Mets against the Cardinals, father against son

Mentioned the other day how up until the latest generation, Mannion family baseball loyalties have descended in not quite a straight line from my great-grandfather's loyaties to the New York Giants.

The teenager roots for the Mets, but his younger brother is devoted to the Cardinals, and his being a St Louis fan has nothing to do with Frankie Frisch the Fordam Flash having been his great-grandfather's favorite player.

He is a Cardinal fan because he's a Blue Jays fan.   And he's a Blue Jays fan not because Toronto's Triple A farm club, the SkyChiefs, plays in Syracuse, the city the ten year old still thinks of as home.  He's a Blue Jays fan because when he was learning the alphabet he was thrilled to find out that there was a baseball team called the Jays.

He heard that as the J's and he said, My name starts with J too, and that was that.

It helped that his favorite color is blue.

When he learned they were the Blue Jays, that didn't bother him.  He liked birds.  In fact, he liked birds so much that he decided that all teams named after birds were his teams.

Ever since he has rooted for the Blue Jays, the Cardinals, and the Orioles.  Since the Cardinals are the only one of those three teams that wins anything, he's become most attached to them.

He's so attached to them in fact that he hates the Boston Red Sox and everything they stand and will never forgive them for 2004.

And he hates the Houston Astros and everything they stand for and will never forgive them for last year.

He has declared his intention of hating the Mets and everything they stand for if they win the NCLS this year.  I'm to be consoled by the fact that he won't hate them as much as he hates the Red Sox and the Astros.

He does feel a little bit of ambivalence about the upcoming series.  He doesn't care that the Mets are his father's favorite team.  He cares that his favorite player is Met.  Carlos Delgado.

Back when we lived in his---the ten year old's---hometown, the Blue Jays sent Delgado down to Syracuse on a rehab assignment.  He was there for a short time but we were at one of the few games he played.  The ten year old was a four year old at the time, I think.  He was just beginning to pay attention to baseball and understand its rules.

Delgado came up and I pointed him out.  "That guy's a very good player," I said.

"How good?" the then four year old asked.

Delgado answered the question by driving the next pitch deep over the right field fence.  There were some picnic tents way, way out there and the ball cleared their striped tops.

"That good," I said.

Tonight I'm hoping Delgado will be that good again and continue to be that good for the next four or five games.  The ten year old's hoping he'll be that good but only when there are no runners on base and the Cardinals are well ahead.

Your turn:  What's your first great baseball memory, the one that made you a fan?

The local paper the Times Herald-Record's more of a Yankee paper than a Met paper, but with the Yanks out of it, the Mets have taken over the sports pages.  Good coverage, whether you're rooting for the Mets, the Cardinals, the Tigers, the A's, or just rooting for the games to be good.  Best place to start is with Michael Geffner's profile of Mets Manager Willie Randolph.

Comments

[Kate Marie]

That's easy. My first great baseball memory is of my father getting me out of bed to listen to Nolan Ryan break the single season strikeout record for the California Angels. The game wasn't televised in the Los Angeles area, so my dad and I listened on the radio.

[Dugas]

Joe Carter's World Series Ending home run in 1993. Your son has good horse sense. I don't care if that sentence doesn't make sense.

[Chrys]

You know I can't resist answering a baseball question! My favorite baseball memory? I have so many, but, as a little girl, going with my parents to a Dodgers-Mets game at the Polo Grounds, made me a fan forever. I remember I loved everything about the experience...the crowd, the food, the excitement. I still feel that was when I go to a baseball game!

But, my most wonderful baseball memory of all time was listening to the Professional Baseball draft on the computer a few years ago and hearing my son's name announced as a draft pick by the Phillies. I still get choked up thinking about the screaming, crying and celebrating we did! It was the beginning of a dream of a lifetime for him...and for his mom and dad.

And, Let's Go Mets!! Hope Delgado doesn't disappoint the ten year old.

[Dugas]

And how good was Paul Molitor during the 1993 World Series?

12 for 24 (.500)

2 doubles, 2 triples (at the age of 37?!), 2 home runs, 10 runs, 8 RBIs.

[Mike Schilling]

Not quite my first, but I fndly recall skipping classes at Berkeley to see the Giants play the Phillies at Candlestick. Vida Blue started and pitched a great game, but came out in the 9th with one out and sluggers Mike Schmidt and Greg Lusinski due up. Randy Moffit (Billie Jean King's brother -- you could look it up) came in and struck them out on six pitches. (Isn't the web amazing? It was this game).

Barry Bonds's number 500 wasn't bad either.

[Linkmeister]

I haven't a specific memory, but it was sometime in 1959, when the Dodgers and I had both just moved to LA. The Dodgers went to the WS and beat the ChiSox, and the papers' sports sections were ecstatic. There was Jim Murray, writing column after column about the team in the LAT. There was the Coliseum, home of the Olympics, USC and UCLA, and now the hometown baseball team, with its idiotic left-field screen. There was Larry Sherry, winning two games and saving the other two in the Series. And there were Scully and Doggett on KFI everyday, and I could listen to them on my blue portable Motorola radio (5" high, 9" wide) while keeping score in spiral notebooks with hand-drawn rows and columns.

What more could a nine-year old boy want?

[Exiled in New Jersey]

Seeing Don Newcombe and Robin Roberts hook up on a Sunday afternoon in 1956 at what my dad called Shibe Park in Philly. The home team had yet to discover that Blacks could play baseball, so perhaps half of the crowd were cheering on the Dodgers and when Charley Neal doubled home the winning run in the 8th, they went home happy. Newcombe was much maligned when he played; the term was he 'choked' but way back in 1950 Newcombe pitched both games of a double header when the Dodgers were trying to catch the Phillies, completing the first and giving a 'quality start' in the second.

