When I was six, my father gave me a bright red scorebook that opened my heart to the game of baseball. -;DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN, WRITER AND HISTORIAN My daughters first came to the ballpark when they were so young,they couldn’’t even track what was going on. Their first understanding of baseball was that innings were amounts of time between dinner (after the 3rd inning) and Fudgesicles (after the 6th). The next insight was that when the ball sailed over the fence, that was a good thing-;people stood up and cheered; and the billboard cow, advertising a local dairy, nodded her pressboard head in approval. By the time the girls were nine and six, they were following the plays and learning to keep score. Some of their questions were naive: Dad, how come everyone is yelling ‘‘Go Die, Ump?’’ That’’s ‘‘Good Eye, Ump,’’ dear, and we’’re being sarcastic. Dad, what’’s sarcastic? Other questions invited a discussion: Dad, how come people are yelling ‘‘Yer Due!’’? Well, that requires looking at batting averages. That guy’’s batting average is 290 and that means that, until recently, he’’s been getting hits about 29 percent of the time. But, in the past week, he’’s had very few hits, so it seems like he’’s overdue for some hits. One could question that logic because-; Thanks, Dad. Would you like some Cracker Jacks? Even in the olden days of my youth, baseball reached all parts of the United States and also other countries, especially Japan and Latin America. However, in America, Major League baseball was regarded as the ultimate level of baseball. In those ancient days before satellite communications, the Major Leagues were physically restricted to the Northeast and Midwest, a relatively small part of the country. From 1903 to 1952 there were sixteen of these teams located in ten cities in the parallelogram with corners at Chicago, Boston, Washington, DC, and St. Louis. Many baseball fans and baseball writers from this era grew up in big cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Boston, so they experienced Major League baseball first-hand. Or at least they were able to follow the regular season by listening to the radio. For example, many baseball fans in the South listened to St. Louis Cardinals’’ games on the radio. My situation was quite different. I grew up in Utah, which seemed about as remote from the center of baseball action as a kid could get. I was aware of the brazenly named World Series. But, for a long time,I didn’’t even wonder how the teams got to be in the World Series. It seemed like being in New York was a big advantage, if not a requirement, though teams like the Cleveland Indians made cameo appearances. I didn’’t question this any more than I would have questioned how my parents came tobe married or that Roosevelt and Stalin came to be world leaders. It had always been so. Even out in Utah, cool teachers would let their classes listen to the World Series on the radio; my cool teacher was a young lady who taught history. Thanks, Miss Lake. The real professional baseball teamin my home town was our local Salt Lake City Bees, a team in the class C Pioneer League. This league included teams like the Idaho Falls Russets (think potatoes) and the Billings Mustangs (think horses, not cars). I attended many games and I listened to all the other games on my radio, carefully hidden under the bed covers when necessary. I remember recalculating hitters’’ batting averages-;long division with a pencil!-;andthen checking the Salt Lake Tribune the next morning to see if I’’d done them right. Hub Kittle was the pitcher-manager of the Bees. He was a legend in the minor leagues for decades. On August 27, 1980, as a minor league pitching coach, he took the mound for Springfield (Illinois) versusIowa, teams in the American Association. He was six months past his 63rd birthday and was the oldest player ever in organized baseball. He retired the Iowa batters in the first inning on two flies and a groundout; he threw one pitch in the second inning before leaving the game. The most interesting ballplayer for the Bees was the catcher, Gus Triandos. He was nicknamed Tremendous Triandos because of his rather solid build. He was powerful, but not swift. Indeed, he was the only Major League player to play over 1000 games, mostly with Baltimore, and end up with a perfect stolen-base record, 1 for 1. In addition, he holds the Major League recordwith 1,206 consecutive games without being caught stealing. In one inconsequential game, near the end of a season, he decided to amble from first base to second base. The catcher was so surprised that he did not throw. (Uncontested stolen bases counted in those days.) The Salt Lake City Bees, and the World Series via radio, were not enough to satiate my appetite for baseball. My favorite board game was All-Star Baseball, a game designed to simulate real baseball. This was a precomputer nonelectronic game that mo
