ghosts in the stadium: My Life in Nine Innings

  I’ve always said that there’s ghosts in Yankee Stadium

because it seems like strange things happen all the time.

—Derek Jeter

 PRE-GAME

My parents, Kenneth Cooper and Natalie Levy Cooper, courting.

      I had my own encounter with the ghosts in 2008 when dear friend Saul and I took our daughters to Yankee Stadium. The girls had been raised properly, meaning they had been introduced early to baseball, in the backyard of course, but also in the stories we told them, occasionally to rolled eyes if we went on too long or repeated too much, as dads will do.

      As far as we know, none on the early 20th-century Coopers played baseball, or any other sport for that matter, unless you count schoolyard brawling in which my uncles were said to have excelled. But as Jews new to a location will do, Grandpa Moses co-founded a synagogue in Lynchburg, Va., and that was the beginning of my lifelong loyalty to the Yankees.

      Unlikely, I know, but bear with me.

      Moses's eldest daughter, my aunt Esther, was raised in her father's synagogue, and loved it so much that she decided after college to find herself a rabbi to marry. But where to find one, a single one, in Lynchburg? Her quest took her all the way to New York, of course, and there she found a brilliant young rabbi named Maurice at a synagogue in the Bronx (see where this is going?).

      Aunt Esther's living in proximity to "The Big Ballpark in the Bronx" and her fortuitous introduction to Rabbi Maurice's secretary, Natalie from Newburgh, put her in the perfect position to serve as matchmaker for the young couple who would become my parents.

      A year before the match was lit, Daddy was on a United States military transport ship returning from his four years of service in the European theater of World War II. He said to his Army buddy "I'm going to marry the first white girl I meet."

      That quote shocks our contemporary conscience, and would have disqualified him from holding elected office today. But I have learned to accept that he was a man of his times, both culturally as well as legally, as it was then against Virginia law for a couple to marry across racial lines. He was also a bit of a prankster so I have forgiven him, or would if he were here.

      Anyway, Esther brought these two together, and through the summer of '46, they courted via the Southern Railway between New York and Lynchburg. On one of his visits to New York, they attended a ballgame in Yankee Stadium.

      Sixty-two years later I walked from the concession stand concourse through the tunnel and into that very ballpark on the mezzanine level. I was standing at the railing on the third-base side taking it all in: the iconic facade, the Bronx skyline beyond and the grass. 

      Up from my subconsciousness came a blubbering stream of tears. Then I saw the ghosts of my parents in the left-field seats where I had always pictured them on their 1946 date, when she had reached across him for a hot dog, blocking his view for just an instant while somebody hit something somewhere and with some significance. 

      No damage was done to their courtship, but he teased her about it regularly—and she rolled her eyes, for the next 30 years.

1st INNING (ages 0-10)     

      I was a baby boy of summer, born five years after the hot dog incident, which began a long but occasionally interrupted run of baseball-themed birthdays along with a much less frequently interrupted love affair with the Yankees. They presided over major league baseball, winning six of the nine World Series in which they competed during my first decade.

      Lynchburg was and still is a long way from New York (about eight hours on those infrequent occasions when the train runs on-time), but television brought the Yankees to me on a regular basis. Watching the games on our old three-channel black and white set, I heard the announcers say something about scorecards but had no idea what to do with one, so I devised my own method, writing the names of the Yankees starting lineup (from memory) on a plain tablet, then adding my idiosyncratic symbols to record the play-by-play as described by my favorite announcer, the legendary St. Louis Cardinals pitcher, Dizzy Dean.

      In April of my seventh year, my sister, Tina, was born and shortly thereafter, Daddy and I escaped the commotion at home by riding a Southern Railway train to Washington to see my Yankees whup the Senators as they had done every year of my life according to the man seated beside us in Washington's Griffith Stadium. In the ninth inning, Yogi Berra smacked a home run to right field, a moment that Daddy caught on film and processed in the same chemicals he used to develop X-rays of his medical patients.

      Our new friend and seatmate went home disappointed again as the Yankees won 11-3. After the final out, Daddy hustled me down to the Yankees locker room into which he hopefully passed my cap, causing me a moment of confused anxiety until it emerged minutes later, autographed by Yankee relief pitcher Virgil Trucks, known to his teammates as "Fire" because of his reputation as the guy brought in to put out the fire.

      This was Fire's last season as a big-league pitcher, so it's possible that my very first autograph was also his very last. (Later, in both his and my years as Ol' Timers, I showed that photo to Yogi Berra. He grinned that Yogi grin and said That's Griffith Stadium!).

