Lost Ballparks
Lost Ballparks with Mike Koser is a podcast that transports you back to the golden age of baseball—through the voices of those who lived it. Hear firsthand stories from players, broadcasters, batboys, clubhouse managers, groundskeepers, umpires, and fans who vividly recall what it was like to spend a summer afternoon at Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds, Forbes Field, Yankee Stadium, Comiskey Park, Crosley Field, and many more beloved ballparks now lost to time.
Lost Ballparks
Jane Leavy (Sportswriter)
Legendary sportswriter Jane Leavy is my guest on this month's episode of Lost Ballparks. We’re gonna relive Sandy Koufax’s perfect game at Dodger Stadium in ’65 that was so expertly chronicled in her bestselling biography A Lefty’s Legacy, and hear some bold potentially game changing ideas from her latest book: Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It.
Hello, this is Gladys Gooding. For the past several years, I have been playing in Ebbett Field for our beloved bums, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Special Services has arranged to bring you your favorite tunes on V discs.
SPEAKER_03:I was born in 1972, 15 years after the Dodgers packed up their steamer trunks, loaded them onto a moving truck, and headed west. I never walked through the rotunda at Ebbett's Field, never saw a home run rise over the Schaefer Beer sign in Wright Field and land on Bedford Avenue. But Roger Kahn took me there. The Boys of Summer, that book became kind of a time machine for me, carrying me back to 1950s Brooklyn, a borough alive with stickball games and trolley bells and a love for the Dodgers that ran deeper than the subway lines. And the New York baseball Giants, gone too. Their final game at the Polo Grounds was played 15 years before I ever took my first breath. So I never sat in those center field bleachers or stretched out a hand hoping to brush the sleeve of Willie Mays as he jogged up the clubhouse steps in center field. But Arnold Haino's a day in the bleachers somehow put me there. I could almost hear the sound of Willie's spikes as he made his way up those stairs into the clubhouse. And that's the gift of great baseball writing. It has a way of being able to carry us across decades and to places and moments that we can never visit, but somehow remember. My guest on this episode is one of those rare writers. When Jane Levy writes about Sandy Koufax's magical night in September of 1965, you can smell the grass, feel the tension, and hear the butterflies and anticipation in Vin Scully's voice, as if he already knew he was about to witness perfection.
SPEAKER_09:We're gonna be close, and we hope you'll have a cold shape or two throughout the evening.
SPEAKER_03:John Maroon, Michael Ortman, Janna Marie Smith. And it was because actually of their recommendation that uh Jay and I recently finished your book on Sandy Koufax, which now sits right alongside Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer and Doris Kern's Goodwin's Wait Till Next Year as three of my all-time favorite baseball books. Thank you so much, and thank you to them. And that book led me straight to your latest work, Make Me Commissioner. I know what's wrong with baseball and how to fix it, which, in my opinion, is essential reading for anyone who loves this great game.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, thank you. Thank you for saying that. I'm it makes me very happy.
SPEAKER_03:Well, on this episode, I'd love to talk about both. We'll start with this. One of the things that I've learned from doing this podcast is that there's kind of this universal connection in baseball, something that unites fans and players and writers and broadcasters, and that's the memory of their first major league game that they have ever attended. But I think, Jane, your story is actually a little bit different. You don't remember the first game you attended, but rather the first one you weren't allowed to attend. Is that right?
SPEAKER_02:Precisely correct. I have a picture of me standing in the backyard of my parents' Roslyn, Long Island home, very young and very chubby, with a ridiculous pocketbook that must have been my mother's. I never carried around stuff like pocketbooks. I carried around baseball stuff. My arms crossed across my chest, and that was the day that he took my sister to Ebbotts Field and left me home on the grounds that I was too young. I am of the opinion, and I believe I wrote something to this effect. I don't think you're ever too young for baseball.
SPEAKER_03:Your grandma lived about as close as anyone could possibly live to Yankee Stadium, which is incredible for a young kid. What do you remember about being with her and being able to hear the roar of the crowd and sounds from the ballpark drifting through her neighborhood?
