Yankee Love: It’s Primal (Open Letter to a Dodger Fan)

By Danny DiPierro

I can certainly relate to your [sadness] about Rupert Murdoch and the current Dodger ownership. I've had to deal with the megalomaniac felon George Steinbrenner (and now his sons) since the 70's. I've always rationalized: "It's like being an American in spite of Nixon, Reagan and Bush I & II". Would be so much happier with O'Malley or Oakland's Haas family (guess you have to be named Walter), but there just doesn't seem to be very many owners out there like that.

But I do find it really hard to believe that anyone could actually be "revolted" by the likes of Derek Jeter, Joe Torre, Bernie Williams, or Mariano Rivera. This modern era of the Yankees since 1995 is pretty solid, a little straight if you really get down to it. They even used to tell Mattingly and Munson to shave and cut their hair! I always leaned more towards the likes of Boomer Wells and David Cone, or more recently Giambi and Swisher, but jocks are mostly just jocks.

Hey, I've heard every "Yankees Suck" rant that there is. I've been in Fenway Park at a Yankees/Red Sox game, even! And I do have a book in my library titled "The Official New York Yankee Hater's Guide". I simply smile and look at history and Cooperstown. I really don't have to argue too loudly.

I think Ken Burns did a fairly good job giving me the true background of how baseball (and particularly the Yankees and a few other teams) has run the show with money, power and politics all the way back to Spalding at the very beginning. I certainly had been quite naive to all of that until maybe the 70's with George and free agency.

But my love of baseball/Yankees is not so much nostalgia as it is primal. My Mom and brother and I watched Yankee games religiously all summer long, keeping score in front of the TV. Every day as I played sandlot games I fantasized about being Joe Pepitone at first or Mantle in center or at bat. And every year my Dad took us to a double-header to watch Mickey and the boys. There was really nothing better than that smell of cigar smoke outside and organ music on the PA, and that amazing green grass with white lines, or the sound of the crowd cheering (and stands shaking like a subway train) when Mantle hit a home run, amazing!!! And who did the broadcasting, sharing every baseball story I ever learned from? Red Barber, Mel Allen, Phil Rizzuto, Gerry Coleman, Joe Garagiola, these guys watched and even played with Ruth, Gehrig and DiMaggio, or against Satchel Page and Ted Williams, in 100 World Series games!

Ah, growing up in the1950's era of NY Yankees/Giants/Brooklyn Dodgers! To be perfectly frank, as a kid, the fantasy of a "team of giants" first caught my imagination, visions of Jack (from the Beanstalk) and Paul Bunyan stomping around the outfield! It was ironic that I really became an avid Yankee fan during the '62 Yankees/Giants World Series, with a transistor radio and all day games played at the end of my 6th grade school day. That line drive from McCovey to Richardson cemented it. (Remember, it was not too many years after the devastating Bill Mazeroski walk-off that left Yogi and Mickey devastated in Pittsburgh.)

With a legacy of Joe DiMaggio/Jackie Robinson/Willie Mays/Duke Snider/Pee Wee Reese/Casey Stengel/Leo Durocher/Roy Campanella/Yogi Berra/Mantle and Maris/Whitey Ford/Sandy Koufax, it was pretty hard not to believe that the center of all of the baseball world was NYC, if not right in the House that Ruth Built in the Bronx itself! Like most everything else, the medium is the message! McLuhan and Andy Warhol knew what they were talking about.

I couldn't change this deep heritage any more than I could forget I come from New York, or that I live and love art and/or that I'm Italian-American.

Hope to see you [at a game] this summer.

True Confessions 2011

By Richard Rosen

Editor’s Note: It seems only fitting that the first post (well technically second) on the new Baseball Diary should be written by Richard Rosen, as he was the first person, besides me, to write an article for the original publication. (You can read his 1982 True Confessions at the Archive, where it’s also the first entry.) AND, of at least equal importance, he was the person who actually turned me into a baseball fan, but that’s a story for another time (that’s right, there’s MY true confession: I never watched baseball or any sport as a kid and underwent the conversion as an adult!) Unbidden, he has sent this along, and we hope there will be more in the weeks ahead.

Ah, Baseball Diary. Has it really been nearly 30 years since I wrote “True Confessions”? Lessee: 2011 minus 1982, yep, nearly 30. Well, it seems only fitting that I revisit this subject as my first submission, but this time with a slightly different slant. Back then the lame running joke was I didn’t want my yoga teacher to know about me collecting baseball cards, as if she acshully gave a hoot. In 1982 I’d been a student for less than 2 years, and I was trying to get some traction in the local community. Collecting baseball cards, the implication was, that if the word got out, it would throw my seriousness into question and I’d be seen as a faux yogi. Well, here I am today, and lemme tell ya, go ahead and put this on the front page of the Times for all I care. Did I ever get my yoga traction? I’m director of the Piedmont Yoga Studio in Oakland, a contributing editor at Yoga Journal, I’ve written four books on yoga and countless articles. I could go on but you get the picture. I’ve got some extra traction if anybody out there needs some, though it won’t do you much good unless it’s somehow connected with yoga.

