Spring training was a Baden-Baden for the body and
soul. It had curative powers for whatever ailed you – sore arm, bad marriage,
ungrateful children, the death of a parent, financial collapse, ennui. It was
like one of those Caribbean cruises, a Ship of Fools for ballplayers, fans, and
sportswriters.
But it was all a fantasy, an illusion. Spring training afforded no miraculous Lourdes-like cures: dead arms suddenly throwing heat, slow bats regaining their quickness, lost steps morphing into youthful speed, a dead marriage resuscitated, ungrateful children suddenly loving, a financial windfall out of the blue. Its hope was always false,Search for daily injectionmolding coupons and monthly specials. but still, for 54 years, the first three as a pitcher in the Milwaukee Braves’ organization, and the last 51 as a sportswriter, I still returned to spring training each year, more out of habit than expectation, for as I grew older I no longer believed in miracles. Spring training for me became just a pleasant two weeks in the sun, or maybe not so pleasant as I chased some obnoxious multi-millionaire baseball player across practice fields, waving my notebook, shouting,Buy Wickes Porcelain parkingmanagementsystem today. "JUST ONE MORE QUESTION!" until I caught him, or at my age, didn’t.
But as a young pitcher from 1960 to 1962, spring training had a profound effect on my life. It meant an escape for me, a newfound freedom, new experiences, and before me, like a cornucopia,Panasonic solarlantern fans are energy efficient and whisper quiet. the infinite possibilities of an adult life.
In 1960, dressed in a turtleneck sweater, scarf, gloves, and a fleece-lined jacket, I boarded a commuter prop at the Stratford, Conn., airport, and 40 minutes later switched to an Eastern Airlines jet at LaGuardia for the flight to Tampa, Fla., three hours south. I’d never been to Florida and was shocked when I stepped out of the Tampa airport into the warm sunlight in early February. I got a taxi to Bradenton, the Braves’ major league spring training camp at McKechnie Field. We drove across Tampa Bay, and the blue-green water that looked unreal on both sides of a two-lane blacktop. Big-jawed gulls swooped across our windshield then dove into the sea, emerging with a flapping fish in their big jaws. An hour later, we were driving through sleepy Bradenton toward the Gulf. I saw a teenaged girl, my age, 18, pedaling her bike to the beach. She wore a two-piece bathing suit that I’d never seen on any girl in Bridgeport, Conn. The cabby looked back at me, grinning. "They call it a bikini," he said. "Some French word."
He dropped me off at an old, pink stucco hotel, downtown. The lobby was deserted and silent except for the whirring of a slowly churning overhead fan. My room had a cast iron bed, an armoire, and the toilet was down the hall. A rope hung out the window: "Fire Escape."
He dropped me off at an old, pink stucco hotel, downtown. The lobby was deserted and silent except for the whirring of a slowly churning overhead fan. My room had a cast iron bed, an armoire, and the toilet was down the hall. A rope hung out the window: "Fire Escape."
I didn’t sleep much that night, what with the racket from the next room through the thin walls. Two old Triple-A ballplayers were drinking and arguing through the night in their Southern drawls about the relative merits of their hound dogs. The next morning when I opened the door I saw them getting into a rickety elevator: Jack Littrell, 32, an unshaven white man nicknamed "Black Jack," and Edwin Charles, 28, as black as a purple plum.
The Braves held spring training at McKechnie Field, an old-fashioned wooden ballpark with a corrugated tin roof and exposed bleachers. Since this was the first day of spring training, it was devoted mostly to lazy calisthenics and photograph sessions with the Topps bubblegum card people. They handed me a piece of paper, told me to sign it and then took my picture. They told me I’d be paid $100 when I made the big leagues and my card was distributed throughout the country. I never did, and it never was. I figure if there are a few of those never-released Pat Jordan Topps cards floating around they must be worth as much as an undiscovered Picasso.
