Today is not a day for writing about politics, the economy, philosophy, or even Jewish holidays and scripture—all topics that have made a Raspberry Patch appearance in recent weeks. No, in honor of what feels to me like a somewhat premature Opening Day, it is a day to write about baseball.
It’s not so far-fetched a choice, really, when you think about it. Baseball is capacious. How so? Well, baseball has its politics, its business aspect, and its philosophical dimensions, too. As true baseball aficionados all know, it is—along with cricket, but cricket is impenetrable to me—by far the most philosophically sophisticated of all the major team sports: Unlike much cruder games constrained in space and time because they are modeled after warfare, baseball is theoretically infinite in both space and time because it is modeled after pure grace. Seriously: If a pitched ball is batted into play between the first and third base lines it can fly, bounce, or roll all the way to the Andromeda galaxy and beyond and still be a fair ball; and if the score remains tied at the end of an inning, extra innings can theoretically go on, well, forever.
Baseball certainly qualifies as a religion, with its statistical aspects as its scripture. Besides, the World Series always occurs around the time of the High Holidays. No one will ever persuade me that this is mere coincidence.
Baseball even has a mystical aspect associated with its role as a religion, and no, I’m not referring either to my absolute favorite boyhood movie, Damn Yankees! (1958), or to Susan Sarandon’s captivating role as the siren Annie Savoy—she of the Church of Baseball—thirty years later in the 1988 film Bull Durham. The mysticism I have in mind is the “fantasy league” mindset where otherwise mostly normal guys group together to game out the season in a strangely orthogonal, highly unreal manner that many appear to take more seriously than the game itself. I have never understood this mania, and I sense down deep that I don’t wish to understand it.
Speaking of what is deep down, today is a day for writing not about baseball as just a game. I could, after all, write about the various rule changes old and more recent that I have witnessed, every single one of which I regret. No, I prefer to write about the intertwining of baseball with my life, and about the strange ways that memory and emotion, character and fate, are all improbably but ineluctably bound up together. I did this once before, when The Raspberry Patch named my first joust at what everyone then called blogging, more than a dozen years ago. Today, with the Nats about to go head to head with the Reds in Cincinnati just an hour or two from now, I want to return to May 18, 2011, and pick up my baseball thread from there so as to link the old Patch with the new.
Harmon Killebrew died at age 74 of esophageal cancer on May 17, 2011. He was my boyhood hero and idol, and I was compelled to write about his passing on the very next day. Killebrew’s first full season in the American League was 1959, during which, on June 1, I turned eight years old. As I recall, the Senators were already headed toward last place at the time.
Baseball meant everything to me. Having been born at the since-condominiumized Columbia Hospital for Women, the Washington Senators were my team—which is why I thrilled to the aforementioned Damn Yankees!, since the Senators beat them at least in the movie. The Senators had been the team of my father and his eight brothers, too (Aunt Gertrude, the one girl-child of the family, I can’t say). My uncle Myron, may he rest in peace, was an absolute Senators fanatic (also a Redskins fanatic but that’s another story). My father was close behind in his enthusiasm. Born in January 1905, he was 19 years old when the Senators won their only World Series. The year was 1924. He told me many stories about it, as did my uncles. It was a central part of the holy writ of Garfinkle family oral tradition. It is why most years I try to visit Walter Johnson’s grave in Rock Creek Cemetery on or near the anniversary of his death.
I myself was never even remotely a great player, although I wanted to be more than anything in the world. Standing 5'8" at my absolute tallest in adulthood, and with poor eyesight from an early age, I was hardly prime material for a star athlete. I was coordinated physically and pretty fast, however, and worked hard to become a proficient defensive infielder. But with my meager upper body strength I couldn’t hit the ball very far, or even hit it very often against fast pitching because I couldn’t see it all that well. I didn’t fully grasp the reasons for my mediocre hitting performance at the time, of course, and so it really bothered me. That’s probably why I was so amused when I read, back in the day, that a Washington Nationals hopeful then still in the minor leagues, a young man named Bryce Harper, suddenly caught fire at the plate after it was discovered that he was nearly blind as a bat and got fitted out with contact lenses.
