In the first part of a personal essay about baseball, I chronicle the game’s enduring presence in my family, going back nearly a century.
(Note from John Eisenberg: I’ve been fortunate to travel on two different rails as a writer, publishing 11 nonfiction books, each of which took years to complete, but also thousands of newspaper and website columns, articles and features, almost all authored quickly, on tight deadlines. Along the way I’ve written some material that didn’t quite belong on either rail. In 2012, my son was playing college baseball and I began to write about what I was seeing and my family’s history with baseball. I had to abandon the project when the Baltimore Ravens hired me to write columns for their website. But I recently reviewed what I’d written and thought the Bird Tapes community would enjoy it. It isn’t about Orioles history, but it’s about baseball and memories, which is the essence of the Bird Tapes. I’ve done some editing and updating and I’ll publish the piece in two parts.)
The second game of the doubleheader was called off in the third inning when a heavy snow squall blew in.
It came out of nowhere. There had been patches of blue sky over the baseball field at Randolph-Macon College, in Ashland, Virginia, during the first game of the doubleheader on February 6th, 2012. Forty degrees with gusty winds was hardly ideal weather for baseball, but no one had expected tropical conditions in mid-February. The first game of the doubleheader between Randolph-Macon and the Seahawks of St. Mary’s College of Maryland started on time and sped to a conclusion.
But soon after the second game began, the sky suddenly darkened and big, white flakes filled the air.
It was a heavy, wet snow that settled on the grass, wreaking havoc. Randolph-Macon’s shortstop fielded a grounder and fired the ball high over the first baseman’s head. The pitcher, a lanky right-hander, peered through the whiteout and issued a four-pitch walk, then another. It was unclear whether he actually could see his catcher. Several batters hit balls that skidded through the infield. St. Mary’s scored four runs before the umpire mercifully raised his arms and waved both teams off the field.
My wife, Mary Wynne, and I fled for our car, which was parked on a dirt lot behind the field. I gunned the engine and we sat inside with the heater blasting, trying to warm up, as slush piled up on the windshield. After a few minutes my son, Wick Eisenberg, a pitcher for the Seahawks, texted me from the visiting dugout: “You should go. You don’t have to stay through this.”
We agreed. Even the most loyal baseball parents have a limit, and sitting out a blizzard was beyond it. I jumped outside with an ice scraper, cleared the windshield, and we got on the road, wishing the drive home to Baltimore was half as long. A stop for hot coffee was mandatory.
Twenty minutes later, Wick texted again: “Game canceled.” No surprise. And another game scheduled for the next day also was off, he wrote, because a front was expected to pass through the area overnight, plunging the temperature to 20 degrees and leaving a fierce wind as it departed.
All in all, it was a hellacious exhibit of winter’s firm grip on February.
But in spite of it, my son’s baseball season was underway.
Many people rightfully connote the game with sunshine and warmth. As fans in various northern climes endure the final weeks of winter, major leaguers limber up for their season in Florida and Arizona, taking part in the pristine ritual known as spring training. Roger Angell, the great baseball writer, once authored a book about the game titled The Summer Game. That’s when kids play it and when fans flock to ballparks – in the summer.
But for college teams competing in Division III of the NCAA in the Mid-Atlantic region, encompassing Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Delaware, baseball is a winter’s tale, a ruddy and rugged endeavor that is not for the faint of heart, the casual observer or the poet.
The players wear extreme cold-weather gear under their uniforms and bundle up in the dugout in sweatshirts, parkas, and gloves – meaning their mittens, not their mitts. The crowds at games consist almost entirely of parents dressed for an Arctic excursion.
Teams start playing in early February because they have no choice if they want to get in 40 games before the spring semester ends. Their season is almost over by the time the major leagues celebrate Opening Day in late March or early April. That’s an annual occasion that inspires sentimentality among fans about the smell of the grass and life renewing itself, but Mary Wynne and I are already sufficiently renewed by then, thank you, having witnessed several dozen of Wick’s games, living and dying with each pitch and hanging on outcomes as others will do in summer’s warmth.
