I love the sport of baseball. I dreamed of being a professional baseball player, but the dream went out the window at the end of my Little League career after two years. I was about 13 years old at that time. Oh well…
I’ve watched baseball on TV countless times, and I’ve jumped as high as I could only once in my life when Mookie Wilson hit a ground ball past Bill Buckner’s legs during the sixth game of the World Series between the NY Mets and the Boston Red Sox in the fall of 1986.
Yes, I’m a fan of the NY Mets. And of the NY Yankees as well.
Every other time I root for either the Mets or the Yankees or any other NYC professional team in basketball, hockey, or football, I’d cheer with just my voice and arm movements (e.g., raised arms and closed fists). The only exception was that jump – it occurred in my parents’ bedroom in our old house in Holliswood, a suburb of Queens, one of the boroughs in New York City. That it was an unbelievable event was an understatement.
As for anyone who tells me to choose between the Mets and the Yankees, I’m totally deaf. Some of them even have called me a fair-weather fan….yeah right, it’s as if I don’t have much choice. I’m still deaf to their pleas.
I had gone to the original Yankees Stadium only once in the early 1970s. I was part of a Boy Scout group from the Lexington School for the Deaf, and we watched Mel Stottlemyre, a fine Yankees pitcher, shut down the Minnesota Twins, 2-0. I remember receiving a first day cover postcard (Fig. 1) honoring baseball with an authentic autograph by Bobby Murcer and a pressed autograph by Yogi Berra upon visiting the Yankees Stadium. Yogi Berra was a Hall of Fame catcher for the great Yankees from the late 1940s to early 1960s while Bobby Murcer was a star player for the mediocre Yankees during the mid 1960s – 1970s. You can Google both players.
Mel Stottlemyre later became a famed pitching coach for both the Mets under Davey Johnson and the Yankees under Joe Torre, and he had won World Series with both teams. Mel even stood up to George Steinbrenner, the comically iron-fisted owner of the NY Yankees. Thumbs up for Mel!
As for the Mets, well, I’ve been to the Shea Stadium a number of times. Sometimes, my family and I went there. Most of the times we were there, the Mets had won, and I was pretty happy. There was one thrilling game when the Mets played against the San Francisco Giants on June 14, 1980 (it was three years after the Midnight Massacre when the Mets traded their pitching great, Tom Seaver, to the Cincinnati Reds). The Mets were losing 6-2, and they were batting at the bottom of the ninth inning. Somehow, the Mets came back to steal the game, 7-6 with Steve Henderson’s winning home run. He was part of the trade for Tom Seaver, and I still have the NY Mets program book (Fig. 2).
But there was one game where I could remember a non-baseball event much more than the game itself. At that time, Joe Torre was the manager for the terrible Mets (that was some 15 years before he became the manager of the great Yankees dynasty from 1996 to 2007).
A stadium usher in his late fifties was the true bum of the game, though he helped provide us an unintentional reward. My parents, my siblings Andrew and Jennifer, and I came to Shea really early and the stadium was rather empty. We sat somewhat close to the field (we were on the rightfield side), but there were metal barriers that supposedly would prevent fans from getting too close to the field. But fans could easily climb over those barriers and could get close enough to the field so that they could talk with or try to get autographs from professional baseball players warming up prior to the game.
At that time, I was about 17 years old, and I thought I could join the fans chatting up with their favorite players. My parents didn’t oppose my action, and I climbed over two or three barriers before being stopped by that bum. So, I climbed back over the same barriers and went back to my original seat. That bum must’ve tried to call me, but he realized I couldn’t hear him and followed me. When I sat, I faced the usher. Suspecting my hearing loss, he clearly told me that I had to go back to the place where ushers told us to return to our seats. From there, he said, I had to go through ‘proper channels’, that is, go to the entrance/exit passage where there were no barriers from where I was caught and walk in the ‘proper way’ towards my original seat. Mom and Dad saw that too, and realized that there was nothing they could do because if they had protested, the usher would’ve called security and have all of us escorted out of the stadium even before the game had begun. So, my parents nodded that I follow the bum’s orders.
So I went, climbed over the barriers, went back to the spot where the usher first called me out, walked through ‘proper channels’, and returned to my seat to the bum’s satisfaction. Thereafter, I don’t remember what happened in the game. Perhaps the Mets won, but that didn’t matter. All I could remember was that I couldn’t care less – life goes on. It, however, was humiliating and infuriating for my parents because they saw no other fans who were caught had to perform the same way as I did. So, Dad decided to do something.
Shortly after that game, Dad wrote a letter of complaint to the offices that ran the Mets. I don’t know exactly what he wrote, but I could speculate how he would describe the fury and humiliation he, his wife and his children, especially his deaf son, had felt following our encounter with that bum. Dad also might add that the usher bullied me because of my disability. The letter surely worked like magic – it inspired the offices to send to Andrew, Jennifer and myself three Mets yearbooks with authentic autographs from many Mets players plus Joe Torre, the manager of the Mets. He was so cool to write, “Let’s Go Mets!”
I have two authentic autographs by Joe Torre, one from that Mets yearbook and the other from his Chasing the Dream autobiography, but I’d take his Mets autograph over any other autograph (with maybe one exception from Derek Jeter, about whom I blogged when I ‘stole’ his plane seat1).
I would like to say to the usher, “Take that, bum,” but instead I have to say, “Thank you, bum,” not just for the yearbook but also for the memories and the lessons that came with them.
Postscript I – Ironically, when I compared my autographed yearbook and my program recording Steve Henderson’s winning hit, they came from two different games during the same season! The Mets were awful during that season, but it was a memorable one for me.
Postscript II – Yes, that yearbook has Steve Henderson’s autograph.
Reference
1https://the-eagle-ear.com/non-intentional-theft-of-derek-jeters-plane-seat/