I knew he saw Yogi Berra at games at Yankee Stadium and his favorite player was Joe DiMaggio.

It was my dad who got me into APBA, actually. 

I had been doing the evolution of sports games that we all did. This will age me, but I had a set of baseball, football, basketball and bowling games put out by Pop Tarts. The game, inserted in the box between the pastries, used a deck of cards. The player turned over the cards, using the results printed on the game sheet to play. It was the precursor to APBA, I guess.

Like so many others, I then gravitated to electric baseball and football when I was 7 or 8. My parents got me an electric baseball set for Christmas 1969 and I began doing season “replays” then. The baseball game utilized a magnetic ball and a plastic spring-loaded bat. There was also a spring “arm” mounted atop the centerfield bleachers you could use to throw to bases. The game consisted of loud whacking noises of the bat hitting the metal ball, the arm throwing the ball and the whirring of the game when you turned it on, sending runners vibrating around the basepaths.

That game alone probably was the catalyst for APBA. The noise had to have driven my dad bonkers at night.

So, in 1977, he got me the APBA football game for Christmas. And away I went. I’d toss the dice by hand rather than with the yellow dice shakers that came with the game to spare the clacking noise late at night when I played games.

My dad would come into my room and ask how the games were going. A year later, I got the basketball game and he’d do the same.

Of course, everyone thinks their father was a genius, but I think mine really was. He was a music teacher at Bemidji State University in Minnesota, and he could pick up any instrument, figure it out and begin playing it shortly after. He wrote two books about music theory and history and he loved learning new things. He was an avid reader of classic science fiction and I remember a time when he tried to explain various dimensions to me. I sat blankly as he tried to define what a fourth dimension was.

But despite his vast intelligence, he also laughed at farts and that, I felt, rounded him out totally.

Unfortunately, the only genetic hand-me-down I got from my dad was the affinity for fart jokes.

He died in 1987 after battling Parkinson’s. It was in March, around the time the Minnesota Twins opened spring training of their first World Series winning season. I wrote about dealing with my father’s passing and how that season helped me with the grief for the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2017 for the 30^th anniversary of the Series victory. I received a lot of messages from the newspaper’s readers who worked with my dad, confirming my thoughts that he was pretty special.

Now, as I near the end of the 1965 replay I’ve been doing, I miss my father even more after 35 years of him being gone. It’d be nice to talk to him about how Mickey Mantle and Harmon Killebrew are doing in my replay and how he remembered them in his days.

As I get older, I am becoming more a fan of the history of baseball. I’ll check out most of the library’s books on baseball to read. My dad, I realize, was a library of his own of the older days of sports.

A lot of APBA players probably got their start with their fathers. And now, as Father’s Day is next week, you should take time to talk with your dad about baseball if he’s still alive (demographically, many APBA players are older themselves and their parents may have passed on as well). Roll a game with him.

You’ll be glad you did.