The games themselves are familiar enough, marked by sounds such as balls smacking into gloves, metal bats pinging, players razzing each other from dugouts, and umpires showboating. Most of the players were high school stars lacking one crucial skill out of the full complement Division I recruiters demand. Either they were too small, didn’t throw quite hard enough, or didn’t want to spend every free moment in the weight room. But they’re still young, strong and talented, and their competitive fires haven’t waned.
Wick is a junior at St. Mary’s, a liberal arts college located 70 miles from Washington D.C., near Maryland’s southern tip. The school features a lovely campus, dense with trees and set by a river, and students who don’t mind going to college in the middle of nowhere. A sports powerhouse it is not. Athletically, it is best known for its sailing team, which wins national regattas.
The baseball team at St. Mary’s has existed for more than four decades without ever making the Division III national tournament, as far as anyone can remember. Since 1995, it has been coached by a soft-spoken, gray-haired grandfather named Lew Jenkins, who played at the University of Maryland in the late ‘50s. He has coached national teams and scouted for the pros, according to his biography on the school’s website. No one doubts that he knows the game, and he certainly has the right priorities. When he crosses paths with Wick on campus, away from the diamond, he asks only, “How are your classes going?” After one spirited defeat, he gathered the team around him on the outfield grass, shook his head sadly, and said, “Fellas, you just can’t curse like that.”
He is a fine man. But not a young man.
His rival coaches tend to be thirtysomethings with ripped abs who bristle with intensity, bark loud orders and make sharp gestures in the third base coach’s box. They would break your neck to win, it seems. Lew is rumored to have been feisty himself when he was their age. Now, though, he is old enough to be their father and doesn’t pretend to share their electric-wire crackle. He moves gingerly around the dugout, never raising his voice and occasionally just giving a player a tender pat on the shoulder for no reason. When he takes the field to object to an umpire’s call, he approaches with palpable deference.
A coach who has never taken a team to the postseason in nearly two decades would have gotten the axe long ago in Division I, where the pressure to win weighs heavy. But when Lew won his 300th game at St. Mary’s, one year after he lost his 300th game, his players surrounded him, doused him with warm water, and chanted his name as they clapped.
That they tossed warm water on him was by design, to ward off the possible onset of hypothermia.
When my father was a medical school student in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in the early 1940s, he played on a competitive fast-pitch softball team known as the Medico’s. Manning the “short field” position — the shallow-outfield extra defensive slot allowed in softball – he helped his team win a city championship before he shipped out to the Far East as a physician on a Navy cruiser near the end of World War II. Miraculously, a Medico’s team picture survives in the archives of Forsyth County, North Carolina. Seymour Eisenberg, my father, is kneeling on the grass in the front row, decked out in baseball flannels and eyeing the camera with a level gaze.
His medical career eventually took him to Dallas, Texas, where he courted and married my mother. (They’d met when my mother’s older brother, also a doctor, brought my father home for dinner one Sunday.) I came along in 1956, four years after my sister, and as I grew up in Dallas in the ‘60s, my father and I bonded over sports. Inevitably, our favorite subject was football, a secular religion in Texas. The NFL’s Cowboys had launched, and our family had tickets to their games, courtesy of my grandfather. Decades later, when my mother asked me what experiences, if any, turned me into a sports journalist, I pointed straight to the roar of the crowd at those early Cowboy games at the Cotton Bowl. I was awestruck by the spectacle.
In those days, Dallas didn’t have a major league baseball team for my father and I to share as an all-consuming passion, which certainly describes the attention we paid to the Cowboys. But recently, reflecting on those years, I realized that, in my oblivious youth, I’d failed to recognize that my father quietly loved baseball, quite possibly more than football.
