ABSTRACT
The author's connection to baseball came through her father, and vice versa. He was born in the Bronx to a hard-drinking Irish cab driver and to a mother who, widowed young, stood in line for government-issue oatmeal to feed her eight children. There were no camps, no swimming holes. In her father's neighborhood, the afternoon Yankee game provided the background music to the summer. Every summer weekend when she was growing up, he'd mow the grass and then sit in his lawn chair with a Pabst Blue Ribbon and watch his six children play Wiffle ball, the transistor radio on a folding table by his side. Joe DiMaggio had been his idol, but he fell hard for Mickey Mantle, as anyone who followed New York baseball in the 1950s and 1960s did. The nation was growing up, becoming less sentimental and more bottom line. Baseball was growing with it, leaving behind childhood crushes.