If the hitting problem were not enough, I couldn’t play outfield well because, if I ran to catch a fly ball, my glasses—back in those days the typical plastic sort with temples that did not wrap around my ears—would bounce around on my face so that the ball appeared to hop through the sky this way and that like a drunken dragonfly. That is no way to catch a fly ball. I played catcher sometimes; I liked being in the thick of the game and I wasn't afraid of getting dinged by a foul ball off my shoulder or leg. But the fact that I couldn’t hit the ball that well at a time when my eyes were getting worse, and my glasses were not keeping pace with the deterioration, made it tough to make the team.
Determination and spirit mean a lot, but they cannot entirely make up for not being able to see the baseball. This was an early lesson is thick-mud realism, and it’s a lesson that has stayed with me all these years, to wit: Yes, Jiminy, you certainly can wish upon a star, but the star doesn’t give two shits, pardon my eschatology, about your problem.
In Arlington, Virginia, where I grew up, we had a pretty sophisticated baseball league for kids: well-kept fields with fences and games under the lights with paid umpires at Four Mile Run Park, and commercial sponsors who provided sharp uniforms and all the rest of the first-rate equipment we had. My best friend down the street was associated with the team called Broyhill, and I went along with him and his father to try out for that team. The team was sponsored by a guy, Joel Broyhill, who owned a local furniture store and who soon got elected as a Republican serving our Congressional district for number of years. I was at junior high and high school with his daughter Jeanne. We were not Republicans, but back then most Republicans had not yet gone crazy, so I thought little of it.
Anyway, I went to all the practices and tried my best, but I was the very last cut before the season started. I was the last cut fairly, in my opinion. Coach Clayton had to abide by the league rules, and the rules stipulated that he could submit a roster only so large. There was maybe one other kid I thought I was maybe better than, but it was a close call. I could field better than he could, but he could hit better than I could. His name was Tom Warnock and he was really a good guy. I’ve no idea whatever became of him.
But the real reason I got cut was fate. A kid named David Adams, a handsome freckled red-haired kid, had come back to town. He had been in my first-grade class at John Marshall Elementary School, and he was a natural-born leader. At recess we pretended we were wild horses and it was just a no-brainer that David led the pack. His father was in the Navy, and David had left the area with his parents after first grade; he returned after practice for Little League had begun in 1961 or maybe 1962 (I'm not sure which), but he played second base—my preferred position—and there is no doubt in my mind to this day that if the U.S. Navy had not seen fit to return David’s father to the Washington area, I would’ve made the team and been the starting second baseman. This was a very important lesson in life to learn: Randomness matters.
Now, my father was sure that my disappointment was due to anti-Semitism. I was sure he was wrong. I had no reason to think that Coach Clayton even knew I was Jewish, or would have cared if he did know. It just never came up. And as I said, had I been coach Clayton, objectively I would probably have done the same thing he did.
Coach Clayton said I could be the batboy and continue practicing with the team as a kind of consolation prize, and I accepted. That is one decision I have always regretted; I should have swallowed hard and just walked away. But I loved baseball more than I nursed my own pride. I won’t say it was akin to an addiction. Nevertheless, I learned how powerful passions can be, and how weak most of us are at resisting them. I never told my parents about getting cut and being batboy. I always went to games with my friend and his dad; my father never attended a game anyway because of his swing-shift schedule at the dairy. If he found out the truth he had the good sense not to humiliate me over it; if he didn’t know, well, in a way that would have been worse because it suggested that he really didn’t care. That will doubtless remain a mystery until, as Robert W. Service once put it, “the judgment sluice-heads sweep.”
