I just wanted to take the
opportunity to wish all the fathers out there a Happy Fathers’ Day. Being a dad
myself, I will make sure I enjoy the day with my son and daughter. While not as
celebrated with as much hype as Mothers’ Day, it’s still an important day, and
for me, a chance to reflect on the influence my father had on me.
This will actually be the first
Fathers’ Day that I won’t be able to celebrate with my dad as he recently
passed away a few months ago. But I will remember him today for many reasons,
one of which is the game of baseball, which he enjoyed as much as I do. There’s
no one person more responsible for my love of baseball than my dad, and there’s
no better way to thank him than to write a little about his favourite sport.
My dad was born in 1936, and as
he grew into baseball, he cheered for the Cleveland Indians. There was no Major
League team in Canada back in the 1940s and 50s and most people in his hometown
were either New York Yankees fans or Detroit Tigers fans. My dad never
expressed his opinion one way or the other on the Tigers but there’s no denying
one fact: he HATED the Yankees. He once told me that the only time he could
ever bring himself to cheer for the Yankees was when Don Larsen threw a perfect
game against the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1956 World Series. That was it!
But back to the Indians first.
He was 12 years old when Cleveland won the Series in 1948. And he was 18 when
the Tribe got swept by the New York Giants in the 1954 World Series, the one
that featured the spectacular Willie Mays catch. I never bothered to ask him
how he followed the Indians. Given that Cleveland is just across Lake Erie,
it’s possible that he could have listened to some games on the radio, but
whether the signal was strong enough to cross the Lake I’m not sure.
In 1969, the Indians were no
longer his team as MLB expanded to Montreal and welcomed the Expos. One of my
father’s strongest habits was to always cheer for a Canadian team and seeing as
Montreal was the first, they became his team. That lasted until 1977 when the
Toronto Blue Jays came into existence and they remained his favourite team for
the rest of his life.
Now, back to his hatred of the
Yankees, I remember watching one of the games from the 2001 World Series with
him. In one of the most exciting Series I’ve ever seen, the Yankees battled the
Arizona Diamondbacks, eventually losing in seven games. During the game, Yankee
shortstop Derek Jeter made an unbelievable play on defense and I remember
voicing how impressed I was and asked him what he thought.
Never one to bestow praise on
anything New York, the best he could come up with was: “Yup. Jeter’s a heckuva
ball player. Too bad he’s a Yankee.” If I recall correctly, I’m sure he said
something similar about Paul O’Neil later in the game as well.
My dad also had a few more
sayings about baseball that I’ve come to appreciate over the years. Whether he
made them up or got them from elsewhere I don’t know, but I will keep telling
myself that they are his originals and be fine with that. I will share a
couple.
The first being, “A slider is a
poor man’s curve.” Now, I don’t necessarily agree with that as there are some
pitchers who have a wicked slider that’s effective. However, his reasoning for
that opinion was that the only pitchers who throw a slider are those who
couldn’t master a curve ball, the slider being the easy alternative.
The next one is, “A win in April
or May is just as important as a win in September.” Makes all the sense in the
world. While some fans justify their team’s early season slump as a slow start
and they’ll play better when it means something, this quote puts the emphasis
on the fact that every game means something. A division title or a wild card
spot is won over the course of the season and if you get off to a slow start,
you’ll always be playing catch-up. Therefore, all April and May victories count
as much as one in September.
The final one is a poem, and
considering my father was never much of a poet, save for some smart-alec
comments in his school books, I’m assuming he picked it up somewhere. However,
since I never heard anyone else say it, I’ll attribute it to him as well. While
watching a game with him back in the mid-1980s, Toronto Blue Jays’ first
baseman Willie Upshaw took a called third strike and then went back to the
dugout shaking his head and looking at the umpire, as if he didn’t like the
call.
My dad pipes up, “Well, Willie,
my man
You will soon learn,
Before you’re much older
That you can’t hit the ball
With the bat on your shoulder.”
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