Out of Right Field: Baseball begins to tie together generations again today

In 1969 my dad shelled out about $25 to buy a first edition of the Baseball Encyclopedia. It came in a cardboard slipcover, rare even in those days. It was huge, weighing enough to hold a heavy door open or make a 12-year-old boy strain to pick it up, roles it has played over the years.

But to my dad it was a time machine.

It transported him, and many times his buddies, back to a simpler time, when baseball was all the rage and they were dealing with raging hormones.

After the book – you know what that is, right? – arrived at the house, my dad’s friends would wander over occasionally, drink Canadian Club and sit around and argue about players who seemed like ancient myths to me.

Who was a better hitter, Stan Musial or Ted Williams? Who was a better pitcher, Lefty Grove or Lefty Gomez? Were the Reds of 1940 better than the Dodgers of ’41?

I didn’t sit in. After all, I was 12 the summer of 1969 and had a strict and early bedtime. I also had a spot I could hide to hear everything that was being said in the living room without my parents knowing.

I didn’t know Babe Adams (hard-throwing right-hander who hit from the left side) from the original Adam (good range but with a tendency to make poor decisions), but it was fun to hear what my dad’s friends thought about him. Plus, the language was more akin to a dugout than I was used to so that was … instructive.

Baseball was, and is, the glue to our past.

Is it the most exciting sport? Probably not. The most entertaining? No way. The most physical? Nope.

But, in this nation at least, it is the one with the longest history, a history that not only traces its roots to our Civil War, but includes a statistical record that allows grandfathers, fathers and sons to compare the heroes of their youth.

I loved Al Kaline as a boy. Sandy Koufax. Johnny Bench.

My dad had his favorites. Hank Greenberg. Dizzy Dean. Mickey Cochrane.

We could look up their statistics, argue whether Kaline’s best year – in 1955 as a 20-year-old he hit an American League-leading .340 – was better than Greenberg’s best – in 1937 he drove in 184 runs and hit .337 and in 1938 he hit 58 home runs.

No matter which year dad picked, Greenberg’s was better.

But I wouldn’t give in, of course. Neither would my dad. But it connected us. Gave us a language to speak when English wouldn’t work. Through the years baseball and its statistics were always there, keeping the lines of communication open.

Why write about this today? It’s Opening Day, of course. The first day of a new season. The beginning of more numbers etched in the modern-day encyclopedia, though it is online and not printed. More grist for the argument mill.

I will do two things today. I will pull out my dog-eared copy of “Why Time Begins on Opening Day,” a collection of Tom Boswell columns on baseball, and read the title column. And I will open the Baseball Encyclopedia to Mickey Cochrane’s page and study his statistics.

Wait, I will do one more thing. I will think about my dad.

I will think about the time we sat in the car in front of our house and he told me how good he thought I could be at the game I loved. About the time he hobbled to the mound to throw me batting practice just days after his broken leg had come out of a cast.

And all the times he told me, wrongly, that the 1934 Tigers were better than the 1965 Dodgers.

Connective tissue. Binding memories. That’s baseball. That’s today.