The Kisseloff Collection

Sometimes, I’m sure that along with the historical memorabilia that seems to occupy every free inch of our house, there are also ghosts that haunt the place, just to taunt me. That can’t be, right?

My grandfather wasn’t a great guy (in fact, he was a lousy one) but he was a great baseball fan. He often took my mother and aunt to Ebbets Field, and when the great ballpark was torn down he retrieved one of the bricks. It now sits on my bookshelf.

He was also one of those people who liked to score games, and as it turned out, he also liked to save the occasional scorecard. My Aunt lives in Florida, and a few years ago she sent me a package with a bunch of scorecards from the 1940s. I didn’t look too carefully at them before I put them away in a binder for safekeeping. Then a few weeks ago, I thought it would be nice to do a baseball-related post for opening day, so I pulled out those old scorecards.

That’s when I had one of those moments that a collector has once or twice in a lifetime — if he’s lucky. As I sorted through the small pile, I noticed that on the cover of one of the 1947 scorecards my grandfather had scribbled “Opening Day.”

Now, if you were a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, or if you just know a few things about baseball history, you know what happened on opening day, 1947. Do you? I’ll stop typing for a moment to let you guess.

Let’s see a show of hands.

That’s right. Opening day 1947 marked the historic day that Jackie Robinson made his Major League debut. It may have been the most important baseball game ever played, and here I was with the scorecard from that game in my hands.

Below are scans from the front and back covers and the inside pages. The scorecard itself is at this moment at Lelands.com, getting ready for auction. There’s a good chance it will cover our moving expenses this summer. My grandfather wasn’t an especially nice person, but from the grave he did me a solid. Knowing him as I did though, I’m sure if he was alive and had realized what I had, he would have grabbed it out of my hands in a second and taken off with it. Fortunately, he’d also be 102 now, so I could probably catch up to his walker and overpower him.

Here are the scans, and as always they’re clickable.

I came home from a friend’s house late that afternoon on November 18, 1966 (we were watching an episode of “Superman”) when my wicked Aunt greeted me at the door with a look of malevolent glee on her face. “Your hero just quit,” she taunted me, obviously hoping to see this 11-year-old baseball fanatic burst into tears. When I found out she was referring to Sandy Koufax, I didn’t disappoint her.

How could it be possible? I knew he had a bad elbow, but he had just gone 27-9 for a Dodger team with one of the most anemic lineups in baseball and still led them to a pennant. He was invincible. Plus, it was a personal betrayal, not only to me, but to every Jewish kid on Long Island who had ever been called an anti-semitic name (basically, every one of us). He was our defender, our Bar Koccba (ok, things didn’t turn out so good for him either). Over the next few days, I carefully clipped every article I could find about Sandy from the newspapers my Dad brought home and lovingly preserved them in my official Sandy Koufax scrapbook that I was sure I would get to present to him one day, much to his undying gratitude.

Believe it or not, I still have that scrapbook, still lovingly preserved  — Sandy, if you read this, drop me a line with your address and I’ll send it to you. You’ll thank me, I’m sure. Here’s the cover, which I made myself with the help of my DYMO label maker.

And here is that tear-stained bulletin from November 18, 1966:

Click on the story to read it.

Yes, detritus is everywhere in my office, even between my ears. So I heard this story back in 1972, but I was reminded of it recently during my weekly run with Norman Goluskin who is reading Kai Bird and Marty Sherwin’s terrific biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer; this after he devoured a biography of Albert Einstein. Some runners have all the brains.

Anyway, it was during our chat about Oppenheimer  that 1972 flashed before my eyes, and I was suddenly back preparing irrigation pipes for our wheat field on Kibbutz Sarid. Somehow, the conversation got around to Yogi Berra (who, by the way, I have seen naked — talk about the kinds of horror sights in your life that you never forget), and my friend Barry, who was working on the pipes with me, told this story: It seemed back in the late 1940s or early 1950s Yogi Berra and Albert Einstein both happened to be invited to one of those gala Washington D.C. parties. The photographers there thought it would be fun to get the two together for a little conversation and photo op, so they took Berra over to Einstein without telling him who he was. They let the two converse for a while. Then pictures were taken. A few minutes later when the photographers got Berra alone, one of them asked him, “So, Yogi, what did you think of the old man?”

Yogi said, “He was ok, but when it comes to baseball, he ain’t no Einstein.”

Out of popular demand (ok, I’m lying, no one has demanded, or even asked), I thought I’d post one more baseball clip this week. This is another true rarity. Baseball fans have probably heard Russ Hodges’s “The Giants won the pennant! The Giants won the pennant!” ad nauseum, — especially Brooklyn fans who suffered mightily after Bobby Thomson hit the home run in the third game of the 1951 playoffs that sent  the Giants into the World Series and broke the hearts of Dodger fans. There was hardly a soul in New York who didn’t think they had the pennant in the bag when they went up by 13 and a half games in August (Little did they know that the Giants were illegally stealing signals, but that’s another story).  Still, it was one of baseball’s greatest moments. Some say the greatest.

The clip is usually about a minute long, and it is great, but as it turned out in the middle of the ninth inning, a technologically savvy Dodger fan had used an early version of the tape recorder to record the action so he could later taunt his buddies who were Giant fans. Despite his misery , he saved the tape (I would have tossed it into the Gowanus Canal), and it eventually found its way onto an LP. That’s where this comes from. It’s a full eight minutes of opera-level tragedy if you ask me, but still marvelous to hear.

As much as it pains me, here’s a video of the home run. The opening commentary was done for a commercial collection.

Click here to listen to the recording, which begins with Whitey Lockman up at the plate.

And imagine you are hearing it on this:

Oh, I forgot to say how we got to talking about baseball when Bob Stein of Voyager came over to my apartment. It was because of this, my Ebbets Field brick, probably my most treasured possession:

I had kind of decided to ease up a little on posting again so quickly, mostly out of fear that I’ll soon run out of interesting stuff (and interesting things to say about it) in a week, but I realized that the World Series is about to start, and since I’m probably going to spend tomorrow night sitting in front of the TV, I thought I’d upload this glimpse of one of the most monumental moments in baseball history to the site.

Back in the early 1990s, the Voyager Company was experimenting with a new media format called CD-ROM. Remember those? Anyway, one of the company’s partners had seen my New York book and thought there might be a CD-ROM in it. There wasn’t, but we got talking about baseball, and lo and behold we realized there was a CD-ROM in the sport’s always fascinating history. About a year later, “Baseball’s Greatest Hits” came out, and I still think it’s a pretty amazing disk, with 65 of the greatest calls in baseball history — the original ones, too, not reproductions of incredible moments such as Carl Hubbell striking out five straight future Hall of Famers, Bobby Thomson’s home run, even Roseanne mangling the Star Spangled Banner. I spent a few days poking around a closet in the Hall of Fame library where they just tossed stuff people had sent them over the years, and so I also got to include interviews with many Hall of Famers, including Ty Cobb and sound bytes from the original Hall of Fame ceremonies in 1939. We also put in  video, columns by Red Smith and even a trivia game. All of it is introduced by the great Mel Allen.

The disk is long since out of print, but I thought I’d share with you my favorite video from the project. It’s a home movie taken from the stands of Babe Ruth supposedly calling his shot during the 1932 World Series against the Cubs. I might get an email from the owner of this clip asking me to take it down, but if not, take your time, run it a few times, especially at the higher magnifications, and let me know what you think. Did he or didn’t he? Get out your eyeglasses and see for yourself.

(It could take a few moments to load, so you might have to be patient, but believe me, if you’re a baseball fan it’ll be worth it). Click here to see the film.