Impact Player

by Bobby Richardson

  After Rev. Simpson read Romans 3:23—“For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God”—I admitted aloud that I knew I had sinned. The pastor then aptly explained to us how the mere fact that we had been born made us sinners, because human beings have been sinners by nature since Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden. Yet as John 3:16 points out, God provided a means of escape from our sinful nature through the life, death, and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus came to become the sacrifice for the sins of all of us. He was the Lamb of God, sent to take away the sin of the world.

  I had heard all that in church services and Sunday school, but it didn’t become personal to me until Rev. Simpson sat in our living room and detailed it directly to my sisters and me. For the first time, I understood that Jesus had died for my sins. His death on the cross and His resurrection became personal to me. It’s interesting how we can hear the gospel message, as I had for years to that point, and still not really hear it. We can know that Jesus’ death paid for all the sins of everyone in the world, yet the moment of true salvation does not come until we grasp that Jesus shed His precious blood to redeem one person in particular: me.

  That is what I meant earlier when I said that Rev. Simpson was the person who took the plan of salvation and brought it all home for me.

  “Do you believe that Jesus died for your sins?” Rev. Simpson asked.

  “Yes,” I answered, “Jesus died for me.”

  My sisters answered the same way, and Rev. Simpson prayed then and there with the three of us as we asked Jesus Christ into our hearts. Inez and I were baptized in church the following weekend, and a few weeks later Ann was too.

  Starting at Home

  My mother maintained a strong spiritual presence in our home. In fact, Mom’s was the strongest presence in our home, period. Her personality was powerful, and to a young boy it was at times a little overwhelming. But I knew she loved me, and boy, could she cook!

  Mom attended church every Sunday. She took part in a number of activities, including her beloved women’s group, and she made sure we attended too. Dad, on the other hand, wasn’t much of a churchgoer, though he never objected when Mom and the three of us kids went. Sometimes he would even drive us to church and drop us off, though the church was within walking distance of our house. I felt confident that Dad knew the Lord because every night at home I saw him on his knees, praying. As I look back now with an adult’s perspective, though, I wonder how much he grew spiritually.

  The truth was, Dad faced some limitations. He had made it only through the third or fourth grade. I don’t know whether he could read, but I do recall that he made all his purchases with cash—no writing checks—and that Mom handled the business affairs around the home.

  Dad also struggled with emphysema. He was owner and manager of Richardson Marble and Granite Works, and the dust from the sandblasting associated with his work contributed to his health issues. I know that the need to rest after a long week of work was one of the reasons Dad did not attend church with us more often.

  Dad didn’t make a lot of money from his company, but business was good enough for him to support us. We may not have been able to buy everything we wanted growing up—and there’s nothing wrong with that—but we did always have everything we needed. At Christmastime there were presents for all of us.

  My sisters claimed I was spoiled because I was the only boy, and there may have been some truth to that. I remember one year receiving a Cushman motor scooter before I was old enough to drive it legally on the streets. But I took it out on the streets anyway—until the police stopped me and told me to push it back home and keep it there until I was old enough for a license.

  Being the only boy did give me an advantage sportswise with Dad. Inez, my older sister, was more into baby dolls and pretty dresses than sports. My younger sister, Ann, was interested in sports, but because I came along before her, I had a head start.

  Growing up, I didn’t really have a favorite sport. I was most interested in whatever ball was closest to me at the moment. If I could throw it, catch it, kick it, bounce it, or shoot it, I did. Over time, though, baseball and basketball emerged as my favorite sports.

  Baseball was the sport I could best play by myself during my free time. We had a two-story house with a big chimney, and I would bounce tennis balls off that chimney to practice fielding ground balls, getting down to the nitty-gritty details like working on my backhand pickups and scooping up tricky short hops.

  For variety I would throw the balls up on the roof and practice catching fly balls as they rolled off. There was a gutter around the roof, though, that liked to catch the balls before they could fall to me. That would mean a trip to the upstairs bathroom, where I could stretch my arm out the window to retrieve the ball from the gutter. After a few of those trips upstairs, I’d decide that fielding grounders off the chimney was more efficient for getting in as much practice time as possible. Who knows? Perhaps that gutter is why I became an infielder instead of an outfielder.

  The back of our house was nice for practicing by myself, but it wasn’t perfect. If I missed the chimney with a tennis ball, the impact of my throw would knock small pieces of plaster off the inside walls. The sound of falling plaster would get Mom’s attention, and she’d come to the back door to express her disapproval. I would apologize and explain that I couldn’t hit the chimney every time. I was never banned from throwing balls against the chimney, but the fear of that happening could be a major reason I was an accurate thrower in my later years.

  I also spent a lot of time practicing baseball in front of our house, where we had a concrete walkway leading to stone steps. I could have bounced balls off those steps and fielded grounders on that walkway all day long. Some days, I think I did. But there was also a danger to playing in the front yard. Balls could hit the edge of the steps and ricochet into the screened front door or up against the siding. The clunk of a ball hitting the house or knocking plaster off the walls would bring Mom to the front door, too. I think my practice sessions caused my mom to wear paths to our front and back doors.