He’d grown up in the ‘30s and ‘40s, when baseball was a pillar of American life. Young men played the game on sandlots and, when the circumstances warranted, supported their local minor league teams as fervently as their distant major league favorites. Pro football was still a fringe sport. Baseball ruled, and being a fan meant playing the game as much as following it. My father was also a college football fan – years later, he still recalled Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice, a star running back for the University of North Carolina, his alma mater — but he had zero interest in donning pads and a helmet and actually playing football; the future physician was decades ahead of the curve on the threat to your head that the game posed. Baseball was easily his preference. He had nice hand-eye coordination and some strength, enabling him to drive the ball at the plate. Although he didn’t play in high school, I’m sure he was far from the last player chosen when he and his friends chose sides for their sandlot games in Winston-Salem. He told me later than he had nice range and good hands as a softball short fielder.
When I came along and was old enough, he put a glove on my hand, took me out to the yard after dinner and threw me thousands of fly balls, in the process teaching me how to track a high fly, a valuable life skill for a boy in those years. Dallas only had a low-level minor league team at the time, but he took me to some of its games at ancient Burnett Field, a peeling, dimly lit wooden ballpark set on a flood plain near downtown. (If it rained at all during the day, that night’s game was off.) I don’t know that I asked to go, but he took me. Only later did I realize that minor league ballgames had been his version of what I experienced at those early Cowboy games — his alluring introduction to the sights, sounds and thrill of sports. Winston-Salem fielded a Class D minor league team in his day, and he went to some games with friends.
The team was still playing years later when we’d visit his family in Winston-Salem during summer vacation. He would drive 10-year-old me and a friend to the ballpark and drop us off to take in a game, just as he’d done as a boy. The next morning, I’d search the Winston-Salem Journal for an article about the game and the league standings, a future sportswriter already in search of clarity.
My father was a gentle soul with a twinkle in his eye and an arch sense of humor. As a classically trained doctor specializing in internal medicine, he could’ve gone into private practice but instead spent 45 years ministering to former soldiers in dire need at Dallas’ Veterans Administration hospital, while also teaching an array of clinical disciplines at a medical school. He taught a class in bedside manner, which spoke volumes about him. He was a patient and caring clinician, a listener. At home, he made his point without raising his voice. We laughed a lot.
When he died suddenly at age 80 in 1999, my heart broke and I was not there to say goodbye, but I took solace in knowing we both knew exactly where our relationship stood. By then I was 43 years old, with children of my own. But we’d never had a cross word.
I wrote a Baltimore Sun column about him dying. It generated more of a response than anything I wrote in 23 years at the paper.
Over breakfast in Dallas one morning in 1965, before he put on his coat and tie and headed for work, my father put down the newspaper sports section and eyed me. I was 8 years old, eating a Pop-Tart.
“I’ve just read here that they’re playing baseball indoors down in Houston. I need to go see that. Want to go?” he declared.
The Astrodome had opened. We drove down to see the Astros play the Los Angeles Dodgers – my first major league game. After spending the night in a motel by the highway, we joined a throng and watched Don Drysdale pitch for the Dodgers. We could barely see the ball from the upper deck, but it didn’t matter. The ballpark was packed and noisy, the crowd festive. An “exploding” electronic scoreboard popped and whirred as the game unfolded. I recall a siren sounding when someone smacked a home run. Both of us were dumbstruck. We couldn’t fathom that we’d just witnessed the very future of sports, the show just as important as the game.
A few years later, I traveled with my parents to a medical convention in Boston. When we got to our room and opened the curtains, we could see the lights of Fenway Park just a few blocks away. The Red Sox were playing the Yankees.
“Let’s get going,” my father said.
We sat in the right field bleachers, with the Yankees’ Mickey Mantle stationed right in front of us. There is a lot I don’t remember from those years, but I do remember, with vivid clarity, one play from that night. A Red Sox batter smacked a ball to deep right field. Mantle retreated, tracking the ball, but when he went to grab it against the wall, it bounced off his glove and over the fence for a home run. As you might imagine, the Boston fans let him have it. (Years later, I was working at a newspaper in Dallas, where Mantle lived, and interviewed him at a golf tournament. I considered asking him about that play in Boston but decided against it.)
Twelve-year-old me with my dad.
My playing career started strong. One night when I was 7 and on a team in a YMCA league, I cracked a drive into the alley and circled the bases for a home run, slapping hands with my father as I sprinted past him in the first base coach’s box. I recall that he was still wearing his tie from work; he’d come straight from there to the game, no doubt.
