The stadium was just fifteen-minute walk from the conference hotel, so I set out on foot, decked out in Phillies t-shirt and hat and serendipitously passed a pub about two blocks from the stadium. Suddenly realizing I was hungry and thirsty, I dropped inside. The place was crowded and noisy, with seemingly hundreds of Orioles fans in bright orange shirts. After looking around a few minutes, I noticed a seat open at the bar and grabbed it. A voice around the corner of the bar from me said, "Are you lost?" I looked up to see an older man in orange t-shirt smiling at me and pointing to my shirt. I smiled back and said, "No just a Phillies fan here for the SABR conference and excited for my first visit to Camden Yards." The response was, "Oh yeah, I read that that conference was in town. Welcome to Baltimore."
This was Steve. Steve is a huge sports fan, who lives a half hour north of Baltimore. His first sport is hockey (he attends Hershey Bears games), but he also has season tickets to the minor league Harrisburg Senators (Double-A), attends Aberdeen IronBirds (High-A) games, and comes into Baltimore for the occasional Orioles game. I ordered a beer and a crab cake sandwich; Steve ordered a beer and a chicken tenders platter, and we settled into some baseball conversation while we waited for our food.
Steve, it turns out, grew up in New York City on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the 1940s and 1950s. He was a regular at the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium and occasionally travelled crosstown on the subway to Ebbets Field. Steve had a habit of always keeping score at every game he attended. In fact, he had scorecards with him there on the bar ready for the Orioles/Red Sox game. "You can't buy scorecards at this park anymore. I bring my own."
Steve says, "I remember those Phillies teams of the late 1940s and 1950s. In fact, I saw Richie Ashburn during his rookie season. They had some great players. I remember Granny Hamner, Dick Sisler, Johnny Blatnick." Johnny Blatnick! I am willing to bet that even with a baseball conference in town there were not more than a handful of people in all of Baltimore who knew who Johnny Blatnick was and two of them were sitting here talking in this bar.
I couldn't contain my enthusiasm. "I can't believe you know about Johnny Blatnick. He had like one good month in his brief Phillies career. In fact, I wrote about it. I write a blog about Phillies history, and I wrote about Johnny's one great month. I thought nobody remembered him."
Steve said, "I'd like to read that." He gave me his phone number and I sent him the link to the article. You can read it here, too, if you'd like. We polished off our food, drained our beer glasses and decided to walk to the game together. Halfway there, Steve remembered he had left his scorecards on the bar and went back to retrieve them. We said goodbye. Steve's scorecards got quite a workout at that game as the Orioles won, 15-10. The score was 15-9 after five innings until the back end of the bullpen for each team restored some order.
The next day I was on the train returning to Philadelphia, when I got a text from Steve. First, he complimented my article and then he sent me an absolute treasure. When he got home, he dug through his files and found the scorecard he kept of a July 5, 1954, game at the Polo Grounds between the Giants and Phillies. Steve was 14 years old at the time.
This scorecard is a treasure for many reasons. First of all, the 1954 New York Giants were a great team, who would win the World Series in four straight over the Cleveland Indians. Second of all, the names that appear on the scorecard are sure to stir memories for any long-time baseball fan. For the Giants there were Hall of Famers Willie Mays (batting sixth!) and winning pitcher Hoyt Wilhelm, as well as Hank Thompson, Don Mueller, and World Series hero to be, Dusty Rhodes. For the Phillies there was Hall of Famer Richie Ashburn, as well as fellow Whiz Kids like Granny Hamner and Willie "Puddin'head" Jones. The obscure Danny Schell was the Phillies' cleanup hitter. Del Ennis was on the shelf with a thigh injury. Here's Steve's 68-year-old scorecard.
The scorecard tells the story of the game itself, of course. The Phillies scored in the first when Schell singled home Jones with two out off Giants starter Ruben Gomez. The Phillies extended their lead in the second, scoring two runs on singles by Earl Torgeson, Ashburn, and Smoky Burgess along with a Gomez error. Mays homered off Phillies starter Murry Dickson in the bottom of the second. In the fourth, Ashburn walked (one of four walks he had in the game) and was gunned down by Willie Mays trying to go first-to-third on another Burgess hit. The crowd roared as Mays grabbed Burgess' looper on one hop in his bare hand and fired to third baseman Thompson to nip the speedy Ashburn. The scorecard notation 8-5, shows, in elegant baseball shorthand, one Hall of Fame centerfielder (Mays) cutting down another (Ashburn) with a great throw. This would be the year that the marvelous Mays won his first MVP award. In the fifth, Rhodes delivered the big blow of the game, a three-run home run that put the Giants ahead for good. Wilhelm pitched three innings of one-hit relief to earn the victory.
A week after this game was played the Phillies new General Manager, Roy Hamey, fired manager Steve O'Neill and replaced him with former St. Louis Cardinal player, Terry Moore. It did no good. The Phillies finished the season 75-79, in fourth place, 22 games behind the pennant winning Giants. Moore was fired at the end of the year. Ennis' replacement, the rookie Schell, had a good season for the Phillies, appearing in 92 games and hitting .283 with seven home runs. The following year Schell appeared in two games in April, was optioned to the minors, and never returned to the major leagues.
In the pantheon of the tens of thousands of baseball games played through the years, this was a pretty insignificant game. But this one was made significant because a 14-year-old boy went to the game, kept a scorecard, and 68 years later chose to share it with a new friend. In a time of deep divisions in the country, baseball continues to connect us. It is a national shared experience to treasure.
Neat story. Schell and Mel Clark were two outfielders that probably would have had decent careers if expansion had come earlier. Clark also blew a knee which didn’t help him any. Ed Sanicki was another guy that came along too early.
ReplyDeleteI’m sure you’re right. S hell would have been good in a Mets uniform. Clark was a contact hitter with speed. That knee injury really ended a burgeoning career.
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