I had Hank Aaron and Willie Mays and Whitey Ford cards, but never got my hands on the Mantle Holy Grail. Of course, my impossible dream was to get a Mickey Mantle card. I long ago lost the autograph but the memory is still fresh.īrothers Bill, Jim, Art and I collected baseball cards, thousands of them, like every boy did in the 1960s. We met the players and I got an autograph of their Hall of Fame second baseman Nellie Fox, one of the best gloves in the history of the game. We happened to stay in the same hotel as the White Sox - the downtown Sheraton Cadillac - and ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant with the Sox. On a trip to Michigan around 1960, we also saw the Tigers play the Chicago White Sox at Detroit’s old Briggs Stadium, later known as Tiger Stadium. As he listened to the games he’d ask me to bring him a can of Grain Belt beer from the refrigerator, and I happily complied because he’d let me have a sip.ĭad took us kids up to a Twins game at the old Met stadium in Bloomington, where Mall of America now stands. He liked the Tribune because it had game reports from the West Coast the night before. He’d sit alone in the semi-darkened living room reading the three newspapers we received each day - the morning Des Moines Register and Sioux City Journal and the afternoon Des Moines Tribune. The Minnesota Twins were my second favorite team because Dad listened religiously to their broadcasts with Halsey Hall and Herb Carneal on staticky WCCO radio out of the Twin Cities. I think I got two hits in two years when we played at Bradford Field, next to the Buena Vista College football field, and the old North School field, where McDonald’s serves hamburgers today.Īfter not improving during a bench-warming season for the Giants in the Little League Majors, I retired from playing baseball and contented myself with following the Yankees through reports in the Sunday Register’s Big Peach sports section and the Saturday afternoon Falstaff beer Game of the Week on CBS with former star players Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese. I was a lousy baseball player so I was assigned to center field because no eight-year-old kid could hit a ball out of the infield. Unfortunately, that was the only resemblance between me and Mantle. When I played for the Bruins in the Little League Minors, my uniform number was 7 - Mick’s number - and I played center field. The New York Yankees were my favorite team and I idolized their center fielder, Mickey Mantle. It’s a lot of fun to pitch for a team that’s maybe one of the best in baseball.When I was a kid, I was a big baseball fan. “And it adds a little bit more to each outing, that’s for sure, to each inning, to each pitch. It’s all about the win, that’s all that matters. And every time I came (back) into the dugout, it was, ‘Way to keep us in the game,’ stuff like that. “I was in the clubhouse for most of the first game, and guys come in and out and they want to win,” Lambert said. Moncada had two hits in Game 2 for the Sox, who lost for just the second time in nine games. “They got to a couple of pitches in the count. “He wasn’t afraid at all,” La Russa said of Lambert, who was returned to Charlotte after the game. Ramírez broke the tie in the third with his 13th homer, making it 3-1. The Sox tied it when Nick Madrigal knocked in Hamilton with a single. He retired the first five Monday before allowing three singles in the second, the third of which resulted in an RBI for Zimmer.
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