I graduated from college in 1975 and spent the next two years blissfully enjoying independence and learning the life of a sportswriter. I got to run quotes for the Associated Press at Fenway Park during the World Series season of 1975. It paid only seven dollars per night, but we could eat and drink all we wanted in the expansive, wood-paneled press dining room at Fenway. I introduced myself to old Mr. Tom Yawkey. I ate scrod and drank Scotch with Jumpin' Joe Dugin, who played third base for the 1927 Yankees. Jumpin' Joe had roomed with Babe Ruth and loved to tell stories about the Bambino. He would sometimes put his glass down, glance at me stuffing my face, and exclaim, "This kid eats more than Ruth!" I loved that.
Sitting in the smoky pressroom, I could listen to Billy Martin, Earl Weaver, Gene Mauch, Dick Williams, Bill Veeck, Calvin Griffith, Clark Booth, and all the writers I grew up reading. The stories got better as the night lengthened and the whiskey flowed. I quickly realized you learn the most by just listening.
This experience helped me land a job as a baseball writer at the Baltimore Evening Sun in the summer of 1977. I was 23 years old and vividly remember my first road trip to Cleveland. I found myself alone in an elevator with Brooks Robinson; he asked me my name and how old I was and said, "You're going to have a great time."
Brooks Robinson. How many times had I pretended I was him while tossing the rubber ball against the backdoor porch in Groton? Now, I was standing with him in an elevator at the Hollendon House in an American League city. I was in the big leagues, even if it was only as a small writer. The Orioles were then managed by Weaver and had a pitcher named Jim Palmer and a rookie designated hitter named Eddie Murray. All would make it to the Hall of Fame, as would a Maryland high school kid the O's drafted in 1978—Cal Ripken Jr. Cal's dad, a third base coach, used to take me to dinner almost nightly at the old Dupont Plaza Hotel when the Orioles trained in Miami. When young Cal came to spring camp, the three of us would dine together.
The Orioles made it to the World Series two years after I left Boston. By then I was covering the Baltimore team for the Washington Star. A month before the '79 World Series, the O's made their final trip to Boston, and I hosted a Saturday night party in my high-rise corner room at the Boston Sheraton. Weaver and several of his coaches appeared, and the old men were quite taken with some of our young female friends. We still talk about Earl dancing in my room with several of the lovely Brissette sisters. The next day, I gave the maid ten dollars to clean up the room before my folks arrived for Sunday brunch. Proud of my expense account, I bought lunch for the folks, and I know Dad loved that. Later that day, before the game ended, I went to see my parents in section 27 of Fenway Park. It would be the last time I saw my dad.
The scheduled first game of the 1979 World Series in Baltimore was rained out. It snowed lightly overnight, and I stopped by old Memorial Stadium the next morning to see if Commissioner Bowie Kuhn might postpone game one for a second day. This was long before the cell phone era and I had no way of knowing that my family in Massachusetts was trying to reach me. When I walked into the Orioles' offices, a secretary said, "There he is," and whisked me into the office of veteran public relations director Bob Brown.
"It's about your dad," he said, stumbling to find words.
"He died, right?" I asked.
"Yes, he died," said Bob Brown.
It was a conversation I'd been expecting to have since my earliest days. Dad had had a lot of heart trouble as a young man and we were actually surprised he made it to the age of 64. I called my mom, brother, and sisters from Memorial Stadium, then flew home to Boston. We buried Dad three days later, and I rejoined the World Series in Pittsburgh before game four.
So it was always baseball. The last time I saw my dad was in Fenway Park. I was in Memorial Stadium when I learned he died. And he's buried in a small cemetery in East Pepperell, Massachusetts, right next to a Little League ball field.
I even met Marilou—who knows next to nothing about baseball—through baseball. It was six months after my father had passed and I was in Chicago with the Orioles, knocking back a few with Weaver and a radio guy in the Lion Bar at the Westin Hotel on Michigan Ave. A young woman—the only young woman at the Westin that night—kept running in and out of the bar (I found out later she was calling her boyfriend from the lobby payphone). I stopped her, offered to buy a drink, and pointed out that the great Earl Weaver was seated on a nearby stool. Naturally, she'd never heard of Earl. A month later, she would join me in Milwaukee when the Orioles were in town to play the Brewers. When I introduced her to Earl in the Pfister Hotel coffee shop at breakfast, he blurted, "In my day, we ordered room service!"
