95 Piccadilly
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By Shane Gilreath
Perhaps, we’ve tired of baseball, or hearing about it anyway, but I’ve driven back in the past this week. As you grow older, the game inevitably seems different, its heroes smaller than the giants who came before. Yet somehow, when the stadium lights go up during the postseason and the evening air turns crisp, it’s tough for me to relinquish it. There’s just something about October and baseball that wakes up a part of me that never stopped being nine years old.
The famed film director Francis Ford Coppola once told a story from his own childhood. In 1949, when he, himself, was a healthy, baseball-loving nine year old, he was struck by the polio epidemic, what they then called “infantile paralysis.” Almost overnight, the left side of his body ceased to move. His father, a musician who’d played at Yankee Stadium and a musical arranger for Radio City Music Hall, knew a man who knew Joe DiMaggio, the great Yankee Clipper. When DiMaggio heard about this young fan, bedridden and heartbroken, he took a new ball, signed it, and then went around the locker room and had every member of his 1949 Championship team add their names.
Coppola still has that ball today. Seventy-six years later and the famed Yankee signatures may have begun to fade by light, the leather may have yellowed, but the spirit remains the same. Coppola’s ball is a relic of a bygone era, a time when baseball was truly an American mythology – when Joe DiMaggio wasn’t just a man but a giant, a larger than life ideal, the same man who, just a few years later, would marry another icon of the age – Marilyn Monroe, of all women – and forever bind the bright lights of baseball stadiums to those of Hollywood. The marriage, the subsequent love story, her loss, and his habit of religiously sending flowers to her grave for decades – until the theft of the flowers stopped it, according to a DiMaggio friend – helped make the private Yankee legend even more aloof – and, perhaps, help consolidate his place outside of sport and in the history of American pop culture. Obsessively private, he probably would hate that.
Lately, between research, writing, postseason games, and community meetings, I’ve been reading a book called “Dinner with DiMaggio.” I like a book that walks me down a road – even if it’s in the middle of Manhattan. Even if I never actually met Joe DiMaggio, whose legend has long loomed over my consciousness, I do know something about a special baseball or three. One, I gave my late-sister as a gift, signed by Yankee great Paul O’Neil. Another given to me as a kid, a home run ball by Yankee great Roger Maris. And a third, a signed baseball by a young team of my own.
It’s true. It may not be the work of the UN’s Antonio Guterres – and I don’t know if it’s competition or the sport itself – but there is something about it that invades your blood and becomes important to you. When I was a youngster, like millions of kids across the world, I played Little League baseball – full of kids dreaming of the big leagues and taking it as seriously as the majors (just maybe not as seriously as our mothers in the stands). Sometimes, I can still see the dust rising, the chalk lines drawn by dads who came straight from work, and the summer evenings – and the bugs – that felt endless.
After one championship game, our coach – my dad or my uncle, I can’t be sure – handed me a ball and I promptly had it signed by the whole team. It wasn’t a DiMaggio ball, but it might as well have been. I kept it for years, until it was lost in a house fire, the signatures, like Coppola’s, fading with time.
For kids who think they’re Don Mattingly, taking headfirst slides like Pete Rose, those balls are held like treasures. After all, baseball, for all its flaws, never really leaves you. It lingers – in the stories, in the leather, and in the quiet rhythm of October nights.