SPEAKER_02:She lived in a building on Walton Avenue in the Bronx, two blocks from or one very long loud foul ball from home plate in the old, which is to say real Yankee Stadium.
SPEAKER_03:Amen.
SPEAKER_02:And because of the way New York blocks, you know, are built on a grid, the wind carries, you know, up the streets and sound carries with that, and especially coming off the river. And so I could hear uh Bob Shepherd's going, you know, the the the echo.
SPEAKER_01:Good evening, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome, welcome.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, I really could hear that. And um, I would crouch under her piano, and there was a uh, you know, firescape outside. I I wasn't stupid enough to crawl out on it, but all you had to do was open the window, and you could hear the sound ricocheting off the buildings as it made its way um uh east. And um I could hear whacks and the roars. That was the thing that was all-encompassing. You knew something had happened, and I just needed to know what it was. It invited imagination. Baseball invites imagination in a way that no other game does, I think. Um, you can project yourself into it. I was young enough that I thought, well, if I was at that game, they would have won because I was there.
SPEAKER_08:Right, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Remember what we all thought controlled the world and the dance. And so she was the person, and she was very feminine, and she took me to the downtown to Sax Fifth Avenue. Uh, she had taste. And uh, when you wanted to buy the best of anything, you went to Sax Fifth Avenue, and so down we went on the CC local train, which of course was a IND that doesn't run anymore from the stadium, but it the stop was at 161st in River Avenue. And um, lo and behold, it must have been right around an opening day. I think I was five, and uh there was a mannequin. Um, and I mean I can visualize her completely in a Yankee jersey, and I think she had like pedal pants on. We used to call them pedal pants and a glove on her left hand. And my grandmother marches inside and says to the first salesman she can corral, I'll have that for my granddaughter. And this very flummox guy, who I remember is looking like the Charmin guy on the on the TV, you know, commercial. Don't squeeze the sharman, yeah. Don't squeeze the sharman, madam. That's not for sale. And my grandmother said, I will have that for my granddaughter. That went on for about another three seconds, and we went home with a glove, which was inscribed as a Sammy Esposito model.
SPEAKER_06:Esposito is the better. After the White Sox built up a good lead, Lopez decided to bring in Sammy. ESPOS I T O.
SPEAKER_02:Sammy being um one of those utility players, and a very, very good spot ball player. I think he hit 207 or 211 lifetime backing up Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox for the Chicago White Sox. Sure. And I had no idea who he was, but that was the beginning of wanting to find out who were these guys. And lo and behold, decades later, when I was a reporter at the Washington Post and we didn't have a baseball team, there was no baseball to watch an opening day, and I would get the assignment to figure out some way to write about baseball on opening day. So I called Sammy Esposito, who it turned out had a very, very uh prominent second career as a basketball coach at North Carolina State, and he worked with Jimmy Valvano, and I called him and got him on the phone and told him what I just told you. And he said, Do you still have it? And I went, Oh no, my mother threw it out. Um, it was the most terrible baseball glove ever. Um, it it had more padding in the thumb and the pinky than uh you know an anguished teenager has in a in a bra, right? Um and um he's I said, What about you? Do you have yours? And he said he had given it to David Thompson, the great, you know, basketball player um who gave it to Monty Tao, the shrimpy basketball player, um, for a softball game. And he never got it back. Oh my gosh. So we were aligned. And I stayed in touch with him for a while. And um uh in fact, it was yeah, I would I this is like one of those things that happens to reporters sometimes. It it makes my eyes well up even now. Um Sammy, I think, uh had uh a rough last um part of his life, and he had been gone to some assisted living community out in the mountains, I think. And one of his friends called and said, You meant uh so much to him that we want to invite you to his funeral when he died. Oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_03:What a great story. Jane, you have memories as a little girl of being at the Concourse Plaza Hotel and being able to look uh through the outfield at Yankee Stadium straight through to uh to home plate. Uh can you talk about uh that and what that experience was like for you?
