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Overview
A son, a father, a baseball team … This remarkable baseball memoir will touch the heart of any baseball fan who has ever shared a love for the game with a parent or child.
Award-winning sportswriter Terry Pluto (The Curse of Rocky Colavito) tells the story of a son and a father and the relationship they shared through their resilient devotion to one particularly frustrating baseball team, the Cleveland Indians (who always seemed to need just one more run to win).
The story includes the joys and struggles of growing older together, of coping with a sick parent, and, finally, of burying the man who indelibly shaped his son’s life. It also includes a lively history of the Cleveland Indians franchise, full of personal recollections about remarkable players and memorable moments from seasons past.
For so many people, baseball remains an important bridge across generations, sometimes the only topic of conversation when all other topics seem threatening. Absorbing his father’s love for the game, and their team, Pluto grew to understand and respect the often distant man who allowed himself few pleasures besides baseball in a life built around laboring to provide for his family. This book celebrates our ability to make that connection through baseball.
It is a heartfelt, memorable tale.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781886228719 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Gray & Company, Publishers |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2003 |
| Pages: | 234 |
| Sales rank: | 1,102,135 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.47(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
It is a Sunday night in late October, and the Cleveland Indians are in the World Series.
I’m still not used to this.
Neither is my father.
Nothing in our lives prepared us for the Indians in the World Series—and here they are in it for the second time in three years.
These were not his Indians.
These were not my Indians.
Our Tribe didn’t go to the World Series. But this is the 1997 World Series, the seventh game, the Indians vs. the Florida Marlins. I sit in the press box at Miami’s Pro Player Stadium, watching the Indians try to hold a 2–1 lead in the late innings, knowing they never will. They need another run. They always need another run. My heart beats a little faster. My throat is dry, even on this humid night. I am one of the lucky ones: I am a sportswriter. It is a blessing and a passion, watching these Indians and being paid to write about them. It still astonishes my father that his son goes to ballgames and a story appears in the newspaper the next day, a story about the Indians.
Our Indians.
And this is my job.
“I had to work for a living,” my father often told me.
Sometimes that annoyed me. The implication was clear: He worked, I play. He paid the dues, I rode on his back to a better life.
I let it pass.
I always let it pass.
To his credit, he never elaborated. For us, it was easier to go to a baseball game and pour salt on popcorn rather than on old wounds. It was more fun (and safer) to talk about the Indians than ourselves. Some psychologists might have a problem with that; they’d say we needed to cut a vein and let it bleed. Spill our guts. Say what was really on our minds. I don’t think so. In those moments when we did really talk, I got a pretty good idea what was on my father’s mind. He worked at a job he hated for most of his life, because it was the right thing to do. He supported his wife and two kids. He played by the rules and in the end, he thought he didn’t get much out of it.
Meanwhile, I caught a break. I never have to punch in or punch out. I don’t have set office hours. I go to games and go to lunch with men whose names are in the newspapers. I can write in the morning or in the evening, and no boss is looking over my shoulder. What my father would have given to have that life. But nothing I could do would ever give him that life. Nothing I could say would ever change what happened to him. He grew up during the Depression; I grew up in the 1960s. He lost four years to the Army during World War II; I spent four years in college. He was the first in his family to graduate from high school; it was a given that I’d have a chance at higher education. For him, the dream was a steady job, a good family, and a house in the suburbs. It was the dream of millions from his generation, men and women who knew only the Depression and the world at war during their youth. They sacrificed for us to go to college, to find work that was more than a job, to be happy. My father wanted all that for me, he really did—but a part of him wished he could have had it for himself, and a part of him couldn’t help but be envious when he saw his son at ballgames, or when he saw his son’s name and picture in the newspaper. That’s because part of him knows he worked harder to give me that chance than I did to get it. I can’t disagree with that. He never really said this, but I knew . . . just as I knew talking about it would do little good. So we talked about the Indians. And yes, he still threw in his line about having to work for a living, but I refused to bite. Sometimes I was annoyed—but I was always silent.
