“All baseball fans have the same memory of their first big-league game. You enter the grandstand, way up in the cheap seats. When you look down, you see a shimmering green island surrounded by an ocean of brick, concrete, and asphalt that stretches to the horizon. You realize that the green island is a baseball field. The incongruity of it all stays with you.”
– Tom Gilbert, How Baseball Happened
My family tells me I have an impressive memory for strange things and minutiae. I was taken back to a summer day in my childhood when I read the above quote in Tom Gilbert’s book this evening. The problem is I didn’t know what day or year I attended my first big league ball game. I needed to peel back the years and piece together what little memory I had of that day before I can determine the day and year.
My dad and I boarded a Bieber bus at the Wescosville bus terminal one morning along with several other kids and their parents from my local Cub Scouts pack for a journey to a cathedral called Yankee Stadium. The bus ride must not have been memorable as I don’t remember a single thing. I don’t remember the journey, parking, disembarking, or walking into the ballpark. My first recollection is walking through our section entrance to find our seats. We turned left to walk up the absurdly large and steep stairs and arrived in our seats seven stories above God in the second-to-last row in the upper deck. Tom’s quote perfectly captured my first recollection of a Major League ballpark. I sat down in my seat and gazed out over the brilliantly manicured grass. Small occasional cloud silhouettes danced briskly over the outfield grass. The scene was devoid of action until two men dressed in Yankee uniforms ran across the field carrying an orange water cooler. A few people throughout the stadium applauded them and cheered. I have no idea why but it impressed upon me this deep appreciation and reverence for a game and team that had so impacted the world. Then he spoke. “Good Afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Yankee Stadium”. Bob Sheppard’s velvet voice still echoes in my ears to this day when I think of my first big league ball game, just as it did when his inviting introduction coated the historic ballpark.
I was a kid and didn’t pay much attention to the game. But what I knew was that, despite the reverence displayed by the Yankee faithful that day, I wanted the Yanks to lose to the Minnesota Twins. And I wanted everyone to hear it. So, when Sheppard announced the Yankee lineup, I screamed that each Yankee liked Barbies. I was a kid, what else could I say to emasculate the previous year’s world champions? To me, they were a squad full of Ken dolls in for a rude awakening at the hands of the Twinkies and their pudgy first baseman.
Of all the players on the field that day, only one name stood out and has stood the test of time imprinted on my mind: first baseman Ron Coomer. I have no idea why. Certainly there were other players with more interesting names. Looking over the box score years later, it turns out Ron had a mediocre day at the plate, going 1 for 4 with a double and two runs scored. Regardless of his mediocrity, his appearance in the lineup that day was a key in determining the game date all these years later.
A kid can only sit in a hard plastic seat for so long before they get restless. Or hungry. And all kids love hot dogs. Dad and I got up at one point during the game to find the best hot dog Yankee Stadium had to offer. Fortunately, there as a concessions stand near the entrance to our section. If you’ve been to old Yankee Stadium, then you know how narrow the concourse was. A packed ballpark with narrow concourses means those concourses are swarmed with people. So, I told my Dad I wanted a hot dog with mustard. He handed me the hot dog and began to pay the vendor. But I was bored, so I decided to walk back to our seats without telling him. Not a good idea. As he told me years later. He looked down, saw I wasn’t there, immediately panicked and went looking for me nearby. After an unsuccessful search thinking “I lost my kid in Yankee Stadium in New York City”, he returned to the seat to find me chowing down on my first ballpark hot dog.
The rest of the day is a blur aside from the Twins vanquishing the world champion Ken dolls. As we exited our section and made our way to the ground level, I vividly remember what amounted to a traffic cop directing the crush of fans trying to leave the ballpark. Those concourses were really small. And so ended my first live major league baseball experience.
Now to the detective work. When the hell was this game played? Key components were my age, time of day, the lineups and a stadium sign. First, my parents and I moved to the Lehigh Valley in 1997 and I didn’t join the local Cub Scout pack for another year. So the earliest the game could have taken place was 1998. The Twins and Yankees are in different divisions so they only play each other a few times each season. The Twins only beat the Yankees once in 1998 at Yankee Stadium, and it was a Friday night game. Since the game I was at was played during the day, 1998 was out the door. Second, before the game began, I remember seeing a sign in the stadium that read “24 World Championships”. The Yankees won their 24th World Series title in 1998, so 1999 was a good next starting point. In 1999, the Twins won two games at Yankee Stadium – Saturday August 14 and Sunday August 15. Both were day games; Saturday’s game started at 3:05pm while Sunday’s game began at 1:35pm. The key to solving the mystery, however, was the lineup. Third, and finally, my guy Ron Coomer wasn’t in the lineup and didn’t pinch hit on Saturday August 14, which means the first major league baseball game I ever attended was Sunday August 15, 1999.
27th and Jefferson 