There’s No Crying in Baseball!

Growing up, I always prided myself on the fact that I was pretty low-maintenance as a kid. I didn’t bitch and moan or cry much about anything. Mom certainly wouldn’t tolerate any of that former stuff so, assuming I even tried to play that game with her, that behavior would have been corrected immediately in the traditional Mom way. Problem solved. As far as the latter cry-baby stuff goes, I think I got that out of my system on a bizarre trip to Pittsburgh to see the Pirates play the Mets on August 10, 1970 (right before I would start 3rd Grade at McNelis Catholic).

(In Third Grade, we would all have to deal with Sister Joseph Ann. But that is the subject of another post.)

As I have stated in previous blog entries, we were a single car family. However, by virtue of his employment at the Pennsylvania Railroad/Penn Central/Conrail, my Dad had access to free passes for train travel. This was pretty sweet for us. There wasn’t much disposable income in our family. There certainly wasn’t extra cash laying around in an emergency fund that could be used to make major repairs to our only car. So my Dad was very paranoid about long trips in our car – those were to be avoided if at all possible. When we did have to use the car for a long trip, it seemed that Dad could never relax, always worrying.

In the early 70s, when we would go to Pirate games, we would sometimes leverage these train passes. I can remember two or three trips to Pirate games on the train. The first one was my first MLB game about a month earlier (after I tragically missed out on the last game at Forbes Field). The second one was this Mets game.

This Pirates-Mets game was a weekday evening game – 8:05 PM start. Looking at the Retrosheet Box Score for the game (as well as the Pirate Game Log in 1970), the Pirates were playing well (8-2 in that stretch) and that was a big crowd (47K for a Monday night game in Pittsburgh – had to have been some sort of promotion). The Mets were the defending World Series champions, but the balance of power was shifting that year to the Pirates, who would win 6 Division Titles and Two World Series Championships over the 10 seasons from 1970 to 1979.

We always had a tight schedule when the train was employed for a trip to the ‘Burgh for a night game. I’ll bet my brother Steve probably (to this day) can recite the exact arrival and departure times (as he employed that form of transportation liberally while attending Pitt). My recollection was that we would depart Altoona around 3:30 PM or so and we would have to board the train back to Altoona by 11:15 or so. I recall that we would get on the train in Downtown Altoona at the station down by the Post Office on 12th Street.

The train station in Downtown Pittsburgh is near the intersection of Liberty and Grant, where the Greyhound Station was situated. (I am quite familiar with that bus station from my college days. We used to refer to that mode of transportation as “Taking the Dirty Dog”. I didn’t have a car in college.) The train station was about 1.5 miles from Three Rivers.  I think the train must have been running a little late that evening and we needed to hustle to get to the game. That is when the trauma started for me.

ac-ro-pho-bi-a

[ak-ruh-foh-bee-uh]

noun - a pathological fear of heights.

Seems that up until the age of eight or so, I had been internally harboring a case of unrealized acrophobia. Now I would get over that somehow by the mid-1970s, but I had it pretty bad there for a couple of my formative years.

On my virgin trip to Pittsburgh about three weeks earlier, we had elected to employ the Sixth Street Bridge (now the Roberto Clemente Bridge) on our route. With this bridge, you don’t actually climb any steps to reach the bridge and the bridge railings are opaque and at a decent height. If you stay on the inside of the pedestrian walkway, you aren’t even aware of how high over the water you are. On this earlier trip, the selection of the Clemente Bridge masked my condition.

Not so for the Met’s game. A decision was made that instead of the Clemente Bridge, we would employ the Fort Duquesne Bridge. I am not sure who determined that plan of attack. For this game, brother Rich, sisters Laurey and Joni, and Mom were along. (Dad of course would have been working and wouldn’t be able to depart Altoona in time.) Perhaps we were running so late that it was thought that the Fort Duquesne Bridge was a quicker route? Not that I am trying to assign blame forty-one years later or anything, but I did recently calculate the distances using mapquest.com and the two routes are roughly equivalent in distance.

So Terror Episode I for me this evening commenced when we get to the base of the Fort Duquesne Bridge. In stark contrast to the Clemente Bridge. one has to climb a fair number of steps and the railings on those steps are not opaque. I think I made it to around the third landing before i started bawling and froze up.

