First Posted: 3/4/2014
After a long winter’s slumber, baseball, our nation’s oldest of the three major sports and my favorite, is back. And, while there are some things I’ll never quite figure, like another opening day passing last weekend thousands of miles from the nearest American diamond, this time, of all places, on an Australian retrofitted cricket field, there is one thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately as we head into another season. It’s something about my national pastime upon which I can always rely.
Actually, it was something introduced to me quite early, back in a time when I could count my age on two hands, back when nothing thrilled me as much as buying a pack of baseball cards at Grant’s, my go-to place for such a purchase at the Westgate Shopping Center.
In one series of cards, memorable moments in baseball history were recalled. Now, while I would have rather had the current images of my childhood heroes, say, a Sandy Koufax or a Mickey Mantle or a Willie McCovey, I embraced all those pieces of cardboard that carried the intoxicating aroma of bubble gum. Some of the cards in the historical specialty series noted glorious moments from long before I was born, but there were other cards that bore titles like “Snodgrass’ Muff” and “Merkle’s Boner.”
The explanations on the flip sides of those two cards that bore the images of a couple of Freds in their “Field of Dreams” turn-of-the-20th-century uniforms, gave the details on what vital mistake each made and why infamy became their legacies.
In Snodgrass’ case, it was his dropped fly ball in extra innings of the last game of the 1912 World Series that put a Red Sox on base, a Red Sox who would eventually come around to score the winning run and make losers out of Snodgrass’ Giants.
As for Merkle, it was his failure to touch second base after seeing what would have been the winning run scored in a crucial game pitting his Cubs against their archrival Giants that ultimately cost the Cubs a pennant. While the details are quite interesting, they are a bit lengthy, so if you’re interested, the whole scenario is eminently Google-able. But, what’s important here is, like Snodgrass, Fred Merkle made an honest mistake that years later became the subject of a baseball card held in my grimy little 9-year-old hands.
So, just a few weeks ago, I just wasn’t all that surprised when I saw in USA Today a couple of inches and a picture of Bill Buckner, last year’s hitting coach for the minor-league Class A Boise Hawks, who had announced his retirement at the age of 64 from baseball. The headline that separated his picture and his couple of inches of farewell read, “1986 Series Goat Buckner Retires from Baseball.”
Billy Buck decided sometime over the winter that it was time to spend more time with his family and made his announcement some weeks before it would again be time to pack his bags for spring training. Those couple of inches, of course, came with a rehashing of his worst moment of an otherwise great 22-year playing career, a moment when a ground ball trickled through his legs in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, one muffed grounder that allowed the winning run to score in a game that, had the Red Sox won, would have ended a World Series victory drought of 68 years.
As soon as I read the little piece, I again thought of those faded baseball-card images of the two Freds, men I had never even heard of when I first read of their mistakes, and men who years after their deaths would perhaps look down from the clouds and welcome another brother in infamy into their fold.
Of course, at 62 years old and the author of a veritable anthology of mistakes that is further annotated daily, I realize now what I never did in my ninth summer, which is, that mistakes are inevitable and that there is something so very inequitable about anyone’s life being encapsulated by his absolute worst moment.
Never mind that Snodgrass went on to play nine years of baseball at its highest level, that he developed a reputation as one of the game’s best fielders or even that he became in retirement mayor of Oxnard, Calif.! At 9, I thought, what a dummy! He dropped a fly ball!
Never mind that Merkle was just a 19-year-old kid when he had a momentary mental lapse or that he would go on to play 19 years, steal close to 300 bases or be deemed so valuable that he would play for four different teams, including the gold-standard Yankees! At 9, I thought, huh? He never touched second base!
And, when it comes to Buckner, of course, never mind that the tying run scored on a wild pitch before that ground ball was even hit to him in that ninth inning or that the Red Sox had a sixth-inning 3-0 lead they squandered in Game 7 or that Buckner had two hits in that Game 7 or that he would play 22 years, amass more than 2,700 hits, win a batting title or field close to 14,000 other balls flawlessly in more than 1,500 regular-season games at first base! He didn’t catch the one grounder that people deemed to matter most!
And, that is baseball’s and, for that matter, professional sports’ cursed charm. For fans, much of the charm of sports is its history, the nostalgically woven tapestry of games played, the players who play them and the results.
But, for men like Snodgrass, Merkle and Buckner, their histories become their curses for the unwitting roles they’re destined to play in perpetuity, and all for their one mistake, a mistake made honestly, one not spawned by deception, indolence or malice, but one made at the wrong time when seemingly, every eye in the country was upon them.
