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Posted By: DMcD

Baseball kind of happened all at once for me in 1956. Learned how to bat and throw and catch. Went to my first MLB game. Opened my first wax pack. I remember that I would read the back of every card and I was particularly fascinated by the guys like Early Wynn and Enos Slaughter and Ted Williams who had stats going back to the thirties, and also by the birthdates of some of the coaches and managers that dated back to the 1890's. (Those ancients were then as old as I am now). We lived on a GI Bill block in New Rochelle and every kid's dad grew up in the city and was a Giants fan or a Yankees fan or a Dodgers fan. These guys had seen Ott and Hubbell, Gehrig and Dickey, Camilli and Mungo play and loved to tell us kids that the modern guys couldn't hold a candle to their heroes. Most of us kids were Jewish so Greenberg was the one player that we held in the greatest esteem. I close my eyes I can still see myself, four-foot-nothing, looking up at the man himself and asking for his autograph (recounted here in an earlier thread: http://tinyurl.com/9j7dww ).