All This Time

... all I had to do was ask Melvin.

Melvin, Watson, Norton and I toured the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory during our soggy sojourn through Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana in 2013. The factory offers personalized bats for sale and at the time, I thought this might be the right medium to commemorate seeing every major and minor league team. That achievement wouldn't happen for another decade —

first pitch
Carolina Mudcats vs. Down East Wood Ducks
September 3, 2023

I was thinking that I could have the barrel inscribed with "Touch 'em all" and the dates of my first baseball game and the day I finally saw every team in affiliated baseball. Among other problems, which I will get to, I didn't know the earlier date.

The first game I saw was on a school trip, which I mentioned in my previous post. Melvin, having read that I had not yet found box scores that included time of game, suggested that I look at Retrosheet. Although I still don't know for certain what game I saw, Melvin has (unsurprisingly) helped me identify the likely candidate.

I knew the game was on a school day toward the end of the 1969-1970 academic year. I attended as my home room representative to the student government and we voted on who to see, Mets or Yankees. The Mets had won the World Series in 1969 and they won this vote as well.

The World Champions played seven weekday games at home during the spring semester. Five of them were in April, which I assume is too early to be the game I attended. Of the remaining two games, the attendance for the Tuesday, May 12, game was 8,512 and the gate — as the National League recorded it in those days — for the Thursday, May 28, game was 20,919. That figure is more consistent with busloads of school groups and May 28 is closer to the end of the school year. (All of the day games in June were on the weekend or in Chicago.)

The Mets lost to the Cardinals, 9-2, on May 28, 1970. Future Hall of Famer Bob Gibson — who would go on to win the National League Cy Young Award for the second time in 1970 — pitched a complete game and struck out 11. Two other future HOF inductees took the field that day, Lou Brock in left and catcher Joe Torre (who went into the Hall as a manager).

Jim McAndrew, who would have only one winning season in his six years with the Mets, lasted just a third of an inning and took the loss. I was unfamiliar with McAndrew before looking back at this game, nor did I know Ken Boswell, who played second base. The Mets starters who would become iconic names were Cleon Jones (LF), Tommie Agee (CF, and the winner of a Gold Glove in 1970), Art Shamsky (1B), Ron Swoboda (RF) and Jerry Grote (C) but Boswell went three-for-three with a sac fly, earning both RBI, and stole the only base of the game.

The Mets flashed some leather, turning three double plays, and reliever Don Cardwell (another unfamiliar name) picked a runner off of second. But the four Mets pitchers gave up 13 hits and walked six and almost half of the base runners scored. The Cards' win notwithstanding, it seems on paper to have been a fun game to watch ... if in fact I was paying any attention and, of course, this is the game that I went to.

Even the hint of uncertainty is enough to keep me from buying a trophy Louisville Slugger. Further, I am now at the age when I have begun to get rid of things; I don't need to accumulate more. Most important, however, is the realization that I have been comparing apples and oranges. May 28, 1970 may have been my first professional baseball game but September 3, 2023 wasn't the last game that I saw. (If I drop dead tomorrow, my final game will be the Brooklyn Cyclones getting shut-out by the Aberdeen Ironbirds on my mother's "second birthday in heaven.")

Or, turning the relationship around, while I was able to boast on Labor Day last year that I had seen every team in major and minor league baseball, it cannot be said that my seventh grade school trip was the beginning of that endeavor. In fact, Melvin and I had seen about half of the (then many more) teams before even making this a goal ... and I have no idea whatsoever the date of that decision. And, of course, there is the oft-mentioned fact that teams relocate and new stadiums are built, making "done" always a transient state.

So, no commemorative bat. This was still a fun exercise — and one that would not have happened without Melvin's intercession.

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Footnote: In Back to the Beginning, I researched my first minor league game but that is only one topic in the much longer post with surprisingly (to contemporary eyes) low resolution photographs.