My Dad gave me the gift of a lifetime — he took me to the seventh game of the 1960 World Series. I have to say, Bill Mazeroski was my hero long before he hit that momentous home run to vanquish the hated Yankees. At age 12, you see, I was a good-field-no-hit second baseman from West Virginia, just like Maz.
My Dad introduced me to the game that has been such a huge part of my life, both as a player and as a fan. We played catch in the back yard and listened to Pirates games, as recounted by one of the greatest sports announcers ever, the inimitable Bob Prince.
We lived in Wheeling, W.Va., just 56 miles southwest of Pittsburgh. My Dad hauled my friends and me to Pirates games, a two-hour ride, several times a year.
Dad kept us occupied by inventing the greatest car game ever: “peaflipper.” A peaflipper was a VW beetle or bus, at the time a fairly rare sighting. When one appeared, whoever called “peaflipper” first would get a point (corresponding to one penny); a peaflipper bus was worth 3 points; a peaflipper truck was worth 5 points; and a peaflipper with a Texas license plate was the jackpot — 50 points or 50 cents. We used to pass by a VW dealer in Washington, Pa., which resulted in peaflipper mayhem — dealer sightings were later banned from the game.
My friends were all baseball fanatics — playing it, listening to it, trading baseball cards and engaging in endless arguments over who was the best third basemen or how the manager lost a crucial game through an unwise move.
Our fanaticism was stoked when the Pirates started winning incredible come-from-behind games in 1959 and 1960. As an adult Orioles fan, I often tune out when the O’s are behind by several runs in the late innings, but the little boy in me fights this urge because I remember all the times the Pirates rewarded my loyalty with a dramatic late-inning rally.
Our view of the Pirates-as-the-center-of-the-universe also was fueled by the Pirates one-of-a-kind announcer, Prince. He was an unapologetic “homer.”
Every time the Pirates eked out yet another astonishing come-from-behind win, his closing comment was “We had ‘em aaaall the way.” This simple ironic phrase captured the feeling — the “we” was actually us — that somehow a 12-year old kid, laying awake listening to a West Coast game at 1 a.m., had something to do with yet another miraculous late-inning win. We were all in it together.
Prince’s nick-names for our heroes made them all seem like our best friends. Bill Virdon was “the Quail” because he so often started rallies with a dying quail bloop hit. Vernon Law was “the Deacon”; Bob Skinner was “the dog”; Don Hoak was “Tiger” because he was a ferocious competitor. When Roberto Clemente would come to the plate with runners on base, Prince would exhort fans to yell “arriba,” Spanish for “ rise up.”
Prince made fans feel like they could identify with these guys — that their victories and defeats were our victories and defeats. The result was an incredible bond between the fans and the team I have been privileged to listen to many great announcers, including the incomparable John Miller, but none could equal Prince’s ability to draw me in to fanatical loyalty to the hometown team.
With World Series fever running amok, Wheeling schools eventually gave up battling kids with transistor radios and piped the games through the school’s sound system.
My dad surprised me with tickets to the big game, apparently the result of a business relationship that involved Pirates shortstop Dick Groat. I was the envy of all my schoolmates, and I felt like the luckiest kid in the world. Little did I know that I was about to see the game that holds the title as “the greatest game ever played.”
Anticipating the game felt a little like Seabiscuit vs. War Admiral, our working class never-say-die steeltowners taking on the baseball pedigrees from the sophisticated metropolis. We felt like our cause was just, but we also felt like the deck was stacked against us.
The big day
I remember the walk along Forbes Avenue to get to the ballpark — there was electricity in the air. You could feel it, the full range of emotions from exhilaration to worry and dread.
As the game unfolded, those emotions continued their wild swings, back and forth all the way to the last of the ninth.
I still get tears in my eyes, almost 60 years later, when I picture Mazeroski’s drive disappearing over the 406 mark. I’m not sure Maz ever made it to home plate as fans streamed onto the field to share in the ultimate baseball triumph. It was simply glorious.
On our way home we detoured through downtown Pittsburgh. Steeltown was in a state of collective celebratory delirium, as horns honked, strangers hugged, and confetti streamed down from every window. No one seemed to care that traffic was snarled and jubilant fans had taken over the streets. All were swept up — every man, woman and child, fans and non-fans, white collar and blue collar, all reveling in the stunning victory of our work-a-day hometown heroes.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette captured the wild and wondrous scene:
“The clamorous, insistent sound of auto horns, that began immediately after the game was over, continued far into the night and the early morning hours.
There appeared to be no stemming of the tide of wild uninhibited enthusiasm that surged through the city.
Horns began to sound Downtown and in Oakland, and what first started as a trickle of confetti from office buildings soon swelled into a steady blizzard-like snow.
Air raid sirens shrieked and loud explosions from giant firecrackers rocked and reverberated throughout the city.
Confetti and debris was knee-deep on Fifth and Forbes Avenues as cheering, howling mobs of office workers, shoppers and just plain spectators flipped in a frenzy of screaming and yelling.”
At age 12, I had never experienced anything like it, but that statement still holds true, 60 years later. I was simply overwhelmed with the kind of joy that only happens once in a lifetime.
Thanks, Dad, you gave me baseball.
I gave my three kids baseball, too, but through our adopted hometown team, the Baltimore Orioles. My son’s earliest memory is in 1983, when he was 2 years old. After the Orioles vanquished the Phillies in the World Series, we hopped in the car and rode all over town, honking our horn and soaking in the collective elation. It hearkened back to my still-vivid memories of Oct. 13, 1960.
Our car was, get this, a peaflipper.
Evans Paull is a retired City Planner and economic analyst. His work has been published in ten professional journals. In retirement he is applying his analytical skills to his first love: baseball. He can be contacted at evpaull@comcast.net.
First Published: October 11, 2020, 10:00 a.m.
