Moe, Mickey and Ken

Moe Berg was educated at Yale, and was an amazing linguist. It was said he could learn to speak any language on earth colloquially in 30 days. He was also in love with baseball, and baseball won out. He was a second-string and bullpen catcher for many years in the 40's and 50's. He was a man of much ritual and rules defining his space. The strictest rule was that nobody could touch any of his 10 daily newspapers until he had read it. After someone else had read even an article, he wouldn't read it. He died in 1972, and his last words were "How did the Mets do today?" Mickey Rivers was the quintessential laid-back, jive-talking, black centre-fielder who perennially clenched a half a cigar in his teeth. He removed it to go to bat, of course. . His favourite pastimes when not reading the Racing Form or actually going to Belmont, were a little drinking whiskey and having a lot of late having fun. Ken Holtzman was a Yale-educated, erudite and somewhat intellectual Yankee pitcher. Mickey and Ken probably had nothing in common, and no one can actually remember what they talked about, if anything. But, they were inseparable, on the road, in the clubhouse, and on the plane.

Two people form a bond out of seemingly nothing and feel an unusual unspoken closeness, and another, 30 years earlier, played ball for $3k a year when he could have been at the top of most any field he chose. He felt "at home" at the ballpark, in the clubhouse, and performing all those miniscule and meaningful rituals of the game. I certainly understand Moe Berg in that way of thinking at least. Nowhere else I know can you meet some genuine characters, oddballs and invisible geniuses.

Playing a silly little game of catch with Robbie Roblin on the evening of a day that had been hot, between the third and fourth, planning where to light up and have a few after the game.n'The BUS squad. Everybody knew the most important was the 6th, so everyone got really into it for a while. The banter, the no have Robbie used to say that he didn't have a clue what made me tick "...but "I'll give anyone four bucks who can tell me" ,The ineffable bond that forms somehow, in different ways and different times during the summer. After that, you'll run through a fence to win, and all petty complant just evaporates. That entrance into a new state of mind that came from stepping onto a freshly raked infield. It just all goes away. For 90 minutes at least. Lucky are those who love and live the life.