Only now, I wish he’d tell me how he had to WORK for a living—just once more.
Only now, I wish he’d say just about anything.
On this night in October, with the Indians in the seventh game of the 1997 World Series, my father is alive, but he no longer really speaks.
One word.
MAN.
Over and over, he says Man . . . MAN . . . MAN!
And reading: He can’t read.
My father used to love to read my stories. I found this out—not from him, but from others. He’d tell them. He’d show them my stories and my books. But he didn’t talk about them with me. Sometimes, he’d even say, “I heard the Indians were about to do this . . .”
I’d say, “Dad, I know. I wrote that story.”
Talk about being put in your place. Here, my own father didn’t even remember what his son wrote. Now I just wish he’d say that one more time, that he’d heard something about the Indians—something I’d written. Instead, he looks at my picture in the newspaper over my columns. He recognizes me. He shows the picture to the few people who still come to see him. But he can’t read the story under the picture.
Can’t talk. Can’t read.
Now, I wish he could tell me about his job—those long hours in a dark grocery warehouse making sure that the right trucks took the right products to the right supermarkets. That was his life. All he heard was when something went wrong. The wrong truck went to the wrong place. The right truck had the wrong products. The truck was late, or the truck didn’t get there at all. As I sit in the press box on the night of October 26, 1997, waiting to see if the Indians will actually win a World Series, I think of my father.
I am not with him, but I can see him.
He sits in his special recliner chair. His right hand is in his lap, nestled softly on a pillow. The right arm is paralyzed, and he keeps the arm in front of him so he doesn’t forget about it.
There have been times when he’s lost track of that right arm, then sat on it—then screamed. The arm is paralyzed, but not dead. By keeping the arm on a pillow in his lap, he knows where it is and can keep it out of trouble. Sometimes, I think about that—about having to worry about sitting on your arm or getting your fingers caught in the spokes of a wheelchair.
He sits in that chair wearing Depends under his Nike sweatpants, because he can’t always make it to the bathroom in time. He sits in that chair with pain shooting down his right arm, an electric bolt that varies in intensity but never really stops. His right arm can’t move, but it sure can hurt. He sits in that chair at the age of seventy- seven watching the Indians and the Florida Marlins in the seventh game of the 1997 World Series, and knowing I am at the game.
How do I know?
Because he occasionally points to the screen, trying to tell something to his caregiver, an angel of a woman named Karen Cochran.
“Man . . . MAN . . . MAN!” he says.
“Terry’s at the game?” asks his caregiver.
“Yes,” he says.
It’s strange. Once in a while, he’ll come out with another word—a Yes or No. When he does, he’ll sometimes mean No when he says Yes. And sometimes he’ll get it right. My father suffered a stroke in 1993. It was a major one, the kind that killed Richard Nixon. The difference was that Nixon had a series of strokes and mercifully passed away. My father just had the Big One. It wasn’t big enough to take away his life—just the life that he once knew. It sentenced him to a life few of us would consider worth living. But on this night, my father isn’t thinking about his stroke. He’s thinking the same thing I am, even though we’re 300 miles apart: In his Sarasota living room, he is thinking the Indians need another run. I’m thinking the same thing in the Miami press box.
He raised me with the Indians. We both have so much history with this team. We went to about 500 games together at the old Stadium, and watched another 500 on TV. My father taught me that the Indians will never hold a 2–0 lead—especially not in the seventh game of the World Series. Not with young Jaret Wright tiring, and Jose Mesa warming up in the bullpen.
