I can’t recall my exact age, either eight or nine, when my maternal grandfather told me stories about the great New York Yankees and how they always beat the Brooklyn Dodgers, the “Bums,” in the World Series. Granddad was an Oklahoma farmer who loved God, his family, the USA, and baseball. He never told me how he became a Yankees fan, but he was a young man when Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were in their prime, and his favorite player was fellow Sooner Mickey Mantle – certainly three very good reasons to root for the Yankees.

My mother told me stories of how, as a young man, my grandfather would play baseball on cow pastures whenever the opportunity allowed for the sheer love of the game. He was short in stature, no more than 5’/6” in his boots, but apparently was a pretty good pitcher. I remember how he could chuck rocks across good-sized ponds, and how he taught me to skip the flat stones across the water’s surface.

When he was finally able to own a small farm, he invited the young men of the community to play ball on Sunday afternoons, after church, on a relatively flat area of his pasture. The Elders of the local Southern Baptist church were not pleased with my grandfather for allowing baseball to be played on a Sunday, and threatened to disfellowship him if he persisted. But, that threat (they did not follow through) did not dissuade granddad – he believed that the young men who worked hard, from sunup to sundown, for six days a week, deserved to play the game and that the Lord would be OK with baseball on Sundays, as long as it was after church.

Strangely enough, I did not become a Yankees fan. I wanted to know more about the team that he called ‘the Bums.’ The first hardback book I bought with my own money was ‘The Rhubarb Patch – The Story of the Modern Brooklyn Dodgers’ by Red Barber and Barney Stein with stories and pictures of Dodgers players of the 1940s and early 1950s (I still have the book). I saved my allowance to buy every baseball magazine available and often memorized the stories and statistics of the Dodgers. Of course, I purchased the small packages of Topps baseball cards with the horrible, hard-as-a-rock, bubble gum in each package, keeping all of the Dodgers players and trading others for those cards that were missing from my ‘roster.’

I fell in love with the stories of Cookie Lavagetto, Pee Wee Reese, Pete Reiser, Rex Barney, Gil Hodges, Preacher Roe, Jackie Robinson, Carl Furillo, et al. These were my kind of players who played hard, had dirty uniforms, and would never back down. These were the players I wanted to emulate, they became my baseball heroes and role models.

Dodgers vs. Yankees games will always bring to mind my grandfather. Although he would have preferred that I had been a Yankees fan, he opened the door for me becoming a lifelong Dodgers fanatic. Thanks, granddad!

By the way, granddad, when you are playing on The Field of Dreams, don’t let Don Drysdale know that you are a Yankees fan. If you do and are looking for something low-and-away, Big D might put one in your ear.

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