Rising through the age-level leagues, I peaked in the summer before seventh grade, winning games as a pitcher and earning a transistor radio from the coach for having good statistics. One of my great uncles, a hit-and-miss oil wildcatter, came to the game and stood right behind the plate, up against the screen. He, too, had come from the era when baseball consumed America, and having gone childless in his marriage, he delighted in watching me take the mound. It was harder to throw a strike with him standing right in my line of vision with a jaunty fedora perched on his head, but he kept up a stream of encouraging chatter and I didn’t dare tell him to move.
Yours truly, ace right-hander.
My career soon petered out. That home run I’d smacked years earlier wasn’t just my first, it was also my last. I was small. Didn’t hit much. My high school didn’t even field a baseball team; the spring sports season in Texas was mostly reserved for football practice, a game I’d given up after several seasons of having my bones crunched.
Years later, my journalism career brought me to another place where baseball takes a back seat in the spring. Baltimore isn’t just a hotbed for lacrosse; it is THE hotbed for lacrosse, the sport completely dominating the spring season.
Mary Wynne and I started a family. Our daughter, Anna, came first, followed by Wick three years later. From the outset, we were a sports-centric house. I was a Baltimore Sun columnist trundling off to games and major events. Inevitably, there was a lot of sports talk. We used to joke that while other families discussed science and politics over dinner, I was teaching my kids how to calculate an earned run average. (A few years later at school, Anna was standing with some sports-loving boys who were wondering who had the longest consecutive-game hitting streak in Orioles history. “Eric Davis, 30 games,” Anna snapped, stopping the conversation cold. She’d exposed herself as a quiet but irrefutable expert.)
From the outset, baseball was the No. 1 game in our family. This was the years between the departure of the Colts and the arrival of the Ravens, when Baltimore didn’t even have a pro football team. I went to spring training every year for the paper and took the whole family several times. Anna started playing softball as soon as she was old enough. The equality push of the women’s sports movement was still a few years away. Anna’s teams in the Towson Rec Council were named after flowers.
When Wick was 6 months old, I rolled a tennis ball to him in his crib, and he picked it up and tossed it back at me – with his left hand. He never showed the slightest interest in strapping on a helmet and pads and flinging a lacrosse ball around with a stick. He was always a baseball kid.
One day when he was 3 and came to one of Anna’s games, he went over and sat by a tree, plainly depressed that he couldn’t also play. When he was 5 and we were tossing a baseball in the yard, a cigar-chomping ex-Marine neighbor walked by and growled, “You should put a lacrosse stick in his hand.” It was too late for that. We had already snuck him into T-ball a year early because he so desperately wanted to play, already knew the rules and could easily hold his own. One night, he tagged up and scored from third base when a teammate hit a ball in the air that was miraculously caught. His coach turned to me and said, “Seriously?”
Wick on the T-ball field.
As he grew old enough, he also played rec soccer and basketball, but those seasons were just a way to pass the time. Baseball was his game. Given a choice between an afternoon at the pool or an evening game on a rec-league diamond, he would take the game every time. I wondered about the power of genetics, whether his zeal could trace to his grandfather, the medical student and short fielder who’d played competitive softball in the 1940s.
He also began to exhibit some skills, which almost seemed fated. I wrote right-handed, ate right-handed, did everything right-handed. So did my wife and Anna, and for that matter, so did Wick except he threw a baseball with his left hand. And while he didn’t throw it especially hard, he could always throw it where he aimed it. His first coach put him on the pitcher’s mound when he was 7. Already the lefty specialist, and wearing glasses, no less. Wick lobbed his pitches toward his catcher and stared, mystified, as the adult umpire danced and strutted, wildly exaggerating the ball-and-strike calls as if he were imitating Leslie Nielsen in The Naked Gun.