That Earl always was a sweet talker.
It mattered not that Marilou knew nothing about baseball. I got enough of it every day from fans and friends. John F. Kennedy was said to be relieved that Jackie never greeted him at the door with "What's new in Laos?" Marilou and I were married in February 1982 in Detroit (big draw, Detroit in February), and by then I was working at the Boston Globe, occasionally covering the Red Sox.
Baseball bookmarked our new family events. Sarah, who would grow up to become a catcher, was born in 1984, which was a good year to fly our family to Detroit because the Tigers were on their way to winning the World Series. When Kate was born in July 1985, I walked from Beth Israel Hospital to Fenway Park, where I handed out cigars behind the batting cage. Kate, who would become an outfielder, fell in love with baseball before any of our other kids, and when she was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 8, it was the Jimmy Fund—the official charity of the Boston Red Sox—that saved her life. Sam was born on a Friday afternoon in October 1987, the day I was supposed to be flying to Detroit for a season-ending series between the Tigers and Blue Jays. The next day he (sort of) watched his first game, an extra-inning pitcher's duel between Jack Morris and Mike Flanagan. We brought Sam home on Sunday and I flew to Minnesota for the American League Championship Series the next day.
Baseball has been there at every important moment of my life. It has been very very good to me.
Sam
Sarah and Kate Shaughnessy inherited a well-documented family curse (on their dad's side) and needed braces to straighten their teeth. The process was long, uncomfortable, and expensive. When their younger brother reached the age of orthodontics, it was determined that he would not require braces. Only 11 years old, Sam had one reaction to his good fortune: he asked his parents for the cash difference. In Sam's mind, he was saving us money that we'd spent on his sisters, and he thought he should be compensated.
His name is Samuel William Shaughnessy, which sounds like maybe he was named after Theodore Samuel (Ted) Williams, but it's just coincidence. We had decided on "Sam" if it was a boy and William was my dad's name. It all seemed to fit when Sam first picked up a bat and swung from the left side and later dedicated his young life to baseball, baseball bats, and the science of hitting.
Sam had blond angelic hair when he was small, which sometimes drew odd glances from strangers who saw him with his mother. Marilou is half Sicilian and Sam inherited none of her Mediterranean features. He has green eyes and a crooked sly smile and his hair, unfortunately, has taken on the coarseness and color of his dad's. (Like me, he can also go a week without shaving before anyone says anything.) When Sam gets a buzz cut, he's reminded that he looks a little like Red Sox outfielder Trot Nixon. That's just fine with Sam. They both hit lefthanded and work from a dramatically spread stance.
One thing Sam got from his mother's gene pool is the upper torso of a Teamster. Marilou's dad is 100 percent Polish with wide shoulders, thick arms, and meaty hands. As Sam's baseball skills blossomed through high school, his arms and chest expanded, giving him the look of a young man who maybe had swallowed a couple of barbells. While most of the best players in our region grew to be six foot two with rangy, limber bodies (the kind the pro scouts love), Sam grew sideways. It's pretty clear that he's never going to be six feet tall, but I remind him that he's just a little thicker tha
n Bill Mueller (five foot ten, 180 lbs.), who won a batting title with the Red Sox in 2003.
Sam's first birthday party was held at our new/old home in the Hunnewell Hill section of Newton, Massachusetts. Newton is a suburb of Boston with over 80,000 citizens, most of whom at one time or another seem to have written books, seen therapists, and driven Volvos. Newton leads the nation in psychologists and bleeding hearts. The median income for a Newton family exceeds $100,000, and three times since 1999 it has been named the safest city in America. Recess at Sam's old elementary school features a "tug of peace" because the old-fashioned tug of war is too aggressive and offensive for some of our overthinking, baby boomer parents. Birth announcements in our local paper come under the heading of "arrivals" because we don't want to offend parents who've adopted children. When corporate honchos attempted to open a Dunkin' Donuts franchise at the busy corner near our home, neighbors galvanized and protested with the fever you'd expect if somebody had threatened to open a sex toy shop.