Not that I ever gave up trying to make a team. I loved the game too much for that. I went out for baseball at Yorktown High School, and I did make the varsity team in 11th grade. I wasn’t a starter and I didn’t play much; I was used “sparingly,” as they say. One reason was that we had a good but stubborn coach, Tim Hill, who told me to go down to McGuinn’s Sporting Goods store in Clarendon and buy some baseball cleats—my soccer shoes didn’t cut it. But those things were expensive, my stipend from my parents didn’t cover them (in 11th and 12th grades I lived in the family house by myself most of the year while my father and step-mother were in Florida on account of my father’s post-stroke health), and I thought the soccer shoes worked well enough. I never did buy the cleats, so I ended up getting into only a few games. I remember one time toward the end of the season, when we were clobbering some team 13-2, I played shortstop starting the 4th or 5th inning. I fielded two ground balls and made the throws to first: no muffs, no errors. I even got on base in that game, a right-handed hitter swinging late and driving a low liner on one bounce right through the astonished first baseman’s legs; and I stole second on the next pitch. Lesson: Very small glories don’t necessarily stay small in one’s aging imagination. A person can actually remember such stuff 65 years later like it was yesterday, and enjoy the show in the mind’s eye as if it were a big deal…..even though it definitely wasn’t.
Anyway, in 1959 I never aspired to be a home-run hitter like Harmon Killebrew. In my 8-year old mind I was more in the mold of a Zolio Versalles, the Senators' shortstop prospect back when I was a kid. Or maybe the third basemen Eddie Yost. Still, when Killebrew hit 42 home runs in 1959, he gave us Senator fans hope.
Actually, he hit 43 round-trippers that year and won the crown—at least he did so in my mind, because one shot he hit down the left field line at Fenway Park that a besotted ump called foul was actually a fair ball. The witness to that fact was none other than Boston Red Sox left fielder Ted Williams. If you can’t believe Ted about a thing like that, then you can’t believe anybody. This did not lead me to hate Rocky Colavito of the Cleveland Indians, with whom Killebrew is tied in the record books for that year. But it was a lesson in injustice that struck me hard at the time. To an 8-year-old, robbing a hero of his reward as undisputed home run king of the American League is an enormity of unspeakable proportions. In those days injustice of that magnitude was just not allowed to stand on “Mighty Mouse” or “Crusader Rabbit”—no way. I don’t think World War III, had it broken out toward the end of the 1959 season, would’ve bothered me nearly as much.
My sharpest memories of Harmon Killebrew are entwined with personal matters that occupied not so much the year 1959 but rather the year after. There is persuasive empirical research showing how short-term memory is transformed into long-term memory through the hippocampus at times of great emotional engagement, whether that engagement is traumatic or enrapturing. We tend to remember nearly everything surrounding key emotional moments in our lives, especially when we’re young. It is part of the way our brain works, that it is promiscuously and lazily associational except in those rare moments when we manage to bring to bear our critical facilities on a problem. Some never experience major traumas or other strong emotional focal points when they’re young, and so lack a basis to really understand the phenomenon. But I understand it.
I remember as though it were yesterday, for example, the evening of September 26, 1960. That was when the first televised presidential election debate took place, between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. As I already told Raspberry Patch readers in the “WhigWhacked” essay from March 16, I was sitting in front and toward the left side of the dark red sofa on the living room floor in my usual position watching our small black-and-white television set. I remember my father leaning over and taking hold of my upper right arm with his left hand and saying to me, “Audie”—that was my nickname, after the war hero Audie Murphy—“you see that man there, Richard Nixon? Don't forget that face. He’s a liar and a crook." My father was a member of the Teamsters Union, so he knew plenty about liars and crooks from several angles of incidence.
Why do I remember this so well? Because my mother was sick. She was still in the house, and I can see her in full late-Eisenhower Administration colored hues sitting in the living room on the evening of September 26 watching the debate with my father and me. But she was clearly sick, again she was sick, and would soon have to go back to the hospital. I knew it. I remember vividly knowing it, and I remember being quietly worried out of my mind to the point of incipient panic.
Then, just a few days later on Sunday, October 2, the Washington Senators played their very last game in Griffith Stadium. It was against the Baltimore Orioles, and they lost. I was there. I cried when it was all over, and I mean really all over. As we kids knew, arrangements had been made to move the team to Minneapolis for the 1961 season. A new expansion franchise, also called the Washington Senators, was to implant itself in Washington.