      Back home, the summers stretched into infinity. Having no school, chores or any other commitments for that matter, long days of baseball on the field next to my house and on the Little League fields all over town held me in a solid connection with baseball between televised games on the weekends.

      My coach decided I would be a pitcher, which suited me just fine as the Yankees had provided me with several excellent role models including Whitey Ford and Ryne Duren.

      Ford was the winning pitcher in six of his 13 appearances in World Series games during his time as my hero and role model. But it was the fire-balling but sometimes wild pitcher Ryne Duren to whom I was compared by my coach on the day he called time-out and walked slowly to the mound where I was experiencing difficulty locating my pitches.

      He leaned down and asked, “You ever heard of Ryne Duren?” I took that as a compliment, and my mood brightened. He left me in the game and my pitching career with the Cubs continued for another season, ending when I was 10 and no longer able to get Little League hitters out.

2nd INNING (10-20)

      The Yankees' continued to win in the early 1960s, and regularly appeared in the World Series during my pre-adolescence. But watching the games on TV became complicated by the frequent co-occurrence of the World Series with the Jewish Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.

      By this time the portable transistor radio had become widely available and affordable, so these magical plastic boxes began to be hidden in the pockets of the suits which my friends and I wore to the religious services. Whenever possible, we would excuse ourselves and head for the boys' bathroom where we could check the score of the games before returning to the sanctuary where our parents remained.

      I can't say that they knew what we were up to, and why we needed to use the bathroom so much, especially on Yom Kippur when nobody was drinking anything.

      My devotion to baseball and most other things not involving girls began to decline in my adolescence, which paralleled the Yankee players' apparent loss of interest in the game. By the time I was 14, the Yankees dynasty was over. At the same time, I directed whatever athleticism I may have had to other sports: tennis in spring and summer and basketball in fall and winter.

      But a glowing ember of passion for baseball remained and was re-ignited in 1966 when I was offered a ticket to my first World Series game. My best friend Steve, a die-hard fan of the Orioles, had an extra ticket to Series game 4: Los Angeles versus Baltimore. I jumped at the opportunity, despite its requiring an eight-hour round trip car ride wrapped around a three-hour game lacking in Yankees.

      It was so worth it. Having recently retired from Little League pitching, I was dazzled by the Baltimore pitchers who allowed only two Dodgers to score during the four-game Series. From the excitement of that peak experience, baseball and I took a break from one another while the Yankees took a break from the World Series that lasted well into the decade of my twenties.

3rd INNING (20-30)

A re-creation of that time the blind and drunk umpire toppled over.

      I finally came to the difficult realization that a career in baseball requires more discipline and inherent talent than my childhood aspirations were able to sustain into adulthood. Softball appeared; a game derived from baseball but with requirements similar to but different from baseball's.

      Softball was more suited to the weekend athlete who saw nothing incongruous in enjoying a cold beer while also playing first base. Softball also had the decided advantage of freedom from traditional gender discrimination, giving rise to co-ed games.

      Married and other couples, which in our twenties began to include those with babies, could show up at a park after work or on the weekends, and discover the pleasures of softball as recreation and a social event that reminded us of our youth, but made no great demands for skill nor a serious commitment to winning. As a casual and social variant on baseball, softball fit perfectly into my summer tradition.

      My 26th birthday ballgame in 1977 was a classic.     

      The field was, unlike most of central Texas, the perfectly level, boulder- and cow patty-free front yard of my house in Round Rock. The grass was cut perfectly short by my good neighbor, a cattle rancher with a tractor and shredder, who kindly offered to hit that field with a couple licks of the shredder so as to make it look not so snake-y.

      The players on one team consisted of graduate students at the University of Texas who were taking the day off from their studies. My team on this day comprised mostly carpenters, some of whom still had all ten fingers, several of whom were former and future poets, one of whom was a round-eyed Buddhist philosopher and one of whom was their construction foreman, a veteran craftsman who regularly threatened to retire because of his diminishing ability to see, but who never seemed able to tear himself away from the job.

      He told us before the game that he would prefer not to play but rather to call balls and strikes at a safe distance behind home plate but within arm's reach of the beer cooler. Perfect. The game's details are lost to memory, and play was halted abruptly when the blind drunk umpire and his lawn chair toppled over.