I love our house. As I type these words, I'm sitting in my office at the back of the second floor, and I can hear Sam coming in the front door and running up the steps to his bedroom on the front side of the house. I hear the clacking of the wood baseball bats in his bag. It's early in the school year and Sam's just come in from an afternoon of hitting.
A large portion of the wall of my office is covered by a mural I assembled when I was in high school. It's a collage of color sports photographs clipped from the pages of Sport magazine and Sports Illustrated, circa 1965 to 1970. Bill Russell, Johnny Unitas, Ray Nitschke, and Hank Aaron have been watching my fingers fly across the keyboard for parts of five decades. They are frozen in time, eternal heroes of my youth, the godfathers of the Tom Bradys, Manny Ramirezes, and Paul Pierces I write about today.
Our big old (1900) house has three floors, six bedrooms, three crummy old bathrooms, and a soon-to-be-finished basement, which always had a pool table and Ping-Pong when the kids were younger. We've got two washers, two dryers, two fridges, and lots of dust and cracked windows on every floor. Just about all the window sashes are broken. You can feel the wind coming through the creaky window casings when you stand close during winter storms. The house is big, cluttered, and drafty. Things are always breaking, but I love it more than any building I've known and that would include the house where I grew up in Groton, Massachusetts, and Fenway Park—my two other all-time favorite abodes. Houses have souls and this well-worn structure is full of grace, warmth, and lingering laughter. It's warm even when it's cold. It's safe even when we're watching world calamities on television. It was home to babysitters from Sweden when the kids were small, and it was home to dozens of international students who came to the States to learn English at a school in downtown Boston. It's been home to Alexis Mongo, Sam's Metco brother since kindergarten, a city kid who's had a bed and toothbrush here since he was five years old. It's been home to half of the Newton North basketball team during winter break (the hoopsters like to make pancakes when we're on Christmas holiday), and it's been home to several players on the Boston University softball team who needed a place to stay for the summer. It's been home to Globe summer interns, my daughter Kate's boyfriend, Marilou's parents, and all the aunts and uncles and cousins who've visited or lived with us for an entire summer. Sam and I once counted the bed and couch capacity and came up with the magic number of twenty-three. We exceeded that number a few times when Kate and Sarah had team sleepovers during high school volleyball, field hockey, and softball days.
There are no school buses trolling the Hunnewell Hill section of Newton. Our kids walk or ride bikes for the first nine years of their public education. Neighborhood watchdogs are legion. We still have block parties and pig roasts. We get weekly milk delivery in old-timey glass bottles. Tom the mailman is allowed to stroll into our home and help himself to cold water from the Poland Spring cooler in the kitchen. Nobody calls the cops if a neighbor has a loud party—better to crash said party. Growing up in Groton, I remember reading hilarious police reports about a "suspicious vehicle" in a neighborhood. That was code for "a car we could not immediately identify." Anything new or different was immediately suspicious. And all these years later it's the same in our Newton neighborhood. Woe to the suspicious vehicle. We joke that you can't walk around the Hill without a passport and Sam knows that if he's seen driving too fast on the way to school, we'll know about it by dinnertime—from multiple sources.
Kate was diagnosed with leukemia in 1993, when Sam was in kindergarten, and I'll never forget the way the neighborhood rallied. Stacked like cordwood, homemade lasagnas packed our basement freezer. Neighbors put a grocery list inside our door every few days. We'd check off the items we needed and bags of groceries would arrive later in the day.
"Just like in the old days," Marilou's mother would say after finding another pie or dinner feast cooling on the front porch.
While we spent all of our time with Kate at Children's Hospital, Sam and Sarah were invited on playdates and taken to Chuck E. Cheese. You don't forget that kind of unconditional love.
Our house was always full of sounds. Kids laughing. Kids arguing. Canned laughter as the girls watched yet another episode of Friends. Kate practicing the drums. Sam dribbling a basketball in his room, loosening the plaster on the ceiling over the TV room. When the kids got older, and there were cars and boyfriends and girlfriends, we embraced and encouraged the noise. When there was noise, we knew they were home. Only silence was troublesome. Silence meant one of two things: 1. The kids were not home and we had no idea what was really going on; or 2. They were home and it was too damn quiet for anyone to be up to any good. Pretty soon that silence is going to mean that the job of child-raising is done and they are gone for good.
