Gaylord Perry as he posed for Topps in 1962 for his first Major League card. Perry passed away on December 1, 2022, at the age of 84, due to complications from COVID-19.
Photo courtesy of John Grindrod
While there are many signs as I age that tell me how much time has passed, the one that seems to happen with the greatest frequency is when I hear of the passing of the sports figures that I followed as a child in the late 1950s and early ‘60s.
In some way, it almost seems as if I’m losing people dear to me, even though I didn’t know them personally. Once upon a time, they were images on cards, baseball cards specifically. As time passed, I watched many of their tearful retirements during my teenage years. And as I acclimated myself to the challenges of adulthood, during my twenties and into my thirties and early forties, I convinced myself that I really wasn’t aging all that much as long as there was at least one player still playing that was a part of my childhood. Alas, once I lost Nolan Ryan to retirement in 1993, the year I turned 42, there would be no more such players.
From that point on, I had to settle for the heroes of my youth still being of this world as proof that I wasn’t all that old. Sadly, however, they began also leaving me with greater and greater frequency, proof that even when it comes to heroes, to everything there is indeed a season… even unto death.
With another baseball season just beginning, I thought back on another former player whose 1962 rookie baseball card I still have, Gaylord Perry, who left us on the first day of last December. And I will tell you that I still remember pretty clearly the day I tore open another pack of Topps cards just outside Grant Drugs on the west end of Lima’s first shopping strip, Westgate, and laughing at the funny name with my childhood bestie, Jim Fry, for we certainly had no Gaylords that attended St. Charles Elementary with us.
Well, that man with the funny name turned out to be quite the pitcher, albeit one who plied his trade with what some would say was some occasional mischievous chicanery. On the way to playing 22 years for eight different teams and notching 314 wins, he wasn’t averse to doctoring the baseball with perhaps some saliva, Vaseline or other foreign substances to put a bit of extra dipsy in his pitches’ doodles. He even penned an autobiographical confession in 1974 with a rather ungrammatical title, Me and the Spitter.
There’s one story in particular I will always remember about Perry, one that actually has nothing to do with neither his occasional illegalities on the mound nor his Cooperstown Hall of Fame-worthy accumulated statistics.
Back in Perry’s second year in the Majors in 1963, a writer named Harry Jupiter covered the San Francisco Giants, Perry’s first of his eight teams. As the story goes, Jupiter was down on the field one day talking to the Giants’ manager Alvin Dark during the team’s batting practice while Perry was in the batting cage taking some cuts. Impressed by what he saw, Jupiter commented to Dark that his young hurler could handle the bat pretty well — that is, for a pitcher — and he looked as if he could launch some balls over distant fences.
Dark chuckled, seeing a pretty fair amount of absurdity in what the scribe said, and replied that a man would walk on the moon before Perry would hit a home run.
That moment passed and a whole lot of others as well, actually the rest of that season and five more full seasons, with Perry going to bat dozens and dozens of times and not hitting any balls over those distant fences. In Perry’s eighth of what was ten seasons pitching for that team from the City by the Bay before he would be traded along with Frank Duffy to Cleveland for Sam McDowell, he finally homered. The date was July 20, 1969, when he hit the first of what would be his six career home runs. The home run came at home, in Candlestick Park, against the Dodgers’ Claude Osteen in a game Perry won, pitching, as starting pitchers of that era did with great regularity, a complete game.
Now, if that date of July 20, 1969, sounds familiar, it should, especially for folks in our area. That’s the historic date that a certain former Wapakoneta resident that later turned astronaut on that very day stepped off the last rung of a lunar ladder and took his first small step for man and giant leap for mankind. And, for Harry Jupiter and Alvin Dark, I have to believe, it was a day they laughed.
In this world there can only be one first of anything. For Perry, it was hitting his first homer, and for all of us, it was knowing there really was a man on the moon.
In a sport with so very many wonderful anecdotes that comprise its history that dates back to those Cincy Red Stockings taking to the diamond on May 4, 1869, that just might be my favorite tale in my favorite sport.
John Grindrod is a regular columnist for The Lima News, a freelance writer and editor and the author of two books. Reach him at [email protected].