      The players enjoyed a potluck dinner and were conversing beside the garden when a Kenyan graduate student bolted out of his chair, ran to the ball field and grabbed a bat with which he proceeded to attack a rattlesnake, chased from the ball field by the tractor and shredder, and who had innocently wandered into the party.

      Leaping high in the air, our African friend yelled THE LIFE OF THIS SNAKE IS IN THE TAIL. THE LIFE OF THIS SNAKE IS IN THE TAIL, all the while slamming the bat down in the vicinity of the poor snake's rattle. The assault continued until the Buddhist philosopher calmly and efficiently administered a blow to the head of the snake with a garden spade, then quoted the Dalai Lama's pronouncement following his having squashed a pesky mosquito: Circle of life.

      Birthday cake with a baseball-themed frosting was served.

4th INNING (30-40)

Brady Anderson tossing me the ball.

      In 1976 America turned 200, I turned 25, and Daddy, in the final year of his life, turned 65. On the TV in his hospital room we watched the Yankees in the World Series for what we knew would be our last time. Between innings he asked me what my plans were. I answered that I was planning to be a good father.

      What I didn't say is that I had no clue what being a good father entailed. Maybe I was trying to tell him that he had been a good father? Not sure, but I have come to believe that we don't know how to be a parent until we have a real child whose specific needs, beyond the basics, are not known to us unless and until we've had a few years to learn who this child is. Turns out we're not all the same. Who knew?

      Harriett Rheingold knew. In a graduate psychology course focusing on infant and toddler development, I had learned from Prof. Rheingold, said to be the grande dame of child development, that the most important thing a parent or teacher can do is to pay attention.

      So, for Samm's first few years I carefully observed that her specific needs were to be physically and mentally active, verbally, visually and lovingly engaged with her family, curious about the world, respectful of and attentive to her teachers. All those attributes came together one day when she was six, and her cousin David came to visit, bringing with him the whiffle ball and bat he had just gotten for his birthday.

      We had fun playing whiffle ball in the backyard, but I learned afterwards in the house that she had quickly grown fond of this new activity. The TV in the den was tuned to the Baltimore Orioles baseball game, which I absent-mindedly switched off. She raised her voice at me a little, demanding that I turn it back on. I want to see how they do it. 

      So, the first baseball action Samm ever saw was Oriole centerfielder Brady Anderson stealing second base, finishing his sprint in a head-first slide and the proverbial cloud of dust. It was a defining moment for Samm; as Doris Troy's classic R&B song goes Just one look, that's all it took.

      Soon Samm was drawing pictures of Brady, including their wedding picture in center field. A mere month later she proved just how bewitched she had become when my mother-in-law offered to take her to Disney World for her seventh birthday coming up in July. It was apparent to me that a counter-offer might be accepted, so I proposed an alternative to Disney World: Would you rather go to see an Orioles game?

      On her birthday, July 3, the Orioles were scheduled to play a night game, not optimal for a seven-year old. So, on Sunday afternoon, July 2, 1989, we had overpriced scalper's tickets to see Brady and the Orioles versus the visiting Tigers of Detroit. As the Orioles were taking fielding practice, Samm and I stood by the field and watched as Brady came trotting right toward us on his way to the dugout.

      Noticing the ball in this left hand, I held Samm up as high as I could lift her, pointed to her and yelled to Brady It's her birthday. He met the moment, as they say, tossed me the ball, then autographed it with "Happy Birthday, Samm." 

      Parents, fathers in particular, seem almost hard-wired to transmit love of the game to the next generation, and in this regard, I think I had become a good father.

5th Inning (40-50)

With Saul, observing the players' strike.

      My dear friend and fellow good father, Saul, has been a constant presence in my life since 1984 when my family and I moved onto his street in Maryland. He and I shared many experiences but also values, and professional specializations as well.

      One significant thing we share is love of baseball, but also a fascination with the care, development and education of children, especially those whose troubled and troubling emotions and behaviors make it difficult for them to participate in many experiences typically enjoyed in childhood, such as summer camp.

      In recognition of this widespread problem, in 1996 Saul and I co-founded Camp Attaway as a therapeutic recreation experience which we co-directed until our retirements, mine in 2008 and his in 2019.      

      Among the camp's carefully selected activities was kickball, which is like softball in that each is a derivative of baseball. Kickball was fun for most children and provided a number of therapeutic opportunities. The counselors used the game to teach children, along with the basic physical skills, how to be a good sport, and a team-player who encouraged others and experienced fun regardless of the score.

