A soul-warming occurrence for something like the last 140 years, baseball's annual return to Pittsburgh this weekend brought with it as required an inevitable portion of nostalgia, sometimes felt in its acute form as plain old sadness.
No better or worse example of this exists in the city's history than the solemn opening day ceremonies that played out 50 years ago Friday, when the Pirates presented their right fielder with his 12th Gold Glove.
Posthumously.
Vera Clemente accepted it, tearfully; she'd been widowed barely three months prior, and among the more than 50,000 assembled that day inside Three Rivers Stadium, none knew more painfully than she that eternally, when baseball goes away in the fall, it returns as less of itself in the spring.
How much less is not a matter for quantification. No advanced metric can express the precise sense of loss that time creates in our wintry interludes, as it's very much an individual phenomenon. When you've been watching and/or covering baseball for more than 60 years, as I have, deaths that don't even wrinkle the news cycle, such as the passing last month of Jesus Alou, can bring a palpable sting. I got to know his brother Felipe a little bit, a kind and gracious player and manager. I admired his brother Matty, who won a batting title with the 1966 Pirates, and I was always amused by the pre-pitch ritual of Jesus in the batters box, where he seemed to imitate a player whose uniform top had just been invaded by wasps. All three brothers played in the same outfield at the same time for the Giants in a couple of games when I was 10.
Every offseason subtracts and chips off all manner of players from the game's vast personal mosaic, a chronological imperative no doubt best described by the one and only Yogi Berra, who, reading a scoreboard list of recently deceased players at one Old Timers Game, said, "Boy, I hope I never see my name up there."
It's when the players leave us such golden quotes and timeless stories that their departures get felt most painfully, it seems. That's why this February's passing of Tim McCarver remains a fresh wound. McCarver debuted with the Cardinals when I was 6, and I covered his final seasons in Philadelphia as a beat writer in my mid 20s, which included one of the worst retirement announcements in the game's history. Leaving the visiting locker room with a handful of traveling writers in October of 1980, a Phillies PR operative motioned us into a kind of anteroom somewhere in the lower intestine of Montreal's Olympic Stadium. There, adjacent to the remains of a bullpen pitching mound and a couple of wheel barrels and rake or three, Tim McCarver announced that he was done playing.
An unfailingly cerebral All-Star catcher who'd helped the Cardinals win the World Series in 1967 and who proved indispensable to the pitching brilliance of Hall of Famers Bob Gibson and Steve Carlton, he was about to launch a broadcast career in which he'd analyze 24 World Series on his own path to the Hall of Fame. So much of what McCarver said about baseball remains in the mind's audio book: "Luck is the residue of design." "If you're not willing to criticize, your praise is meaningless." And, my favorite, said about heavyweight Joe Frazier when Smokin' Joe somehow turned up near the Veterans Stadium batting cage as Pete Rose was nearing 3,000 hits: "Joe is also celebrating 3,000 hits."
Again in the winter just completed, too many players who'd triggered generational baseball stories were suddenly gone. Gaylord Perry, the Hall of Fame spitballer, can be heard telling a favorite with a simple internet search. A Giants beat writer watching batting practice once commented to Perry's manager that Perry could really drive the ball. "Are you nuts?" Alvin Dark said approximately, "There'll be a man on the moon before Gaylord Perry hits a home run." Seven years later, an hour or so after the Apollo 11 command module carrying NASA astronauts landed on the moon, Perry homered against the Dodgers. His first. Ever.
Nate Colbert's death in January necessitated for some outlets the delicious retelling of one of the game's great symmetrical narratives. Colbert, a slugging outfielder for the original San Diego Padres, was a native of St. Louis. As a boy, he'd been in the stands at a Cardinals doubleheader when Stan Musial hit five homers. Eighteen years later, in August of 1972, Colbert homered five times in a doubleheader in Atlanta. One was a grand slam, allowing him to set the record for RBIs in doubleheader, 13.
"I never thought anyone would equal (Musial)," Colbert said for the San Diego Padres Encyclopedia, "certainly not me."
May all the recently departed players rest in eternal peace, including former Pirate Frank Thomas, Sal Bando, Ted Savage, Pete Koegel, and Joe Pepitone, who held his own on great Yankees team with Maris and Mantle, who was an exceptional first baseman, and who is said to have been the first player to bring a hair dryer into a locker room and the first to pose nude for something called Foxylady Magazine.
So good for us, baseball is back.
But not in full.
Not really.