This, of course, was catastrophic news, if not the actual end of the world then the closest thing to it I could imagine. Most of the adult baseball fans in the Washington area commenced to hate Calvin Griffith for his treachery and betrayal. Me, I couldn't be bothered with who the owner was. All I cared about were my heroes, my guys. This was a time when the core of major league baseball teams tended to stick together for longer periods than became the case after the advent of Curt Flood and free agency. You got to know these guys and think of them as a group, as a “band of brothers”—though at the time, forgive me please, I knew nothing about William Shakespeare. When a player you liked got traded, or got sent back to the minors, or got hurt bad, or retired, it was a serious emotional occasion.
Since I’d been four or five years old I recognized and was rooting for most of these guys, so I could not abandon them just because the franchise was leaving town. I made a determination: I would become a Minnesota Twins fan, and I would very deliberately try my hardest to care less about the new, expansion Senators. And that, in turn, meant that the Twins’ slugger Harmon Killebrew had always to do better than the new Senators’ slugger Frank Howard. I wanted and I even prayed for Frank Howard to strike out every time he went to bat. He struck out quite a lot, and so naturally I took some credit for that. I could really pray up a storm back then when it came to certain subjects.
Rooting for the Minnesota Twins turned out to be fairly easy in part because the new Senators were terrible, even worse than the old ones. In their first season they lost 100 games, an ignominious achievement in the baseball world. Worse from my point of view, the old stadium, Griffith Stadium, was no longer the home of the Washington team. A new stadium, RFK Stadium, was built, and it was hard to get to from Arlington. It was also a terrible stadium—too cold, too large, too remote from the field. I hated it because I hated the fact that it reminded me of what was now gone forever.
I had loved Griffith Stadium in part because when you walked toward it from where the car got parked you always smelled fresh baking bread. This was no mystical illusion; the Bond Bread factory was just down the street. Griffith Stadium was where I first met David Eisenhower, and it was where my father took me to every Senators-White Sox doubleheader, because at the Sealtest Dairy where he worked he knew some guy who worked for the Park Police who could somehow get free tickets for all the Senator-White Sox games. So back in those years I saw a lot of Luis Aparicio, Nellie Fox, Sherm Loller, Early Wynn, their slugger Ted Kluszewski, and the rest of the White Sox, who, as baseball fans will know, won the American League pennant in 1959—a rare event back then when the despicable Yankees, for once, did not carry the day. My father never took me to a game at RFK, but there are special reasons for that of which more below.
I was not the only one who felt this way about the Twins and the new Senators. My friend Johnny had an older brother named Paul who took the same point of view and who, like me, retained it for decades. From day one I have been a Twins fan, even though I’ve never been to a game in Minneapolis. I’ve only been to Minneapolis twice, and both times the Twins were not around––once they were on the road and once my visit occurred in the middle of a frozen Minnesota winter. After Camden Yards was built in Baltimore, I would occasionally go to that wonderful stadium to see the Twins. But I have followed every Twins box score, almost without exception, since April 1961. And I was rewarded for my loyalty: The Twins became a successful team, winning the American League pennant in 1965 (and going up three games to one over Sandy Koufax’s Los Angeles Dodgers before losing the Series), and even winning the World Series in 1987 and in 1991.
Meanwhile, the new Senators franchise never accomplished anything beyond an oscillating futility. Worse for those who trusted the owner, Bill Short, after only a decade he yanked the team out of Washington and took it to Texas, where it became the Texas Rangers. If any “new Senators” fans followed that franchise to Texas as I followed the old franchise to Minneapolis, I don’t know about them. And hard-hearted type that I am, I don’t care about them either. At least I avoided being heartbroken a second time when the new Senators also left town.
Since baseball returned to Washington for the 2005 season in the form of a National League franchise, with the Nationals coming down from Montréal where they used to be the Expos, I have been torn in my loyalties. It hasn’t been for practical purposes a difficult dilemma; since the Twins are in the American League and the Nationals are in the National League I could root for both—except, of course, during interleague play when the two teams very occasionally played one another. On those rare occasions my head told me to root for the Nationals but my heart continued to root for the Twins. How could I switch allegiance? What would Harmon Killebrew say?
