Henry Aaron

(Henry Aaron)

As I continue to gather pieces for a new collection I'll consider this one:

In 1980 I researched and wrote a series of historical pieces on the Portland Beavers while working for a community monthly in Northwest Portland. I dug into a trove of microfiche files at the Portland library to find material dating from turn-of-the-century newspapers, and I leaned heavily on many stories by a long-time Oregonian writer, a legend in Oregon named L.H. Gregory, whom I could remember reading as a kid.

Gregory was among the last of the old-time sportswriters. He referred to the ballplayers as "lads" and extolled their virtues as "fine young men," and once described a manager as having a "Romanesque stature and nose," a man whose "dignity" surpassed even his managerial skills, etc.

A night on the town would include players under Gregory's watchful gaze "ice-skating in Fresno" on an off day, and "cutting manly figures" as they circled around the rink and "impressed the local ladies."

It was good stuff.

I used as much of the material as I could find and put together six pieces covering professional baseball in Portland between 1901 and 1980.

Lo, I had a minor hit in the community! One friend urged me to start going to spring training in Arizona and freelance baseball stories. People, generally old men, but a few old women as well, wrote to the newspaper thanking us for the memories of Vaughn Street Park, Portland's home field for over fifty years. Built in 1901, Vaughn had once been the finest ballpark on the west coast, people said. Everything changed when they tore that old stadium down in 1956. It just wasn't the same.

Baseball is American society's biggest nostalgia hook, even when the nostalgia is phony and trumped-up by baseball's never ending self-promotion. Or George Will, the waxiest of the baseball philosophers.

I understood baseball because I played the game. I played Little League, Babe Ruth, high school and junior college ball. But I swear to God baseball doesn't make me nostalgic at all. In fact, I don't even care for the game today. It's too money-centric now, and as with every professional sport most of the players are all about the money and little else. When Curt Flood sued baseball to free players at the negotiating table, the game changed, not just the ballparks, which always get rickety and old.

Curt Flood started free-agency rolling. That was good for the players, but bad for the fans. I knew Pete Ward, who played for the White Sox and Yankees for a decade, from my work in the bar business. He was a beer rep for a Portland distributor when I met him, and we once talked about the big money that came into baseball after he retired. He seemed a little wistful about the entire situation.

The baseball strike in the '90s was the last straw for me. I've seen a couple of games since then, but honestly the game bores me to death now, in part because I don't have the interest one must have to keep up with the revolving door of trades and salary disputes and drunken driving charges and dugout tiffs and on and on.

Throw in the "juicing" controversies--steroid use--of recent years and you have a yawner.

I wrote a small book about the Beavers, which in hindsight isn't really a very good book at all, and then I essentially lost interest in the team. Over the ensuing years I watched a handful of games, and I didn’t miss the game at all. Just a year ago the team's final owner, a rich kid whose father is Henry Paulson, and who is a soccer fanatic, sold the team out of town. He reconfigured the old baseball park into a futbol stadium.

But to get back on point, my baseball history was noticed. The Beaver's organization in 1980 had just switched hands again, this time falling in the lap of a young, aggressive Philadelphia native named David Hersh. Hersh favored long, thick, expensive cigars and nicely tailored suits and had a promoter's sensibility, like Charlie Finley, the then owner of the Oakland A's, and like one of the game's greatest-ever promoters, Bill Veeck (as in wreck).

Veeck, owner of the Chicago White Sox, made an early name for himself in 1951 when he hired 3' 7" Eddie Gaedel to pinch hit against the Detroit Tigers. The opposing pitcher walked him, of course, unable to find the six-inch strike zone a hunched over midget presents. For their part, Finley's Athletics kept a mule as a mascot at the ballpark in Oakland, a symbol of the owner's stubborn personality they say. Finley's teams were the first to wear white shoes and lobby for orange baseballs, which never happened thank the good lord lollipop.

David Hersh was 23 years-old when he came to Portland, at the time the youngest baseball executive in the land.

Never mind his relative inexperience, Hersh had somehow managed to find a list of investors who backed his dream, for a while, of placing Major League Baseball in Portland within a few years.

Like orange baseballs, it didn't happen, and Hersh moved on, dashing the hopes of Portland's smattering of hard-core fans.

I liked Hersh for his brashness and early willfulness to get it done and bring real ball to Portland. The Triple-A Beavers were good, but there is a considerable fall-off between the second highest level of baseball and the pinnacle league Babe Ruth helped build while nailing the grandstands together in Yankee Stadium. Anyone who knows baseball understands this, so the excitement Hersh brought to town was tangible.

I met Hersh at the stadium, where I'd been summoned by his Director of Communications, a Rick somebody (I've managed to inconveniently forget his last name; perhaps because he was somewhat of a dweeb). The organization was interested in my baseball history. I let them use whatever text they wanted to promote the team in their program, and in return they issued me a press pass, which I used sporadically for the next couple of seasons. I had asked for money, and Rick had said, "We're not that interested!"

The pass gave me access to the press box behind home plate, where I sat and daydreamed throughout the few games I attended. I may have even fallen asleep on occasion, to tell you how interested I was in the proceedings. I didn't write any more baseball stories that year.

Hersh walked up and down press row at times, doling out free food to the writers, which must have included me because when I was there I ate really well. Big, tasty sandwiches and all the pizza I wanted. Plus salads and savory desserts, cakes, trays of donuts, veggie plates--damn, I'm getting hungry recalling it all.

Hersh was a hand-shaker of course, moving around the ballpark in an effort to meet as many paying customers as he could. He was a back-slapper, touchy-feely, spreading his warm dreams to the writers and fans in the sincerest terms, with a perfect white smile, billowing cigar smoke as he laughed needlessly hard at poor quips--an honest to God salesman.

Hersh the promoter had worked out an affiliate's agreement with the Pirates, the team he brought to town for an exhibition at mid-season his first year. He held a home run contest, and the sight of Willie Stargell hitting the ball over 500 ft. to a balcony overlooking the ballpark in right field was an unforgettable sight, it really was. Hersh, smoking his cigar, stood near the on-deck circle with a wad of hundreds in his fist, and every time Stargell or the other derby contestants hit one out the kid would make a show of giving the batter a hundred. Two hours of this during pre-game, and the tab ran into the thousands.

A year or two later, Hersh brought Mickey Mantle and Henry Aaron to town for a special promotion. I heard later that Mick had been in Joe's Cellar on 21st Ave. with other baseball-types the night before and had drank a few and made an ass out of himself, which might explain why I didn't see him at the park the next night.

But I'm not absolutely sure he wasn't there, all I know is he didn't make it down to the press box, or I didn't see him at any rate.

I ran into Aaron after the game. The stadium offices were under the grandstands and I was down there, had just turned a corner out of the press box and I practically walk into Hammerin' Hank.

You know, Aaron wasn't a very large man, which was surprising given the number of homers he hit— 705. They say his power came from his wrists. When I saw Hank I naturally looked at those wrists, and I said, "Hello, Mr. Aaron."

He nodded and kept moving, until I said, "Could you please sign this for me?" I was holding a scrap of paper I'd just ripped from my notebook.

Hank looked at me with curious discernment and said, "Aren't you a little old to be asking for an autograph?"

Perhaps I was at 29. After that I don't remember what else I said, or how I justified myself, but Hank signed.

I owned that autograph for 20 years before losing it in a move. I should have given it to someone more responsible than I.


TS