The calendar has flipped to March, and baseball is in the air. The spring-training exhibition games are well along in Florida and Arizona.
Baseball is a part of my earliest memories. It was the path for a “refugee” to feel accepted as just another kid. I was an obsessive child—and skilled with numbers—so following baseball felt natural. I devoured team standings and batting averages.
Baseball was mostly an afternoon sport in those years. As a sickly child who missed school a lot, I was often able to listen to the game broadcasts. When my stepfather came home from work, I grabbed at his newspaper to look at the box scores for my heroes—the Brooklyn Dodgers.
From the newspaper photographs and the broadcasters’ descriptions, I had a general idea of the layout of the field and the design of a baseball stadium. The Dodgers played in Ebbets Field—just a 30-minute subway or trolley ride away. But it might as well have been at the other end of the world for a nine-year-old whose stepfather’s view of following baseball was that it was a silly waste of time and electricity.
One unforgettable day in 1947, my friend’s father had tickets to a game—not just a game, but a doubleheader. My friend’s younger brother was ill so I was invited to join them. With our brown bags of sandwiches and mounting anticipation, we rode the subway and walked the few blocks to Ebbets Field.
We entered through a large rotunda with full-length windows and walked with the crowd down a staircase. The last step opened onto a panorama of shimmering sky and bright sunlight, and below it was the greenest grass I had ever seen. That feeling of awe—my first view of Ebbets Field—is more vivid in my memory than any scene from the Technicolor movies of my childhood or any Kodak view of my later travels.
We sat through two long games, and I savored every minute in what felt like a shrine.
I would return to Ebbets Field many times in the decade before the Dodgers broke my heart by moving to Los Angeles. By then I was at Columbia University, and I was the one writing about and broadcasting sports. For the most part, I was physically separated and emotionally detached from Brooklyn, but the loss of the Dodgers hit me hard. It felt like the end of childhood—the end of innocence.
When I tell my story as a Holocaust survivor to school groups, I often get the question, “When the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, did you continue to root for them?” I tell them I had a period of mourning and then turned my affection to the new team in New York—the Mets.
Today, a housing project in downtown Brooklyn has a cornerstone inscribed with the words “This is the former site of Ebbets Field.” I have never visited it, but I only have to look up from my typing to see my desktop model of this place that meant so much to me.
T.S. Eliot may have measured out his life in coffee spoons, but I have measured out mine in baseball seasons. My 78th opening day is a few weeks off. In recent years, my lifelong excitement at the beginning of another season has been tinged with the melancholy thought: How many more will there be?