      During one kickball game in 1997 the campers taught us a lesson about our camp that we had not anticipated. A dispute arose over something, and the children blamed the unsatisfactory resolution of the dispute on the counselors who were simply trying to maintain an orderly game.

      Failing to persuade the counselors to reverse their ruling, the campers declared a strike, just as they had seen professional baseball players do over a labor dispute in a recent season. They walked off the field, leaving the surprised counselors somewhat paralyzed and without an effective response.

      I noticed Saul watching from the sidelines and laughing. He explained to me that it was a good thing the players went on strike because it was a clear instance of their having come together as a group to take collective action, something most of these children needed to learn in order to be active participants in most aspects of their young lives, including family, school and the fun to be enjoyed in extracurricular activities.

      Samm turned nine, holding fast to her affection for Brady Anderson of the Orioles. Barbara and I turned 40, having logged a few years as parents and enjoying professional success. It was time to get a dog.

      Samm had been asking us for one and we had been stalling for several years in an effort to assure ourselves that she would be taking at least some responsibility for a pet while we continued to build our professional careers. Our delaying tactics included filling her bedroom with adorable stuffed puppies, foxes and whales, then actual animals including Amazing Sea Monkeys and a cute hamster whose lifeless furry body ended up in our freezer for a time while we figured out what the hell to do with her.

      Samm went along with the charade and parade of surrogate pets, but was persistent in her campaign for a dog. Our final attempt at delay was to insist that we achieve a familial consensus as to the dog's name.

      I only recall one of the unsuccessful nominees, probably because Tenure was the only one that achieved the status of having a file folder labeled as such by Barbara who was confident that I would soon be elevated to that academic level. In the end, it was deemed too clever, and the hunt for the perfect name continued until Samm, falling back on her solid and foundational love of Brady Anderson, began to insist that the future dog's name be Nine, the number Brady wore on his back.  

      No one, not even Samm, liked it. Then for some reason, I remembered a little bit of the Hebrew I had learned in my early twenties while living much of a year in Israel, so I suggested the Hebrew equivalent of nine, which did the trick because it sounded more or less like a dog's name. And with that, Taysha took her place as a member of our family, a place that Brady Anderson never could have occupied no matter how many bases he would steal.

      Because they live seven times faster than humans, dogs are destined to break our hearts. Taysha died on the morning of my 50th birthday. Otherwise, that party and that ballgame were the best of my life.

      My mother came to DC with a 50th birthday poem she had written. Arthur Watson brought “David's 50th” t-shirts for everyone. Our insurance agent with recent replacements of both knees called balls and strikes and managed to stay upright for several innings. Taysha would have loved all the ear-scratching attention she would have received from the assembled friends and family, and she would have run her fluffy tail off chasing all the errant softballs.

6th INNING (50-60)

      Despite my decades of loyalty to the Yankees, until 2008 when I read that the 85-year-old Stadium was coming down, I had never experienced it for myself. Having seen it on TV for decades, though, it somehow felt like a familiar place. Then Saul said let's make a father-daughter pilgrimage, and I realized he was so right.

      Samm was living and studying in New Haven at the time, so she was easily persuaded to take the short ride to the Bronx. Julia pretended to be skeptical. She was certain that Samm and I had been responsible for the rain that had tried to wash out any number of father-daughter camping trips, and she was sure that going to the game with us would guarantee a rain-out. Old stories and teases, trotted out again and again, persist long after they have ceased resembling truth yet retain their power to bring smiles and memories of good times gone by.

      The surfacing of memories occurs with such ease and frequency that we are likely to take for granted a mental process that is anything but simple, and to presume on the basis of little to no evidence that all of us encode, store and retrieve memories of shared experiences in much the same fashion. In my typical reliance on baseball to illustrate a point, I'll offer the following reflection on minor league games to demonstrate a major phenomenon.

      I have often experienced games in the quaint old Lynchburg City Stadium with my sister, Tina (born in the year of Yogi's homer). She loves our annual trips to our hometown ballpark where we watch the minor league Hillcats while gobbling up all manner of stadium junk food, and sometimes sharing an enthusiastic paw bump with the Hillcat mascot.

      During recent games I have noticed Tina taking a good look at the scoreboard a hundred yards distant in center field. She'll ask me, who's winning? I'll say the Hillcats and point out where on the scoreboard she can look for the numbers. After a while she'll ask, what inning is it? And I explain where the inning numbers can be seen.