I confess that it has been somewhat easier to remain a Twins fan not just because of habit and the investment of so much emotion over the years, but also because in the years immediately following 2005 the Twins were generally competitive and the young Nationals franchise was not. But in 2011, at the very moment of Harmon Killebrew's passing, that had changed at least temporarily. The Twins flat out stunk that year; they were the worst team in baseball. The Nationals, meanwhile, were improving, with a shot, it seemed, at finishing the year at .500. (They missed by one game, going 80-81.)
Now, I’m no fair-weather fan. I have suffered through more losing seasons, I think, as a Senators and Twins fan than most—excluding, of course, the long-suffering masochists who rooted for the Chicago Cubs before their miraculous 2016 season. But with Harmon Killebrew’s passing I felt emotionally prepared, after more than forty years in the Washington baseball wilderness, to finally flip my allegiance. I decided then that l would still cheer on both teams, but when they played each other I’d pull for the Nationals—and diligently peruse the Nationals’ box score in the morning before checking the Twins’ box score. It also helped at the time that the Nationals were in a league without the obscenity of the designated-hitter rule. It was one of my hopes that the American League would jettison this blot on the game before I died; alas, things have gone in the wrong direction….
As I said earlier, the Senators and Killebrew are all bound up together in a large but shapeless emotional wad somewhere down near the pit of my stomach. I remember so vividly the Nixon–Kennedy debate and the pain surrounding the last Senators' game in Griffith Stadium because on October 21 of that same year, of 1960, my mother died of breast cancer just about a week short of her 53rd birthday. My quiet panic on the night of September 26, 1960 turned out to have been fully justified.
I, her only child, born when she was 43 years old, was at age nine and a half fairly quickly shipped off to Miami Beach, Florida to live with two widowed aunts until my father could figure a way to put our lives back together, which he did by remarrying and giving me a stepmother. But under the circumstances, making frequent trips, or actually any trips, out to RFK once I was back living in Arlington was hard to do. I suppose we could have gone to see the Twins when they were in town, but for some reason it just never happened.
It took decades for me to realize that one of the reasons I continued to trust in the Minnesota Twins, continued to be emotionally bound up in them, was because they attached me back to my life a time when my mother was still alive. My decision to be loyal to them was of a piece with an implicit decision to remain loyal to my mother’s memory. It sounds entirely crazy, I know, but in the promiscuously associational way that our brains work, it actually makes a perfect of mystical kind of sense. I knew as a 9-year old that the Angel of Death tarried too long in Washington during the month of October 1960: First he took my beloved Washington Senators and my hero Harmon Killebrew away from me, and then 19 days later he took my mother.
You might think that a mother’s death and what amounted to sudden exile from a father and familiar surroundings would make all the baseball stuff seem very small by comparison. But if that is what you think then you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a child, and you know little of the array of defense mechanism a kid is capable of erecting. Pain vibrates and easily fuses with other pools of hurt in the inner world of a 9-year-old child. It was as if the known borders of my personal universe had suddenly dissolved; I no longer knew what was real or if anything was still reliable. When the wind gets knocked out of you at age 9 from several directions at once, you are in no position to analytically parse the causes. You just flail for a way to keep them at bay. Baseball helped; it was a way.
So yes, I mourned Harmon Killebrew when he died in 2011, but unlike most mourners I had a special reason for feeling so deeply about him. It was not just that he was a great player for my favorite team. It was not just the 573 home runs. It was not just that he was a great guy off the field as well as on it. It is that in my childhood memories, it is as if he knew me, really knew me together with my mother, my father, my aunts and uncles, my friends, my dog and my parakeet, everyone and everything. He was always there, has always been there, and in memory is still there now, on Opening Day in 2024, when it seems natural as can be for me to say, “I still love you, Harmon; say hello to my mother next time you see her in the great beyond.”
Waiting on the Cancer, October 1960
Thunderous pangs spread within
The lightning strikes deep, down, under;
Contentment’s lair long since caved in,
Serenity torn asunder.
Soul lashed with draught and doubt
Skin tingling as a windblown spider web
Pain will neither surcease nor release
A life at the far edge of its ebb.
Oh mother, oh mother, why you--and why me?
You did nothing to deserve this, at all.
What is to become of us now?
One last kiss, please, as the leaves begin to fall.
Written for Yahrzeit, 30 Tishrei 5772 (2011)