  The highlight of the day came when Dad arrived home from work, because then he would go to the backyard with me to throw a ball around for a few minutes or to hit some pop-ups to me. My dad had been a pretty good ballplayer himself growing up. He never told me that—he wasn’t the type to talk about himself—but his friends made sure I knew of Dad’s abilities. He might even have been good enough to have his own dreams about playing pro ball. But since Dad had to work a lot to help his family, he was never able to position himself for a chance to play professionally.

  I still hold wonderful memories from those times my dad and I played catch in the backyard. Even though he knew a lot about baseball, he never overcoached me. He was a man of few words to begin with, so the most he might offer would be a simple tip here or there. For the most part, he limited his speech to encouragement—“nice catch” or “good throw.”

  A Chip off the Old Block

  Dad allowed me to spend time with him at his marble and granite company. Although he stayed busy, I was able to further hone my baseball skills at the work site. Dad’s company would take quarried slabs of rock and shape, polish, and engrave them to make tombstones. The process generated lots of granite chips, and in the hands of a young boy with big league dreams, those chips became baseballs. Unfortunately, stop signs became first basemen’s mitts. I’m embarrassed to admit that I plunked a few stop signs in my day.

  Dad let me earn money from his company. Sometimes I would hop into the back of the truck when one of Dad’s employees, who went by the nickname of Crawfish, delivered tombstones to cemeteries. Small metal plates from the funeral home served as temporary grave markers until the tombstones arrived. I would dig up those markers and turn them in to Dad for five dollars per plate. That was good pay—no, great pay—for the work.

  I think letting me help around the company was Dad’s way of slipping me a little extra spending money
, because the funeral homes paid him five dollars per plate as well. It also provided a chance for us to spend extra time together. Even when he was busy working and I was off nailing stop signs with granite chips, my hours at Dad’s company still counted as father-son time for both of us.

  Another job I had around Sumter was delivering the local newspaper, The Item, right after school. I had a delivery route of 128 papers, but 7 of those went to one stop—the YMCA—and a good number of them could be quickly delivered in a set of apartments. I could finish my route in less than twenty minutes, so that part of the job was easy. The part I hated was collecting. I think I had to collect a quarter per week from each customer. I would go around my route with a little pouch that I’d slip the payments into. But I didn’t like having to remind people they hadn’t paid. Even worse, sometimes customers wouldn’t be home, and I’d have to go back later to collect. Those extra trips cut into my sports time. Still, I stuck with that job for a couple of years and made good spending money. I even tried to add an early-morning route for the morning edition, but that meant picking up my papers for delivery at 4:30 a.m. I lasted only a week or so on that route.

  One job I really enjoyed was coordinating sports activities at a community center in a poorer part of town. The work was right up my alley, and I liked knowing that the sports we offered were helping some people who probably couldn’t afford to take part in some of the larger organized-sports leagues around town. The people were great too. My friends from the center and I would take a quick break to walk over to a little country store for a MoonPie and an RC Cola. I still have friendships in Sumter that I made working at the Jenkins Community Center.

  This doesn’t technically qualify as a job, but I did make a little money playing table tennis against Oliver Stubbs. The YMCA was one block from my house, and Oliver liked to practice table tennis there. The problem was, Oliver was very, very good. In fact, he would eventually win the national championship. Not many people at the Sumter Y wanted to play against him, so his dad would pay me one dollar a night to meet Oliver at the Y and practice with him. I spent many nights playing game after game after game against Oliver. I noticed that on nights when I used part of my dollar to buy Oliver a MoonPie and an RC, I had a slightly better chance of winning a game every now and then—but only slightly. I did, however, get something out of all those poundings I suffered at the nimble paddle of Oliver Stubbs. When I was fifteen, I was runner-up in my age group at the South Carolina state table tennis tournament.

  Table tennis, of course, was never a serious threat to my two favorite sports. For me, nothing could compare with baseball and basketball—although I did have a not-so-glorious, one-day career as a football player. My sophomore year in high school, Coach “Hutch” Hutchinson, who also was my American Legion baseball coach, talked me into coming out for the football team. He said that with the good hands I had displayed on the infield, he could envision me as his quarterback.

  It took a while for him to convince me to give football a try, but I finally relented. I joined the team late, during two-a-day practices. I knew nothing about football, really, but Coach Hutchinson put me in right away at quarterback. On the first play, I was supposed to take the snap from center, turn around, and hand the ball to the halfback. Well, I took the snap and made one step. I must not have stepped where I was supposed to, because the halfback hit me from one side and our linemen hit me from the other side.

  This would be a good point to inform you that I have never been a big guy. When I played for the Yankees, I was listed at five feet nine and 170 pounds, and that was a generous listing. As a sophomore in high school, of course, I wasn’t close to that. Between the halfback and the linemen, I was pressed about as flat as the marshmallow filling in one of those country-store MoonPies.

