The Home Team

What set Earth apart as a living planet was air, light, water, and baseball.

In spring, baseball came like buds on the trees. It stopped in fall like colorful leaves.

In the meantime, it was all around, every day.

It was on TV, the radio, in newspapers, gigantically. Everybody talked about it. Kids played it.

Baseball equipment was one of the first things you saved for in life. I had hand-me-down stuff, but I looked forward to buying my own glove someday. That would be great, like buying a suit or a car.

Good gloves were modeled after major league players' and had the player's signature etched in them. You wanted a good guy, not some stiff. That was as important as the fit.

You could pick a player from any team. That was considered sophisticated and genteel. It didn't have to be a player from your own favorite team.

In my case, it couldn't be from my own team, because my team was the Mets, and they didn't have any guys good enough to name a glove after.

The Mets were lousy, but beloved. Neither word is too strong.

The Mets were sort of a replacement team for the Dodgers, who left Brooklyn for Los Angeles in 1957.

The New York Giants left for San Francisco at the same time. Both teams were in the National League. New York went from being the only city with two National League teams, to having none.

New York still had the Yankees, which counted, kind of. But the Yankees were from the slow league, the American League. They won a lot of games and championships and were famous, but dull.

New York needed a National League team and got one, the Mets, beginning the 1962 season.

The Mets were made up of players the other teams were willing to give up in a draft, a funny word for getting rid of garbage. Of course, we did not think of the Mets in these terms. We thought about potential.

It didn't matter that they lost more games their first season than any team ever had: a lot more. We were happy to have them. The newspapers called them the Amazin' Mets. That was purposely ambiguous, jokingly so, because they did not mean amazingly good.

Their legacy team, the Dodgers, were also not very good, for a long part of their history. Their nickname was the Bums.

The Bums thrived on daffiness and fatalism, both major traits in Brooklyn at all times.

One game, the Dodgers had two guys sliding into a base where a third guy was already standing. This is not supposed to happen.

It took the Dodgers decades to get good, and that really only happened because they were the first team to hire black players - reason enough to like them.

The Mets, sadly, did not have players like Jackie Robinson, black or white. They had players like Choo-Choo Coleman, black and white.

It didn't matter. We rooted hard for Choo-Choo, and all the Amazin's.

A nice part of having two teams in town - two very different teams - was being able to dislike the other one close up.

The Yankees were good, in fact the best, but thought who they were, so forget them.

For some reason, the Jewish kids I knew liked the Yankees. I couldn't reckon out why. At least it made things more varied when we'd choose up a game, and pretend to be our favorite players.

It was hard to have a favorite Met player based on merit. I liked Warren Spahn, a pitcher who was once great, but by then old, in his forties. I liked him for his history, and his exotically plain name, but also because he looked exactly like Satch from the Bowery Boys. But this didn't make you want to be him.

In 1965, the Mets brought up a guy named Ron Swoboda. He was young and athletic, though raw. He used to get hit in the head by fly balls from time to time. He was known as Rocky, I think for those catching abilities, and maybe that noggin.

He was cool. "Swoboda" was a good baseball name. He was from Baltimore, and had a Chinese grandfather.

His first year, he hit 19 home runs, great for any Met, but phenomenal for a rookie.

I wrote him a letter predicting his place someday in the Hall of Fame. That reflected my enthusiasm rather than measured judgment, but he seemed to appreciate it. I got back an autographed photo. I'm sure I still have it.