Origin Story: How I became a baseball fan

I’ve loved baseball forever.

I have fond early memories of hot summer days playing in the front yard on Sunday afternoons with my maternal grandfather sitting in a chair on the porch, watching his grandkids. On the hi-fi radio in the living room, blaring through the screen door at the front of our house, were the sounds of KSFO Radio with Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons broadcasting San Francisco Giants games. (That’s my mother’s dad, Grandpa Jack Murphy, in one of the photos here, taken in the late ‘50s.)

 

My great uncle Joe Bowman was a pitcher in the Major Leagues in the ‘30s and ‘40s. He played for several teams, but spent the largest chunk of his 12 year career with the Pittsburgh Pirates. After this playing career ended, he had a successful career as scouting director for Charlie Finley’s Kansas City Athletics from the late ‘50s until the A’s moved to Oakland for the 1968 season. 

You can read Joe Bowman’s biography, courtesy of the Society for American Baseball research here:

https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/aa4eed26

My dad grew up idolizing his ball-playing uncle. The pro games my dad saw in his youth were the Kansas City Blues minor league team. That was long before MLB went west of the Mississippi, so those AAA games were the next best thing to an MLB game.

After his time in the Naval Air Reserve in WWII, my dad moved west to SF from KC to follow his mother who had job-transferred west to SF during the war. Dad didn’t get to see his first real Major League game until he was nearly 35 when the Giants moved to San Francisco in 1958.

My great uncle, like most of the family on my father’s side, was a Kansas City native, born and bred. He didn’t want anything to do with moving to Oakland with the A’s. He'd had enough of Charlie Finley and just wanted to stay close to home.

The teams he helped build by signing young talent like Sal Bando, Reggie Jackson, Jim “Catfish” Hunter, Tony LaRussa and many others, won three World Series, but not until uncle Joe was off working for other teams, serving as a midwest scout, mostly with the Baltimore Orioles, right up to the time he passed away in 1990.

My Dad was a weekend season ticket holder in the Giants’ early years in The City. But he dropped the Giants like a hot rock when the A’s came to Oakland. Maybe it was loyalty to the team his uncle helped to build… or maybe it was a severe case of “root, root, root for the home team” since Oakland was a few miles closer to our Moraga home than San Francisco was.

In any case, Dad was one of the first Oakland Athletics’ season ticket holders. The one souvenir I have from that is a 1968 signed team ball. Joe DiMaggio was a celebrity home coach for the A’s. He signed the ball in the “sweet spot”—the place of honor for a ball signature.

When my brother and I were quite young, Joe Bowman and my great aunt Mary Bowman (my paternal grandmother’s sister), would send along baseball gifts to us. My brother and I would play catch with our Dad in the front yard of our Moraga home…and when we did, we used the official American League baseballs Uncle Joe & Aunt Mary sent us.

In another photo here, that’s me at about four years old in 1960. With one hand, I’m holding the hand of my great grandmother, Nellie Fitzgerald (my paternal grandmother’s mother). She was about 90 at the time. In my other hand, I’m holding... a baseball.

"You spend your life gripping a baseball," Jim Bouton once wrote, "and it turns out that it was the other way around all along."

Baseball is a game of seasons. It starts hopefully every spring as daylight begins to grow. So here we are, on one of my least favorite days of the year…the last day of baseball’s regular season. It’s the surest sign of darker, colder days and the certain farewell to summer…. even if there may still be a bit of warm weather in October.

Sure, the playoffs are looming and we could get almost another full month of baseball. I’m rooting hard for the A’s to go deep in the playoffs. Not just because I’m a big fan, but because every day they play is another day closer to spring, to new and longer light, to the promise of spring.

Just 135 days or so until pitchers and catchers report for Spring Training 2020. I can't wait!

From early 1930s Spring Training: Pitchers Lew Krausse, Joe Bowman,
Roy Mahaffey with Athletics' manager Connie Mack