As I was finishing up a meeting the other evening, a sports new alert popped up across my phone that Roger Maris’ American League record of 61 homers in a season had been broken.
When I got home, I asked my wife Pat had she seen that on her phone.
She quietly uttered an unenthused “huh huh.”
While I’m not sure she even knew who he was, she obviously couldn’t have cared less when I told her that Maris had held that record for 61 years before it was broken.
That’s quite a long time in today’s baseball world for such a record to hold up, I thought.
I must confess that I’d never heard of the American League baseball player who broke the record.
I simply don’t follow professional baseball like I use to when I was a kid playing the sport.
I was 13 years old when Maris set the record. I had the opportunity to see him play that year in Kansas City and the New York Yankees won that game easily.
Had the chance the next year to see him play again in KC.
My late Uncle Jim took his son (my cousin) and me the two consecutive years to see the Yankees and KC.
Growing up, the Yankees were absolutely my favorite team in all of baseball. I could tell you most all their players and there were some great ones.
Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Tony Kubek, Bobby Richardson, Yogi Berra, Elston Howard, Ralph Terry, Bill the “Moose” Skowron, Clete Boyer, were some of them.
Jim Bouton was a great knuckleball pitcher for the Yanks and the team had to get a larger catcher’s mitt for Berra and Howard to catch him.
Terry pitched one of the games I saw in KC and gave up three consecutive home runs. Still, the Yanks won easily.
Whitey Ford was the pitcher in the other game I got to see.
It was a thrill to watch those Big League players in action.
After I got home from that meeting, I began to reminisce how on Saturday afternoons I would watch big league baseball games either with my dad or my granddad Doc if I was over at his house. Doc had played some semi-pro ball in his earlier days and he loved to watch baseball on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.
He and I enjoyed watching at that time Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese who were broadcasting the games.
My dad enjoyed watching it some, but not as much as Doc did.
Doc really didn’t care who was playing necessarily, he just liked watching major league baseball.
Sure brings back memories.
For some reason, throughout the years, I really have lost interest in watching professional baseball. Not sure why, just have.
But I really enjoyed playing ball as a kid and also watching the major leaguers on the tube.