[Chris the Cop]

Easier.

The Mets winning the Division championships in '69; me and my brother sitting on our front stoop banging pots with spoons. I was 12 - my brother was 15.

Before that, it was any of a dozen or so times in '62 or '63, flinging myself onto the living room floor screaming/crying/wailing, watching as the Mets blew another and another and another game in the 9th. I was 5. They were 40-120 that first year.

[apocalipstick]

1967. Bob Gibson and the Cardinals vs. Yaz and the Red Sox. Forever cemented Gibson in my mind as the Cardinal. That was before I knew about Musial, but Gibbie's still the man to me.

[Ronzoni Rigatoni]

Ha! Back in the day (and I mean WA-A-A-AY BA-A-A-ACK) I used to listed to the Indians (with the play-by-play by Cryin' Jimmy Dudley) at my father's Beer Distributership in NW PA. Growing up with a hometown minor league team, I wanted to see the Indians in person, so I asked Dear Ol' Dad to take me to the game. To my surprise, he said OK and told me it was just around the corner. Whee! He took me to my Uncles' hardware store where the very first TV sets were on display, and there they were, the Cleveland Indians, on television, on a snowy round 12" screen, surrounded by a crowd of curiosity seekers. I was not impressed. This was wa-a-ay back in '48 (tolja). I have carried a grudge against all television programming ever since.

[dmh]

So many but one stands out and apropos of this thread, involves the Cards and the Giants, albeit SF by that time. It was a game in old Sportsman Park and as luck would have it all three Alou brothers played in the game. Not only that, but Mays and Cepeda hit a homer and I almost got a Stan Musial foul ball down the right field line but a big, fat drunk man plowed through me to the ball. Great park, great teams, great players, great park.

[Linkmeister]

Lance, did you notice the apartment number in the Willie Randolph profile?

[Domoni]

Way too many baseball memories to pick one...so I'll cheat.

I was nine and exiled to my great aunt's for a week that summer. Disaster turned to hope when I found out there was a drugstore at the corner. I had a dime burning a hole in my pocket and a dream.

I walked there and quickly found the baseball card display. Behind the counter?! How could I hold the packs in my hand so I could telepathically know which one contained the most White Sox cards??? (Tell me you didn't do that!)

I asked the clerk if she could pick a pack out for me. She looked in the display. "There are no packs. Just loose cards. Must be why the box is here." My face fell.

She smiled and told me I could have all the loose cards for the dime. The motherload! The two cards I remember? Red Schoendienst and Mayo Smith -- the managers from my first World Series.

[Michelle]

I don't know at what point I became a baseball fan, but I remember the moment I became a White Sox fan. I grew up in a Cubs household -- from spring to fall I would hear Jack Brickhouse or Lou Boudreau around the house (on TV or radio) just about every day. The Cubs were baseball in the sun, Hey Hey, and Let's Play Two -- seemingly incessant cheeriness (I must have been a blissfully unaware 7-year-old child in 1969). Then, at some point in 1976, I happened upon the UHF station that broadcast Sox games. On it was a team with a crazy owner (Bill Veeck), crazy uniforms (the untucked, big-collared uniform tops), a crazy broadcaster (Harry Caray), an exploding scoreboard, and what seemed like a huge park (compared to the Friendly Confines) populated with people drinking and having lots of fun at night. I was 14 years old. The cuddly Cubs held no interest for me, I was ready for the rowdiness on the South Side.

[rameau's nephew]

Go Cards!!!!!!!!!!

Driving to Sporsman's Park in 1963 with 6 other Cub Scouts in a Chevy (Impala?) Station Wagon. The rear seat faced backwards, and the window was cranked down. I was going on and on about my new prescription glasses, which apparently so annoyed one of my fellow cubs that he grabbed them off my face and threw them out onto I-70.

I have literally only a blurry memory of that game, but much clearer memories from September 1964, of a pocket transistor radio with an earplug, picturesque fall days on the playground at recess, the Phillie collapse, and a classic 7 game series against the more-to-be-pitied-than-hated Red Sox.

We could be looking at a rematch of '68, what a hoot.

Found our framed certificates from the 1965 opener at the now-demolished Busch when I was helping clean out mum's attic this last weekend, brought them back home with me along with a Johnny Edwards bat-day bat (my brother claims the Cepeda bat was his, damn his eyes).

[Chris Quinones]

My first games were a doubleheader at Shea against the Phillies, June of 1975. I was not quite seven. The Phillies won both games. Late in the second game, a reliever named Bob Apodaca was hit in the face by a line drive. The picture on the back of the Daily News the following day was something to see.

Mind you, I was in love well before that moment, but that's what I remember best about that day.

[Linkmeister]

M. Rameau's nephew,
For the sake of accuracy, the Sox were the opponents in 1967 (Lonborg and all that). The Cards played the Yankees in 1964's World Series.

[rameau's nephew]

uh, I knew that about the Yankees-Cards in 64. I just had 67 and 68 on my mind lately as I watched the Tigers run from nearby here in Ontario.

I miss Jack Buck.

[Connie]

Earliest MLB memory: when they brought televisions into the grade school so we could watch home town boy Jim Kaat pitch for the Minnesota Twins in the playoffs.

Best memories: Every summer Uncle John took all his nieces and nephews to Tiger Stadium on bat day. He was a GM bigwig and had the use of GM tickets on the 3rd base line.

Best adult memory: 1984, Kirk Gibson. Need I say more?