One feature we lack is a big rolling lawn for ball games. The homes in our neighborhood are close together and nobody's got enough yard for a decent Wiffle ball or touch football game. Sam outgrew our quilt-size lawn by the time he was 8.
Little Sam always seemed to have a bat in his hands and he always batted left—a first in our family. I once asked Ted Williams why he batted left and if he'd ever tried hitting righthanded. Ted reacted as if I'd asked him to speak Portuguese. In Ted's world, there was only one way to hit. The best hitters were always lefty hitters. The baseball world is dominated by righty pitchers and we all know the lefthanded hitters' batter's box is significantly closer to first base. There would be no righthanded hitting for Theodore Samuel Williams. None for Samuel William Shaughnessy either.
Sam was forever looking for someone to pitch to him. In the summer of 1992, when Sam was 4, we rented a giant house in Pocasset, a beach town at the foot of the Cape Cod Canal. It was a group rental, shared with Marilou's coworkers, and while his sisters and cousins went to swim and sunbathe, Sam could always be seen standing around with his red, fat bat in his hand, looking for someone to toss Wiffle balls his way. Returning from my daily run one afternoon, I encountered tiny Sam, who wanted to know if I could throw him a few pitches. I told him I had to go inside to use the bathroom but would return for some batting practice. While I was in the first-floor stall, I heard one of our friends, Harry King, talking to Sam and it was pretty clear from the conversation that the little kid had convinced the man to play some ball. Harry was one of those cool grownups—single, fit, bookish, and owner of his own drum set. It occurred to me that he might underestimate Sam's hitting prowess, and I wondered if he might be standing a little too close when—still in the bathroom—I heard him saying, "Here you go, little guy, let's see if you can hit this."
"Whomp! "
"Pow."
"Ouch."
I darted out of the bathroom and back to the front lawn, where Harry was sprawled on the grass, rubbing his temple and checking to see if his glasses were broken. Sam was standing nearby, holding his fat bat, laughing at the man on the ground.
"This kid can really hit," said Harry.
It's pretty much been like that ever since. Sam was slow t
o speak (two years of speech therapy when he was a toddler), reluctant to pick up a book (Ted always said he saved his eyes by not reading), hated to swim, was afraid of fireworks, and could not ski. He didn't have a very good arm, never developed an outside shot on the basketball court, and his football instincts were terrible. He couldn't run long distances. He could be stubborn and lazy, his room was a mess, and he mumbled all the time. He and his friends seemed to speak in code and I secretly wished for subtitles like the kind they use in foreign films at the West Newton Cinema. One of my friends correctly noted, "The only times I can understand Sam are when he's pissed off or he wants something."
This child was not a Renaissance man.
But he could hit.
Sam advanced through the normal channels of youth baseball, playing T-ball, then coach-pitch, then minors, then major league Little League. Sam was able to compete in the Little League "majors" when he was 10, and I always thought it was a good idea for him to "play up." Invented by families with two or more male children, the concept of "playing up" starts with a younger brother playing against older brothers. Veteran coaches will tell you that a player with a lot of older brothers is almost always better than another player of the same age who might be a first-born or an only child. You simply get better playing against older kids, and since Sam didn't have any older brothers, I knew he would benefit from playing with 12-year-olds when he was 10.
His White Sox Little League (minors) cap was the first to be hung on a nail on his bedroom wall, and twelve years later fifteen of those team hats hang side by side, symbolic of hardball progression. Those caps will be there as long as we stay in this old house. I have my sports photomural. Sam has his caps.
Sports connect generations. Parents and children don't go to rock concerts together. They are obligated to disagree about politics, religion, fashion, food, hair, and morality. But they still gather to watch the Red Sox in the family room, even when they can't find common ground anywhere else. I take Sam to Fenway and we strain our necks to look around the same poles that blocked the views of my father and grandfather. I go to Sam's games and remember what it is I loved about sports in the first place.
Senior Year Page 3
