Written in 2009 and Republished Today, as Relevant Now as Then: As Time Goes By

Two nights ago [this would be October of 2009, of course], I watched the Phillies trounce the Dodgers, 11-0. What a colossal drubbing! HDTV let me appreciate Cliff Lee's southpaw masterpiece in exquisite detail. But for me the most memorable moment of the evening wasn't Lee's artistry or 270-pound Ryan Howard's mad-dash triple to right. Instead, it was the discovery that the Phillies'  lanky, awkward-but-effective scraggly-bearded right fielder Jayson Werth sports a noteworthy baseball pedigree. His grandfather was Ducky Schofield, a good-field no-hit infielder from the 1950s -- from the days, that is, of my golden youth. Holy jumping jiminy! I saw this young feller's grandpappy play! 

Youch!  More evidence, as if more were needed, of my long-in-the-toothedness.

Why should I be surprised?  I went to my first baseball game in 1946 (at Ebbets Field -- Cardinals 3, Dodgers 1).  Before there was TV. I've been attending to the game for 63 years. Close to three generations.  [Nine more years have passed since I first wrote this;  so 72 years now.]  

I've grown accustomed to father-son combos. Bobby and Barry; the Griffeys (who once played together in the same outfield); Felipe and Moises; huge Cecil Fielder and his even more enormous son, Prince; the Hundleys, the Stottlemyres, and many, many others. Sometimes while I'm watching a game I lose track of time. Eric Young, Jr. looks and runs so exactly like his father that it's easy to fall into flashback mode. I remember a game in which Pedro Borbon came in to relieve. Holy moly, I said to myself -- he's a right-handed pitcher. Why the heck is he throwing with his left hand?  Then after a few seconds of complete bafflement it came to me: Pedro Borbon, Jr. I had simply lost twenty-five years -- a phenomenon to which your "mature" brain is occasionally and increasingly prone.

Jayson Werth isn't even the sole grandson. Aaron Boone's father was the catcher (and manager) Bob Boone and his grandfather was the Cleveland infielder Ray Boone, whom I also saw play, but only on the TV. And then there's the Bell family: grandsons David and Mike, father Buddy, and grandfather Gus, a big hitter with Cincinnati during the Ducky Schofield years.  

So here's the question. Will I hang around long enough to watch the great-grandsons play? Is Jayson Werth fertile?  Does he have any kids?  Are there any budding Boones or baby Bells waiting in the wings?

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

The night the Dodgers scored 15 runs in the first inning against poor Herman Wehmeier and the Cincinnati Reds was the night my parents insisted I go to bed before the game started. They watched it, and you would think they would have had the decency to wake me up and have a topic for show and tell. I didn't find out about it until breakfast the next morning. Chris Van Cuyk (what an awful sounding name) would have been a 20-game winner if the Dodgers could have given him 19 runs each game.

[Vivian]

The night the Dodgers scored fifteen in the first was the night my father told my younger brother Jon that he could watch the first inning of the game and then had to go to bed. It was hilarious when the first inning went on and on and Jon stayed up and up.

[Don Z. Block]

The murder of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1957 was so painful that I still haven't gotten over it. One world championship for Brooklyn in 1955, and that was it. And then what happens? The NL LA team wins 5 championships, the last one in 1988. At that point, I woke up from my coma and realized something had to be done. By then, there were no more Brooklyn Dodger players in the LA uniform: no Duke, no Pee Wee, no Don Drysdale, no Sandy, no Carl, no Roebuck. The presence of ex-Brooklyn players on that team had confused me and prevented me from realizing my mission in life: to see to it that the NL LA team won nothing. And so I placed on this cursed team the Curse of Brooklyn, and it has prevented this team from winning it all for 31 consecutive years. It is programmed to do so until the end of the 21st century and possibly beyond. I could have gone back to 1959, but my calculations indicated that I would have been messing with the space-time continuum and possibly killed my own grandfather before I was born, thereby blipping out my own existence and changing history. And as I have indicated before, I could not root against a team that had many of the Boys of Summer playing on it.

It is also gratifying to see that no offspring of the original Brooklyn Dodgers is playing for the NL LA team: no Hodges, Campy, Jackie, Pee Wee, Billy, Georgie, Duke, Carl, Donald, Preacher, or Joe Black Jr. Does the Curse work? Ask Clay Kershaw.

Does anyone have any memories of what the classsrooms in P.S. 217 were like after the Brooklyn Dodgers won it all in 1955? Does anyone remember what happened during show-and-tell the morning after the Brooklyn Dodgers scored 15 runs in the first inning in a night game against the Cincinnati Reds?