So my true confession this time doesn’t carry the weight it did last time, mostly because all my students know I’m a baseball fan and consider it just one more endearing quirk of their slowly mentally deteriorating teacher. But I have to tell you: I own an iPad and there’s this app.

Way back in 1957, the year I wrote about in my first true confession, there wasn’t much baseball on TV. Remember the Game of the Week? The announcers were Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese. The former was a Hall-of-Fame pitcher from Arkansas, the last one (at that time) to win 30 games in a season; the latter an eventual Hall-of-Fame shortstop who played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and whose greatest achievement probably was his support of Jackie Robinson. I lived for that game back then, on my parents miniature (by today’s standards) black-and-white TV. When the Yankees were on, as they often were, being the perennial World Champs in the 50s and early 60s, there was nothing that could stop me from watching that game. I still vividly recall the incredible charge I would get from a full house at Yankee Stadium, the really old one, before the mid 70s renovation, with the right field foul pole, what, about 296 feet from home, and the Mick batting left-handed against some poor right-handed sucker on the mound. Now THOSE were the days.

Except they’re not anymore. Because there’s this app, MLB.com At Bat 11, which, for $115, gets you EVERY game EVERY DAY from the first pitch of opening day to the last pitch of the playoffs. Well akshully not every game, the locals are blacked out, so I don’t get the Giants or the A’s (no loss on the latter). BUT I do get every Yankee game (except when they’re pummeling the A’s) in glorious color, and so the first question I ask when I wake up in the morning is: what time are the they playing today? That way I can organize my time: get the stuff needing some concentration out of the way, then do the mechanical stuff I can do while the game is on. Do I miss the old days, the nervous anticipation of Saturday’s big game, the excitement of seeing players I only read about in the sports section, and the ultimate high of a Mantle homer at the roaring Stadium. Um, no, well maybe Mick a little, but now that I know what a jerk he was the shine is off the penny. No no no, gimme baseball EVERY day, flipping from one game to another, Prince Fielder whacking a homer, Troy Tulo what’s his name playing short for the Rockies, the Phillies starters, and best of all Boston being crushed by KC (never watch when they’re winning, which prob’ly means no World Series for me this year). True confession 2011? Pretty tame, but heck I'm nearly 30 years older. Oops, gotta go, Yanks are playing the Brewers at 4.

What the Heck is Baseball Diary?

Way back in the 1980's, instead of blogs there were zines. Relatively speaking, a whole lot less people did zines than now do blogs (although there were more than you think, just take a look at an old Factsheet Five). Zines were actually words written on paper, in various formats, often with a typewriter, and stapled together. Some (a VERY few) of the formats were professional magazine quality, but most were extremely low-fi, because the publishers had no money. They were distributed by hand and snail mail. Baseball Diary was in the low-fi category, but what we lacked in glossy paper we made up for in writing and graphics. (Hey, Stephen King became a subscriber, that must count for something?) Started in 1982, Baseball Diary's "mission statement" (yeah, right!) was to explore the intersection between baseball and art, usually observed through the lens of the mundane details of everyday life. The interpretation of what might fit into our pages was so broad that almost anything baseball related was publication fodder. The solicitation for submissions read: "Baseball Diary is accepting submissions of a personal, penetrating nature related to baseball: prose, poetry visuals and letters are welcome". BD was only published during the baseball season, and for most of its life, it came out weekly during those months.

In honor of Baseball Diary's 29th Anniversary (why wait for 30?), we are starting a new volume this season (hoping it will continue year-round), and will begin posting most back issues, starting with Vol I #8 from 1982. The older issues will be posted at the archive blog: a "time capsule" of some baseball fans (and non-fans) living in Los Angeles (and other places) in the 80's. Actual evidence is shaky, but I believe Volume X Number 1, from October, 1994, was the last issue. It was the only issue in a different format: instead of the 8 1/2 x 11 stapled pages, it was half the size in a kind of "booklet" format. And starting with this post, Baseball Diary Vol XI is born! To all of you who may be interested in participating, send us your baseball related personal and penetrating essays and art. Our goal is to have a BD "correspondent" representing (you don't have to live there) every major league city (or not; you don't have to "represent" a city to be published). Many of the original writers and artists have promised posts, and we hope to find a lot of newcomers. Hope you will be along for the ride. Play ball!