      Other than those two basic questions, nothing else seems to arouse her curiosity, and unless we need something else to eat or a visit to the bathroom, we sit in a comfortable silence the same way we do in the synagogue during the Yom Kippur services.

      Whereas the content of each experience is profoundly different from the other, they share a common effect on us which is contemplative, relaxing and in a special way, social in that we take it in together, in the same place and at the same time.

      But I feel certain that how we each internalize the experience is highly personal, specific and virtually unknowable from one to the other. Tina is no more capable of reporting her perceptions and interpretations to me than I am to her. And yet we are certain that we have been to the ballgame and to the Yom Kippur service together.

7th INNING (60-70)

      The classic rattlesnake ballgame (The Life of This Snake is in the Tail!) in 1976 would not have happened if not for my great good fortune to have met and been befriended by Sam Bertron at the Farmers' Co-op in Round Rock. He was the leader of our carpentry crew, creative, patient and wise.

      On my first day at work, Sam stayed completely cool and calm when I banged a 16p nail into an air conditioning supply line, releasing a plume of freon gas. He taught me how to apply joint compound over sheet rock to make a smooth finish, a skill which earned me the title of Dr. Drywall, which he calls me to this day. And he was and still is a deep-thinking, wide-ranging student and repository of all things, but especially baseball.

      His letters, delivered to me intermittently but unfailingly since 1978, are replete with baseball metaphors; I'll give a couple of examples. On the coronavirus pandemic: I suspect the COVID, who turns out to be this year's "player to be named later," will have the last word. And about his sweet wife: Rebecca has been the ace of our rotation all these years and our big-game pitcher. Me, wild and hitting batters all the while, so will perfect my grip and visualize the heart of the plate.

      And it was Sam who introduced me to baseball’s Negro Leagues, a largely unwritten chapter in the history of the game, and itself, a metaphor for life in America and its profoundly inhumane aggression toward its people of color.

      I was about five years into my self-assigned yet Sisyphean mission to advance the cause of racial integration in education when Sam mentioned the name Oscar Charleston, arguably the greatest player and manager in the history of the Negro Leagues. From Charleston's biography I gained a deep understanding of how Black players, from Jackie Robinson's brave crossing of the color line through the present day have paid the price about which I had previously written.

      I called it the desegregation penalty and cautioned would-be reformers like myself to be aware of its pervasive presence in every enterprise that had been formerly segregated, but was then attempting to integrate. There are numerous examples in the education literature, but the one I found most instructive and important to grasp was illustrated in Major League (i.e., white) Baseball's response to the catch made by former Negro League player Willie Mays; the one known simply as The Catch.

      Willie Mays learned that catch and other crowd-pleasing plays in the Negro Leagues where he was not the sole recipient of such coaching; center fielder Gene Benson of the Philadelphia Stars was coached by the great Oscar Charleston on how to make that very play.

      Charleston would drill Benson by hitting fly balls over his head and insisting that he catch them by the turn-and-sprint maneuver, the styling that so dazzled the white fans when Willie Mays did it but which did not survive the treacherous crossing from segregated to integrated baseball. Even after Mays demonstrated its potential, coaches in the Little Leagues and at every level of the game were not persuaded of its superiority and continued to teach players to run a semi-circular route to the spot where they predicted the ball would land.

      In this way their body would never turn completely away from the ball so they could watch it all the way into their glove. The problem of course was that the semi-circular (i.e., white) route took longer to complete than the turn-and-sprint (i.e., Black) maneuver, but baseball’s (white) traditional practices are quite durable, and this was no exception. Unless your name was Willie Mays, attempting the turn-and-sprint move would likely earn you some extra laps after practice or punitive time on the bench.

      The through line of the desegregation penalty runs from Jackie Robinson to the current exuberance of Yankee third baseman Jazz Chisholm. Jazz understands that the essence of professional baseball is entertainment of the fans, and therefore should be played the way Mays and so many other pioneers played.

      But in most cases, it's a style that engenders disrespect toward the Black players. Sadly, the same disrespect has proven to be the penalty paid by Black students who courageously integrate formerly while schools.

8th INNING (70-80)

      A month ago, as I began to plan the innings/decades of my life for this memoir, I wrote myself this note:

      If your team is behind and you need to put runs on the board, you'd better to do it by the 8th inning. Sure, there's a ninth inning available, but it comes with extra pressures, and limited options both for strategy as well as the players available to realize those options.

