If APBA baseball game players replay any of the seasons of when they were alive, chances are they’ll come across games on a date that had some significance in their own lives.
Maybe it’s a date that a replayer graduated school, or the
date of their wedding or birth of their child. Maybe it’s their own birth date.
And sometimes it’s an event that, while it may have not seem
that impacting at the time, had been one of life’s turning point and an
important moment when given the advantage of hindsight.
I came across one of those days in my 1972 APBA baseball
replay.
I reached June 30, 1972. And I remembered what I had done on that
actual day.
It was a Friday, a day after my 12th birthday. My
aunt and uncle from Arizona visited my family in Minnesota then and we went to
the Itasca State Park near our home that day. That’s where the Mississippi
River begins its more than 2,300-mile journey through the heart of the
country.
I know this because my father bought me a metal flip
calendar that day. It’s got a drawing of the iconic tree stump at the
headwaters that notifies visitors of the river’s origin. People can flip a
metal box on the upright calendar that contains plates with numbers for each
day.
On the bottom of the calendar is a red label I made back
then with my father’s 3M label maker noting the date I got it.
It’s also the day my aunt bought me Jim Bouton’s classic
book “Ball Four.” It was the white paperback with the picture of a hand holding
a baseball just before throwing a knuckleball. The title is in green capital
letters.
Those not acquainted with the book should immediately go out
and get a copy. It’s Bouton’s diary of the 1969 season when he pitched for the
Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros. On one level, it’s a rollicking look –
complete with cussing a plenty – at a season on an expansion team that was
pretty bad. On another level, though, it was a study of why people act the way
they do; it was a doctrine about challenging authority and questioning it if it
seemed a tad defunct. Don’t accept life the way it is if you see discrepancies
in it, Bouton says.
At 12, I didn’t realize the great significance of the book;
I giggled at the curse words and enjoyed reading stories about players I
watched on the baseball field.
Later, I read it more for content and now think it had a
major impact on the way I grew up. Sure, I had my parents’ upbringing, but
Bouton’s words made me think for my own albeit with a bit of paranoia and distrust. Now, more than 50 years later, I still
own the copy and still read it with that in mind.
So, while the real games went on during that day –Minnesota
hosted Kansas City down in Bloomington,
Minn., Atlanta was playing a west coast game in San Diego and the Twins’ rivals
the White Sox were playing Oakland – I was standing at the beginning of the
Mississippi River with my book and calendar in hand.
The symbolism was real: I had just turned 12. I was leaving
the safety of my grade school in Minnesota and headed for unchartered territory
in seventh grade at the town’s junior high. I, like that river, was starting a
new journey.
I walked down the path by the river that day. It’s odd to
call it a river there because it’s more a dribble. At points, you could stand
on both sides of the banks at the same time. But, like our own lives, it starts
small and progresses.
Years later, I stood on the edge of the Mississippi River in
Helena, Ark., watching the strength and power of it as it roared. I was a
reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and one of my beats was covering
weather. The river had reached near-record flooding and its width was more than
two miles there. Bits of houses, farm buildings and uprooted trees rushed by. I
thought back to the headwaters where it began, and where I got both my book and
calendar.
I rolled the games for June 30, 1972, this week. In my
replay, the Twins beat Kansas City, 6-2. San Diego crushed the Braves, 13-3,
and Oakland and Chicago split a doubleheader.
I still have the calendar. I keep it on the table where I
roll my games and keep it set to whatever day I’m on in the replay instead of the acutal date. I also have
my first copy of “Ball Four,” along with two other copies. I just read it again
early last month.
