Lou Brock's obit in today's NYT brought about a chain of
thoughts that I will offer you. So, as Vince Scully famously said "pull up a
chair."
Since I cited the great Vince Scully, I will take from the obit an
excerpt that ties Brock to the Brooklyn Dodgers:
Louis Clark Brock was born on June 18, 1939, in El Dorado, Ark., and grew up
in Collinston, La., in a family of sharecroppers who picked cotton. He attended
a one-room schoolhouse, but at the age of 9 he was inspired by possibilities
beyond the poverty and segregation of the rural South.
He was listening one night to a feed from radio station KMOX in St. Louis.
Harry Caray was broadcasting a game between the Cardinals and Jackie Robinson’s
Brooklyn Dodgers, the summer after Robinson broke the major leagues’ color
barrier, a time when, as Brock put it, “Jim Crow was king.”
“I was searching the dial of an old Philco radio,” Brock recalled. When he heard
about Robinson, “I felt pride in being alive. The baseball field was my fantasy
of what life offered.”
As a boy, Brock never played organized baseball. Instead
of a ball and bat, he swatted rocks with tree branches. But he received an
academic scholarship to Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., and played
baseball there, catching the attention of Buck O’Neil, the longtime Negro
leagues player and manager who was scouting for the Cubs.
A coincidental note from the obit: Brock died with multiple myeloma, the same
form of cancer that killed my mother.
Brock spent his first two years in MLB with the Cubs. My most
vivid memory of him is from that period. It was a game in the Polo Grounds
against the 1962 Mets -- the losingest team in MLB history. I was a Stuyvesant
H.S. senior in 1962 and opted to take a 5-period program for the spring semester
because that's all I needed to meet graduation requirements. I finished at 12:30
and on several occasions I headed to the Polo Grounds after school to see the
Mets when they had a day game. (If memory serves, the bleachers admission price
was 75 cents.) My memory of Brock did not come from one of those games. Brock
was NOT a power hitter. In 19 seasons he hit 149 homers. But in a game I watched
on TV, Brock hit a home run into the center field bleachers at the Polo Grounds.
WOW. What a shot.
The bleachers in the Polo Grounds were more 450 feet from home
plate and they had a high wall. In about 50 years of NY Giant baseball in the
Polo Grounds no Giant slugger ever hit one into the bleachers. It was only done
once -- by Joe Adcock, a bona fide slugger for the Boston and Milwaukee Braves.
Here's a digression regarding Adcock. He hit unique home runs in both NL
ballparks in New York City. In addition to his prodigious poke in the Polo
Grounds, he was also the only player who ever hit a ball that cleared the roof
above the left field stands in Ebbetts Field.
And here's another digression concerning home runs in Ebbetts Field. Adcock was
the only one to launch one over the roof, but there were thousands of homers hit
into the upper deck during the 44 years of Dodger baseball in Ebbetts Field.
One of them was hit by Dodger great Gil Hodges in Game 1 of the 1956 World Series.
That ball wound up in the hands of my uncle -- Mac Shapiro -- an NYC Dept. of
Health employee who that day got the plum assignment of inspecting the concession
stands at Ebbetts Field during a World Series game. During the game, after visiting
a hot dog stand under the upper deck, he walked up the ramp to see how the game was
going and Hodges homer ball landed right in his hands. Did he catch it on the fly,
or pick it up off the ramp near where he was standing? Perhaps his son can clarify this
point. Anyhow, good uncle that he was, Mac gave the ball to his nephews, the
Sherman brothers Joey and Lenny, to play with. We were 11 and 8 years old and,
not appreciating the ball as an historic artifact, we did just that. We played
with it and eventually lost it when it rolled into a sewer on 32 Ave. in Queens.
I remember that the ball had a brown mark where it was bruised by the mighty
blow of Hodges' bat.
Getting back to Brock: His bleacher-bound dinger in the Polo
Grounds in 1962 made him the second player to land one in the bleachers there.
During the following year, Hank Aaron, whose homer-hitting credentials need no
introduction, blasted one into the Polo Grounds bleachers off Mets pitcher Roger
Craig. Think about this. In about 50 years of Giants baseball in the Polo
Grounds there was one bleacher home run. In two seasons of Mets baseball there,
there were two more hit by visiting team players. What does that suggest about
the quality of Mets pitching during their first two seasons? So there it is. A
Lou Brock story from me to you that you will not find in any of his obituaries.
Diamond Joe
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