      I decided that my life after my eighth decade would, just like in baseball, offer limited options as my mind and body aged and declined in their capacity to think, remember, write, travel, etc. So now as I look ahead and behind, the salience of unfinished business is real, and the time remaining to finish it reduced.

      The business of fatherhood is mostly finished. Samm is 42 and has grown into an exceptionally fine woman, mother and romantic partner. She has earned a spot at the top of her profession as a scholar and is engaged full-time in the business of devising a peaceful and productive relationship between the people of China and the United States.  

      It's fair to say that she would have turned out beautifully if all I had done as a father was to stay out of her way, but there's also a reasonable case to be made for good parenting having played a role. That, of course, brings me to marriage to Barbara and the enormous part she played in Samm's development as a woman and mine as a father and spouse.

      I didn't know it at the time I told my father what my plan was, but I now confess that despite my ignorance of the fact, being a good father also meant being a good husband.  What was also not apparent to me was that being a father—good or not—would evolve into being a grandfather, the role that began for me at age 62, and doubled in scope at age 65, when Cyrus came along to be exuberantly loving Kevy's delightfully original younger brother.

      I'm crazy about these boys, as I am about their mother, and make the long train journey to their New York home whenever possible. This summer's trip took on added significance as we all decided to make it a grand celebration of everyone's summer birthdays.

      So, BASEBALL!

      Samm, her wonderful life partner, Donn, Kevy and Cyrus have a gorgeous house just up the Hudson River from the Bronx. And so, my life came full circle.

      On Aug. 31, we were all perched high above home plate, under the iconic facade, to see the Yankees play the St. Louis Cardinals. I wore my freshly embroidered Jazz Chisholm jersey to honor all the Black players that ever played the game with pizazz.

      The Yankees scored first but Cardinals starting pitcher Kyle Gibson (no relation to Bob) handled the Yanks while his teammates put up six runs. Through seven innings the Stadium was as quiet as the bronze monuments to players of old out in centerfield.

      Then, as if they had read my manuscript, they noticed that the eighth inning had arrived, and it was time to get busy. Singles by Judge, Wells and Chisholm(!) loaded the bases for shortstop Volpe, who needed redemption after his double-clutched bobble of a toss from Torres blew a double play opportunity.

      Volpe came through, singling and scoring Judge from third while advancing Wells and Chisholm(!). Slugger Giancarlo Stanton was sent in to pinch-hit for the sub-Mendoza line Grisham. By this time the Stadium's less-than-capacity crowd had been roused to a more-than capacity barrage of decibels in hopes of another monster of a home run by Stanton, who was obviously thinking the same thing.

      All the summer birthday Coopers were on their feet when Stanton's blast fell just short of clearing the centerfield fence, plating Wells, Chisholm(!) and Volpe. The game ended 6-5 but what an eighth inning it had been.

9th INNING (80-90)

      Sometime during the eighth inning of a game, the announcer will invariably say something like "Looking ahead to the ninth inning ..." and proceed to tell us who's scheduled to come to bat, and whom they are likely to face on the mound. Often, they'll review the data from the game's first eight innings.

      We're being prepared for the possibility that the game will end after one more conclusive inning. But who really knows? Baseball knows, because everything is counted. In about five seconds, I was able to learn that extra innings occur in about 10 percent of major league games.

      I have been planning for my ninth inning with my financial coach, Richard, and his whizbang computer program which required me to select the age when I expect to be taken out of the game, so to speak. Richard needed to know for how many more years would he have to plan my financial future.

      When I retired, I was 65, and the actuarial table provided by Social Security said I'd have 17 more years. So, at age 82, it would be time for me to hang up my spikes and my uniform, get a beer and a shower, and get on the bus to wherever I'm going next.  

      But let's be clear, I'm not getting on any damned bus. I prefer the train, thank you. And what about those extra innings? Reviewing the data for my first eight, I note that the game has been kind to me, so I expect to have a few more good innings beyond the regular nine.

      Yes, I've been knocked down a few times. Had a couple of surgeries to repair some wear and tear. The occasional sprained ankle. But I've spent a relatively few days on the injured and disabled list. During games I've chewed way more bubble gum than tobacco. And I exercise regularly— several times a month—which should be enough to earn me some extra innings.

      But my big question is where I'll go next. I'm hoping that on a perfect Saturday afternoon in some future September my kids will return to that Big Ballpark in the Bronx and see a reasonable facsimile of me in the upper deck, waving my JAZZ CHISHOLM jersey, and yelling something idiotic to the other ghosts in the stadium.