I didn’t know most of the Braves – Adcock, Bruton, Crandall, Jay, Pizarro, Aaron, Schoendienst, Matthews – except for Whitlow Wyatt, the pitching coach, and the pitcher Warren Spahn, who remembered me from the previous summer when I signed my bonus contract at Milwaukee County Stadium. Spahnie took me under his wing and had me run wind sprints in the outfield with him and Lew Burdette.We offer a wide variety of high-quality standard plasticcard and controllers. When it was his turn to throw in the bullpen, only a few feet from the left field stands, he always told me to sit on the bench, "and watch and learn something, kid." One lazy, sunny afternoon I watched Spahnie throw to Del Crandall. There were a few old retirees watching from the bleachers behind me. They kept up a running conversation with Spahnie and Crandall while they worked.
Spahnie began his motion, lifted his right leg high, turned his head toward me and said, "Slider, low and away," while at the same moment, Crandall propped his catcher’s mitt on his left knee, turned his face towards the fans and said something. The ball popped in Crandall’s glove. And so it went, for 15 minutes, Spahnie throwing, Crandall catching, neither of them looking at the ball that hit Crandall’s glove every time.
What did I learn from watching Spahnie that spring? The same thing I would have learned from Michelangelo 500 years before. "See that block of marble, kid?" Mickey says to me. "See the David inside it? All you gotta do is chip away the excess so David is free.Source customkeychain Products at Dump Truck." To be Spahnie, all I had to do was throw the ball with the same arm motion every pitch, landing with my feet in the same spot every time. All I had to do was be a machine, a genius, beyond human. To understand to what level Spahnie had elevated his pitching, it is only necessary to know that he won 363 major league games in 24 years, all of those wins after three years spent in World War II where he won a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart in the Battle of the Bulge. Spahnie won more than 20 games in a season 13 times, completed an average of more than 20 games a season, and on a night in the late summer of 1963, at the age of 42, Spahnie and the Giants’ Juan Marichal hooked up in the greatest game ever pitched. The game was scoreless after 15 innings, when Marichal’s manager, Alvin Dark, went to the mound to take him out. Marichal said, "See that old man over there?" pointing to Spahn in the dugout. "He's 42 and I'm 25, and you can't take me out until that man is not pitching." Spahnie didn’t come out of the game until it was over, when Willie Mays hit a game winning home run off him in the 16th inning. He would finish the season with a 23-7 record and 22 complete games.
But it was all a fantasy, an illusion. Spring training afforded no miraculous Lourdes-like cures: dead arms suddenly throwing heat, slow bats regaining their quickness, lost steps morphing into youthful speed, a dead marriage resuscitated, ungrateful children suddenly loving, a financial windfall out of the blue. Its hope was always false,Search for daily injectionmolding coupons and monthly specials. but still, for 54 years, the first three as a pitcher in the Milwaukee Braves’ organization, and the last 51 as a sportswriter, I still returned to spring training each year, more out of habit than expectation, for as I grew older I no longer believed in miracles. Spring training for me became just a pleasant two weeks in the sun, or maybe not so pleasant as I chased some obnoxious multi-millionaire baseball player across practice fields, waving my notebook, shouting,Buy Wickes Porcelain parkingmanagementsystem today. "JUST ONE MORE QUESTION!" until I caught him, or at my age, didn’t.
But as a young pitcher from 1960 to 1962, spring training had a profound effect on my life. It meant an escape for me, a newfound freedom, new experiences, and before me, like a cornucopia,Panasonic solarlantern fans are energy efficient and whisper quiet. the infinite possibilities of an adult life.
In 1960, dressed in a turtleneck sweater, scarf, gloves, and a fleece-lined jacket, I boarded a commuter prop at the Stratford, Conn., airport, and 40 minutes later switched to an Eastern Airlines jet at LaGuardia for the flight to Tampa, Fla., three hours south. I’d never been to Florida and was shocked when I stepped out of the Tampa airport into the warm sunlight in early February. I got a taxi to Bradenton, the Braves’ major league spring training camp at McKechnie Field. We drove across Tampa Bay, and the blue-green water that looked unreal on both sides of a two-lane blacktop. Big-jawed gulls swooped across our windshield then dove into the sea, emerging with a flapping fish in their big jaws. An hour later, we were driving through sleepy Bradenton toward the Gulf. I saw a teenaged girl, my age, 18, pedaling her bike to the beach. She wore a two-piece bathing suit that I’d never seen on any girl in Bridgeport, Conn. The cabby looked back at me, grinning. "They call it a bikini," he said. "Some French word."