By 10 years old, he was ready for a slightly higher caliber of ball, a travel team. A meeting of interested parents was arranged one Sunday in early April. I missed it — my job as a sports columnist had me in Augusta, Georgia, covering the Masters. (I know, rough duty.) But Mary Wynne was there, and she called after the meeting had been underway for awhile.
“I think we have a problem here,” she reported in a low voice.
“What’s that?” I said, perched at my seat in the press room at Augusta.
“No coach for the team,” she replied.
Plenty of dads were willing to pitch in as an assistant coach or lug the Gatorade to away games, but no one wanted the larger responsibility of actually running the team.
“Can you do this?” Mary Wynne asked.
I hemmed and hawed, thinking of the major sports events I had to cover in the coming weeks, the deadlines that loomed. How could I ever fit this in?
“Well, if you don’t, I don’t think there’s going to be a team,” she said.
Thinking how disappointed Wick would be, I agreed to take the job. I would figure out how to juggle my obligations. As my wife hung up, I could hear her telling the other parents, “OK, John’s going to do it.”
I had no inkling of the gargantuan commitment I had made. I would spend hundreds of hours over the next five years coaching the same boys from the end of elementary school to the cusp of high school. They were polite kids who loved to play but weren’t destined for the major leagues, and their parents mostly understood that. We played 30 or so games a year around Maryland and held our own, but it was a low-intensity endeavor as these things went. Everyone batted every time through the order. They knew how to slide because one of the dads had taught them the basics during a rainstorm. No one sat on the bench for long. The parents threw nice parties.
While other sports columnists around the country fretted about making their deadlines, I found myself doodling lineups in my notebook in between interviews, wondering how to adjust if the left side of my infield went to the beach for the weekend. And the only person who cared more about the team than me was Wick. He understood our limitations but always believed a breakthrough was imminent. We shared the experience and loved it.
Being left-handed, Wick manned first base and pitched. There were others who could perform just as well on the mound. Wiry-strong Peter had a sharper fastball and a temper that kicked in when a game was close. Chip was a tall lefty with a big leg kick who threw hard and could dominate. Wick threw strikes. He got batters out and didn’t walk anyone. He was steady.
But he had more drive than the others, cared more about baseball and really wanted to be a good pitcher. When our team disbanded at the start of high school, he tried out for a squad in a more competitive summertime circuit. The coach of the team chewed tobacco, knew pitching cold and saw that he could do a lot with a left-hander who located. He reworked Wick’s mechanics, taught him to use both sides of the plate, and called the pitches, loving that Wick could hit the desired spots. I had overseen his early years in the game, but Wick didn’t become a pitcher until he got rid of me as his coach. Growing tall around the same time, he suddenly blossomed as an ace.
After a summer of facing other Baltimore-area kids, his team went to a regional tournament in New Jersey and made the finals. Wick started against a powerful squad of muscled sluggers from the nearby Jack Cust Baseball Academy – run by the father of a major league player with the same name, a well-known “all or nothing” slugger who played for the Orioles in the early 2000s.
Cust’s starting pitcher threw 90 mph. For two innings, Wick’s teammates flailed against him, seemingly having no chance as a sizable crowd of Cust fans cheered the strikeouts. Meanwhile, Wick battled through their order of beefed-up hitters, moving the ball around, changing speeds and minimizing the damage by inducing fly balls that soared majestically, as if hit by Cust himself, before dropping into gloves for outs. The game was close. Then Cust’s starter shockingly tired in the fourth inning and was replaced, while Wick soldiered on, pitching into the sixth before finally leaving with his team down, 2-1. The game eventually went into extra innings before Cust won.
On the drive home, Wick was initially glum, unable to shake the disappointment of losing. He was 14 years old.
“We could have won that game,” he said.
“That is true,” I replied. “But you should feel good about yourself. You pitched your ass off. That was a serious team. Those guys are looking to play in college and you really competed against them.”
He looked at me. “Yeah, I guess,” he said.
We drove on in silence for awhile before he finally spoke again.
“Do you think I could play in college?” he asked.
I glanced at him, thinking, be careful here, Dad.
“After seeing this game today, if it’s something you want, I think if you work at it, you might have a chance,” I said.
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