  I could never seem to find my way in the backfield, and after two workouts that day, I called it a career. My dad never said so, but he probably considered my early retirement from football one of the best decisions I ever made. He’d been concerned that I might get hurt.

  Football, then, was never a serious threat to my future in baseball. Basketball was a different matter. During high school, in fact, I’d say it was my best sport. I was an all-state guard my junior and senior seasons and even received two scholarship offers to play basketball in college. Norm Sloan, a college coach who would win more than six hundred games at schools such as the University of Florida and North Carolina State, offered me a scholarship with the Presbyterian College Blue Hose. Georgia Tech also offered a basketball scholarship.

  I loved basketball, and though I don’t want to bill myself as a better player than I was, I handled the ball well. I was able to break the first line of a defense, and then, when another defender would step up to block me, I could pass the ball to the open player for him to score. I was a good free-throw shooter, too.

  Ultimately, however, I was smart enough to recognize that, largely because of my height, basketball was not the best sport for me beyond high school.

  Clearly, baseball was my sport.

  Musial’s Lasting Influence

  Dad was a St. Louis Cardinals fan because in Sumter, as in many locations in the South, the only station we could pick up that broadcast major league games was KMOX out of St. Louis. When KMOX carried Cardinals games, Dad would invite me to listen along with him. Then when I was a little older, about twelve as best as I can recall, Dad took me and a group of my friends to Columbia to watch an exhibition game between his revered Cardinals and the Cincinnati Reds. On the car ride over to Columbia, we all talked about getting to see the great “Stan the Man” Musial play for the Cardinals. Musial was one of my dad’s favorite players.

  I had never gotten anyone’s autograph before, but after the game I went up to Musial as he walked toward the team bus, and asked for his autograph. He gladly signed for me. I don’t remember how long I kept that autograph or what eventually happened to it, but I do recall that for a time I walked around Sumter saying, “Hey, I’ve got Stan Musial’s autograph.” I also remember how excited Dad was for me to have it.

  Enos “Country” Slaughter was another well-known player on that St. Louis team. Although Slaughter is most remembered as a Cardinal, we were teammates on the Yankees near the end of his long career. During the 1958 season, my second son, Ron, and one of Enos’s daughters were born on the same day at The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, New Jersey.

  When Enos passed away in 2002, his family asked me to be a part of his memorial service in Roxboro, North Carolina. Musial was among the teammates who came in for Enos’s funeral. I had never had the opportunity to play against Stan in a World Series, but I had gotten to know him after retirement through Old Timers’ Games we participated in. At the dinner following Enos’s funeral, I told Stan, “I know you don’t remember this, but when I was about twelve years old, I got your autograph at an exhibition game in Columbia, South Carolina.”

  I have to tell you, that made Stan cringe a little bit, because I was just shy of my sixty-seventh birthday when I told him that. Stan was already in the majors when I was twelve, so you can do the math.

  “Honestly,” I told Stan, “yours is the only autograph I ever asked for as a kid.”

  “Rich,” Stan said, using the name most major leaguers called me, “I can’t believe that. But I sure am glad I signed and didn’t turn you away.”

  Throughout my career, I remembered how much that one signature meant to me at that age. That is why I always made my best effort to sign as many autographs as possible. Plus, as many players from my era did, I always used my best penmanship when I signed. Nowadays, professional athletes tend to save time by making only the first letters of their names readable, followed by something that looks more like a squiggly line than part of a name.

  If you see my autographs, you’ll note that my complete name is readable. And let me tell you, “Bobby Richardson” isn’t the shortest of names. Sometimes it would be nice to have been named something short like “Bob Lee.�
� But I take the time to make the signature nice because Stan Musial did that for me. I have never forgotten how much something as simple as a signature could mean to a young boy with major league dreams—or even to his father.

  Chapter 2

  Becoming a Yankee

  Along with my dad, there was a second person who played a key role in developing my baseball skills: Harry Stokes.

  Harry was seven years older than me, and I must have been about seven or eight when I met him.

  We lived in downtown Sumter near an elementary school where local kids gathered after hours on the ample playground. Harry lived on the other side of that school. One day Harry spotted a handful of us playing baseball, stopped, and offered to hit some ground balls to us.

  Harry was in high school at the time and played on the Sumter American Legion team. My hometown has long taken pride in its American Legion teams, so you can imagine how thrilled we boys were to have a high schooler and an American Legion player join us on the playground.

  Harry was someone I already looked up to, because I had watched him play second base when Dad took me to American Legion games in Riley Park. I was so excited to learn that Harry Stokes—the Harry Stokes—lived two blocks from my house and was actually willing to play with kids my age.

  One of Harry’s favorite stories was about a summer morning after he had played an American Legion game the night before. He awoke to find me standing next to his bed, baseball cap on, ready to go outside and play. It was seven o’clock.