He dropped me off at an old, pink stucco hotel, downtown. The lobby was deserted and silent except for the whirring of a slowly churning overhead fan. My room had a cast iron bed, an armoire, and the toilet was down the hall. A rope hung out the window: "Fire Escape."
He dropped me off at an old, pink stucco hotel, downtown. The lobby was deserted and silent except for the whirring of a slowly churning overhead fan. My room had a cast iron bed, an armoire, and the toilet was down the hall. A rope hung out the window: "Fire Escape."
I didn’t sleep much that night, what with the racket from the next room through the thin walls. Two old Triple-A ballplayers were drinking and arguing through the night in their Southern drawls about the relative merits of their hound dogs. The next morning when I opened the door I saw them getting into a rickety elevator: Jack Littrell, 32, an unshaven white man nicknamed "Black Jack," and Edwin Charles, 28, as black as a purple plum.
The Braves held spring training at McKechnie Field, an old-fashioned wooden ballpark with a corrugated tin roof and exposed bleachers. Since this was the first day of spring training, it was devoted mostly to lazy calisthenics and photograph sessions with the Topps bubblegum card people. They handed me a piece of paper, told me to sign it and then took my picture. They told me I’d be paid $100 when I made the big leagues and my card was distributed throughout the country. I never did, and it never was. I figure if there are a few of those never-released Pat Jordan Topps cards floating around they must be worth as much as an undiscovered Picasso.
I didn’t know most of the Braves – Adcock, Bruton, Crandall, Jay, Pizarro, Aaron, Schoendienst, Matthews – except for Whitlow Wyatt, the pitching coach, and the pitcher Warren Spahn, who remembered me from the previous summer when I signed my bonus contract at Milwaukee County Stadium. Spahnie took me under his wing and had me run wind sprints in the outfield with him and Lew Burdette.We offer a wide variety of high-quality standard plasticcard and controllers. When it was his turn to throw in the bullpen, only a few feet from the left field stands, he always told me to sit on the bench, "and watch and learn something, kid." One lazy, sunny afternoon I watched Spahnie throw to Del Crandall. There were a few old retirees watching from the bleachers behind me. They kept up a running conversation with Spahnie and Crandall while they worked.
Spahnie began his motion, lifted his right leg high, turned his head toward me and said, "Slider, low and away," while at the same moment, Crandall propped his catcher’s mitt on his left knee, turned his face towards the fans and said something. The ball popped in Crandall’s glove. And so it went, for 15 minutes, Spahnie throwing, Crandall catching, neither of them looking at the ball that hit Crandall’s glove every time.
What did I learn from watching Spahnie that spring? The same thing I would have learned from Michelangelo 500 years before. "See that block of marble, kid?" Mickey says to me. "See the David inside it? All you gotta do is chip away the excess so David is free.Source customkeychain Products at Dump Truck." To be Spahnie, all I had to do was throw the ball with the same arm motion every pitch, landing with my feet in the same spot every time. All I had to do was be a machine, a genius, beyond human. To understand to what level Spahnie had elevated his pitching, it is only necessary to know that he won 363 major league games in 24 years, all of those wins after three years spent in World War II where he won a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart in the Battle of the Bulge. Spahnie won more than 20 games in a season 13 times, completed an average of more than 20 games a season, and on a night in the late summer of 1963, at the age of 42, Spahnie and the Giants’ Juan Marichal hooked up in the greatest game ever pitched. The game was scoreless after 15 innings, when Marichal’s manager, Alvin Dark, went to the mound to take him out. Marichal said, "See that old man over there?" pointing to Spahn in the dugout. "He's 42 and I'm 25, and you can't take me out until that man is not pitching." Spahnie didn’t come out of the game until it was over, when Willie Mays hit a game winning home run off him in the 16th inning. He would finish the season with a 23-7 record and 22 complete games.
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