Dads, sons, and baseball
It's a complicated relationship among the three legs of American manhood, especially when bunting is involved.
By Drew Gallagher
HUMORIST
Today we celebrate fathers. My own father imparted a great deal of wisdom to me and was very helpful when I needed to know which book Sting was referencing in the song “Don’t Stand So Close to Me”. I am confident that he offered up Nabokov’s masterpiece with the sincere hope that, as a 10-year-old, I would not ask him to pull Lolita off the shelves for some fun summertime reading. (For the longest time I thought the teacher’s car in the song by The Police was “woman drive” and not “warm and dry.”)
My father was a lifetime newspaperman and one of my regrets in life is that he did not live long enough to see me become an unpaid humorist for a Substack. There were a few other occasions in life where I exceeded my father’s expectations, and there is one moment in particular that still resonates.
Dad was coaching my Babe Ruth baseball team one summer and gave me the bunt sign in a game we were winning. This was strange in that there was no one on base, and I was not known for my footspeed or bunting prowess. Being the diligent son and student of the game, I laid a perfect bunt down the third base line and beat the throw to first. I turned to my father as the base coach, fully expecting to see the depth of admiration he had for me succeeding in the game we both loved. Instead, he bowed his head in what I hoped was reverence but was actually disappointment.
I asked if I had missed the sign, and he said, “No, you got the sign and executed the play.” I asked him what was wrong, and he pointed toward the sky over left field where gray clouds were amassing: “I asked you to bunt because we need to get this game to the bottom of the fifth inning quickly to make it official. I never expected you to beat out a bunt. I thought they would throw you out. Now go get picked off.” Which I promptly did.
Baseball and fathers have a long history, and I wanted to take a moment to reflect upon the great fathers in history, and not just in baseball (because there were not enough to fill out a column).
Cool Papa Bell—There is a common misperception that Papa Bell did not marry Ma Bell because she was not cool enough, but history shows that they did not marry because Ma Bell was merely a term used for the collective of AT&T companies and was not an actual person. Cool Papa was a Negro League baseball player who was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1974 and is believed to be one of the fastest men to ever play the game. The story is often told that Cool Papa was so fast that when he hit the switch by his hotel room door he was under the covers before the light went out. Legend has it that Cool Papa could circle the bases in 13 seconds. (He said 12 on a dry field.) By way of reference, it likely took me close to six seconds to reach first base on the only bunt base hit of my career.
David “Big Papi” Ortiz—They say that Father Time is undefeated, but in the 2004 American League Championship Series against the New York Yankees, I don’t believe that Red Sox manager Terry Francona would pinch hit Father Time for Papi no matter the pitching matchup. The Boston designated hitter was on fire and carried the Sox to the World Series and into the annals of history as they came back from being down three games to zero to win the ALCS and then win the World Series to end the 86-year curse of trading Babe Ruth to fund a Broadway musical that “is a lighthearted romp showcasing the charming music of Vincent Youmans.” Boston has produced some great patriots including Paul Revere, Sam Adams, and Tom Brady, but if the British ever think about invading again, we just need to hand Papi the microphone as they did after the Boston Marathon bombings when he told the gathered fans: “This is our f**king city. And nobody’s going to dictate our freedom.” And, unlike Mel Gibson, he did it in eye black instead of face paint, and on the first take.
Papa Smurf—Speaking of Mel Gibson in blue face paint, the first true blue man group was the Smurfs, and Papa was their leader which the cartoonist made obvious by having him wear a red Phrygian cap which all kids knew was a symbol of the French Revolution as well as a symbol of future promise in the musical Les Misérables. The Papa Smurf role was originally minimized by Victor Hugo and on Broadway because he was too small to be seen above the barricade, but the upcoming Kennedy Center production of Les Mis does feature Papa Smurf prominently and includes a climactic scene where Inspector Javert considers suicide only to be unceremoniously pushed to his death by the Smurf chorus sparing him the existential decision as well as an overlong singing of “Javert’s Suicide” which makes the production shorter and much more to President Trump’s liking.
Daddy Warbucks—Originally known as the billionaire hero with a heart of gold in the Little Orphan Annie comic strip and later in the Broadway musical as Annie’s savior and singing mate in “I Don’t Need Anything but You.” More recently it has apparently become the User Name with the most variations on the Only Fans website. One has to wonder if cartoonist Harold Gray could have ever imagined how many words can rhyme with “Bucks” on an adult web site when he created the iconic moniker.
Papa Roach—I was not clear if Papa Roach was an actual person or just the name of a 1990s alternative rock/metal band (Spoiler alert: It’s not a person). I was equally uncertain if Papa Roach was worthy of inclusion in a Father’s Day column until I realized that they once featured a trombonist and their music inspired a group of female musicians to the point that they formed Mama Roach as a Papa Roach tribute band (rock on, my sisters). As a boy, I once spent a summer on the island of Majuro in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and the trailer we were given for the summer had roaches that were larger than my 11-year-old fist which I later learned was probably due to the 67 nuclear bomb tests that had occurred in the Marshall Islands after World War II.
My father taught me how to play baseball, and even in the 100-degree weather of a Pacific summer, he took my brother and me onto an abandoned airfield on Majuro to take infield practice. We learned quickly that there are few true hops on the cracked tarmac of an airfield that had not seen a plane in 30 years. We also learned that when we flew halfway around the world for two months of a summer in 1981, our father insisted on packing a baseball, a bat, and three gloves. I don’t remember if we worked on bunting.
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Thanks for the laugh-out-loud bunt story.