When it is 2–1 in the eighth inning, my father and I are still thinking about one more run. Because this is a Sunday night game and my deadlines are tight, I am writing a story about the Indians winning the World Series. I am writing it, not believing a word because I know the Indians will never make the lead hold up. But I have to write it just in case, so I can send it to the newspaper office as soon as the game is over. They want the story RIGHT NOW—right after the last out. So I write the story about a World Series winner in Cleveland while watching the Indians blow their 2–0 lead . . . their 2–1 lead . . . and finally lose, 3–2, in the 12th inning.
When it happened, I was not surprised.
The Indians needed one more run, and they didn’t get it. What else is new?
The day after the World Series, I was at my father’s home in Sarasota. We were watching ESPN, and Peter Gammons was talking about the seventh game.
As Gammons spoke, my father held up one finger. I asked a couple of questions, trying to figure out what he meant with the one finger. “One more run?” I finally asked.
“Yes!” he roared.
“They needed one more run?” I asked.
“Man . . . MAN . . . MAN!”
“I know,” I said. “I was thinking the same thing. They were never going to make that 2–0 lead hold up.”
He shook his head and waved at the TV set.
“I knew they’d blow it, too,” I said.
He laughed. We both laughed. We have history with this team. I was born in 1955, the year after the Indians won 111 games. It was an American League record for the most victories until the 1998 Yankees came along.
In 1954, that team with the greatest pitching staff ever assembled, according to my father—well, that team was swept in the World Series. Four & Out. One of the biggest flops by one of the best regular- season teams in World Series history, a team with tremendous pitching that should have ensured a long, competitive World Series.
Instead, it was Four & Out.
That was our Tribe.
I was born on June 12, 1955. That means that I was conceived toward the end of the 1954 regular season. I like to think it happened during the World Series. I’m not sure when it happened, and this was not the sort of thing I ever imagined of discussing with my parents—but it would have been appropriate, my parents first giving me life as the Indians were falling flat on their faces in the World Series. My father and I both took a masochistic Tribe fan’s delight in talking about how I had to wait forty years for the Indians to go back to the World Series. My father was born in 1920, the year the Indians won their first World Series. Of course, he was only six months old when they won, so he has no memories of it—and it really doesn’t count, as I liked to tell him.
He waited twenty- eight years for his Indians to go to the World Series.
That was in 1948.
The Indians actually won the 1948 World Series. He saw it. He liked to talk about it. I eventually got tired of hearing about it. Now, I wish he’d tell me about Bill Veeck, Gene Bearden, and Lou Boudreau one more time—and if he could talk, he probably would. He’d talk about those Indians and these Indians, about 1948 and the Tribe of the middle 1990s. Even with his body ravaged by a stroke, he’d rather talk about baseball than anything else.
Our family is small. My mother died of a heart attack in 1984. I have an older brother, Tom, but because my brother is ten years older, we both felt like only children. For my father and me, the Indians have been like a second family—a more interesting family. When I was growing up, he talked to me of players from the 1920s through the 1950s. Starting in the 1960s, we were on common baseball ground.
Since the stroke- enforced silence built a wall around his life, the Indians have been one of the few ways to penetrate it. I can talk to him about this team, or the teams of his youth. I can look at pictures of the players, and suddenly I realize that it’s like a family album.
That was what I thought on the day after the Indians lost the 1997 World Series as I sat in his living room, looking at this man in a recliner with his right arm nestled on that pillow.
This man who is my father.
[Excerpted from Our Tribe, © Terry Pluto. All rights reserved. Gray & Company, Publishers.]
Table of Contents
1. One More Run2. The Stroke
3. The Spiders
4. The Name Game
5. Manny Ramirez and Joe Jackson
6. 1920 Season
7. League Park
8. Feller & Wright
9. Boudreau
10. At War
11. Veeck and the 1948 Indians
12. Larry Doby
13. 1954
14. Roger Maris, Rocky Colavito, and Frank Lane
15. Our Place, the Stadium
16. The Sad Saga of 1970
17. Wayne Garland and the Power of Delusion
18. The Baseball Beat
19. The Pennant
20. 1997
Sources
Index