Once I actually got shepherded on the bridge, Terror Episode II was initiated. We were walking on the pedestrian walkway on the lower-level of the bridge. You can see right through those railings to the Alleghany River below, so I migrated to the inside of the pedestrian walkway. Foiled again however. In those days, there were steel grates used for the construction of portions of the bridge and you could actually see down through those grates. Additionally, cars were whizzing by. What a terrible experience.

We make our way across the river and proceed to Gate C at Three Rivers Stadium. So I eventually sort of get it under control and settle down. Gate C was the gate for General Admission tickets. At the first game I went to three weeks earlier, we also sat in GA tickets in the 2nd row of the 200 Level – the Red Seats – in centerfield. Really pleasant and no issues with my fear of heights. I remember yelling “Hey Matty” all evening with my sister Laurey to Matty Alou (the Pirates centerfielder). 

This evening, we are running behind schedule and there is this huge crowd, so we find out that the 200 level is completely packed and we are directed way upstairs to the 500 Level – the Yellow Seats. So up all of these ramps, and I make may way through the portal and now Terror Episode III is on. At this point I am thinking, Why don’t you just shoot me and get this over with!

But we weren’t finished. Check out this little gem from the Retrosheet Box Score for the game:

METS 1ST: Game originally to start at 8:05; 27 minute delay because lights wouldn't come on;

What are the freaking odds of that happening after my travails just to get to the damn seat? By this time, I was numb. Just looking down and hoping this nightmare would end, sitting in the dark twilight in the 500 Level of Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium.

Since I spent most of the evening rotating between states of shock, bawling, and recovery, I don’t remember too much about this game other than the trauma. The box score shows that there were four future Hall-of-Famers in the starting lineup for that game: Maz, Pops, Roberto, and Tom Seaver for the Mets. (As an aside, you are watching a pretty damn good game when there are four HOFers playing.)

Dock Ellis started for the Pirates and got rocked in the 2nd inning. Dock was way out there – just one of many colorful characters that the Pirates featured in the 70s. I am pretty sure that if Dock was pitching in this era, he would have his own reality show.

Earlier in this same 1970 season, Ellis pitched a no-hitter against the Padres in April. Dock’s no-no was unique in that he pitched while lit up on LSD. I have to chuckle wondering what went through Dock’s mind when the light’s couldn’t come on that August night. He probably didn’t even notice.

In 1974, Dock got tired of the Big Red Machine punking the Pirates all the time and he decided to take things into his own hands and intentionally hit every Red’s batter that came to the plate. Like me, you might be thinking “What was the endgame there, Dock?” Well, it made perfect sense to Dock at the time, as revealed in this awesome account of that evening.

“We gonna get down. We gonna do the do.” – Dock Ellis

Check out the first inning from that box score. You don’t see that everyday and even that box score doesn’t accurately reflect that Dock, in addition to successfully drilling Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, and Dan Driessen, also threw six pitches at or behind Tony Perez and Johnny Bench.

“Dock it looks like you don’t have your good stuff tonight,” - Danny Murtaugh

I would pay good money to see videotape of Rose under handing that ball to Dock after he got drilled in the side and then tearing ass down to First Base as only Charlie Hustle could. I can’t wait until this documentary comes out. Should be outstanding.

Back to the Met’s game. After staring down at the concrete into which my yellow seat was embedded, I know  we did have to leave the game early to catch the train back to Altoona. With the late scheduled start, the lighting delay, and the long 2nd and 3rd innings by the Mets, I doubt we even made it to the 5th inning. Then it was down the ramps and across the river and back to the train station. I wonder if I was still fussing and if we masochistically took the Fort Duquesne Bridge on the route back? “Hey Joe, here’s one for the road!”. Perhaps saner heads prevailed and the Sixth Street Bridge was leveraged (since I imagine everybody had tired of my act by then.)

By the time we got back to 1521 Ninth Street in Altoona that evening I was ready for bed. Of course, in those  summers, I didn’t actually sleep in a real bed. When my brother Steve would come home from college during summers, I would be evicted to the bedroom floor where I would saw logs on this undersized mattress that was directly placed on the floor - no box spring, no support. (Hell it might have even been an oversized crib mattress brought down from the attic for all I know). Didn’t matter that evening, I slept like a baby after all the drama of that day.