SPEAKER_02:What exactly I saw um from that perch, it was uh the the uh the uh Concourse Plaza Hotel, which is at the top of uh 161st Street, overlooked the back of the ballpark. And because of the way the subway station, and this is the IRT, the elevated tracks were are constructed, and you could still see them even in the new ballpark. There's an there was a gap in the in the back wall, and for an instant you could see the green grass. Now, I persuaded myself that I could see Hector Lopez uh settling in under a fly ball, which he would drop.
SPEAKER_04:Hector walking back with a big grin on his face.
SPEAKER_02:But um, because number 11 just wasn't all that good with his hands.
SPEAKER_04:But this time it was just a slip of the hand.
SPEAKER_02:But you could see into it, and again, you know, it's it sounds very metaphorical, but of course it was. I was looking in as a consummate outsider to a world that you know I didn't understand and I couldn't visualize except with my imagination. And that was that was one of the things about baseball on radio, too, is that you could put yourself in the middle of the action. Um, so you know, the transistor radio that I got, which was a Motorola and it was red plastic with a daisy speaker, which my grandmother would shepherd me into the synagogue with my Sammy Esposito glove and my transistor radio under her mink coat. And it didn't matter, you know, the Jewish holidays obviously are on a different calendar, so you never know whether it's gonna be early in September, late in September, beginning of October, you never know when it's gonna be. Right. Um, but she would shepherd me in it, no matter how hot it was, she wore her mink coat so that she could hide me and Sammy and the transistor radio to get past very uh serious-looking gentlemen at the at the front door. The women sat by themselves upstairs, and this brand ballroom that they held the services in had a balustrade and these incredible drapes that I don't know, they felt like they were three stories high. And I would just, you know, wrap myself up in them and um and and listen to the ball game, what whichever ball game it was.
SPEAKER_04:Today's game, the Yankees and the Red Sox from Yankee Stadium in New York, is brought to you by the Atlantic Refining Company and your Atlantic dealer to offer you new Atlantic Imperial gasoline for not free power that saves you money.
SPEAKER_02:And watch for the moment where you could see the green of the outfield grass.
SPEAKER_03:The book you wrote on Sandy Koufax, A Lefty's Legacy, came out uh 20, 25 years ago. And I was so glad to discover it and read it. And there's so many great details in that book, so many things about Sandy that I did not know. He was uninterested in baseball early on, so much so that his parents didn't even know that he was playing baseball. Uh, when he tried out for the New York Giants at the polo grounds, he famously forgot his glove. And then there's this beautiful bit of symmetry that the first player that Sandy Koufax ever struck out was Bobby Thompson, the same Bobby Thompson who broke Brooklyn's heart in 1951 with a home run into the left field seats at the polo grounds off a Ralph Branko fastball. It's it's almost like Koufax was sent by the heavens to write that wrong.
SPEAKER_02:Right. It's uh, you know, you remember this book better than I do.
SPEAKER_03:Something else I did not realize is that while he was playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1955, he was enrolled at Columbia University. He was taking classes. And so when the when the Dodgers win the World Series, I think it was on October 4th of 1955, he leaves Abbott's Field and goes to class, spends some time in class, and then asks to be excused so he can go to the victory party.
SPEAKER_02:You know, Matt, feature anybody today asking permission, right? You do just go, but he was a very polite young man. I mean, that tells you a lot uh about two things uh who he is and who he remains, and also the world we lived in, you know, where um authority and school and obligations and things mattered. Right. You know, you just you showed up. And and showing up, you know, I one of the things he's told me in recent years that really touched me, and it was not it's not that recent, but when the boys of summer were dying off, and he is the last surviving member of that 1955 Bums team. Um, you know, he said he said off-handedly, Well, I have to take a blue blazer with me now wherever I go, because there's always another funeral. And even if they weren't guys he actually played with, you know, they were teammates. A Dodger is a teammate. Uh and so he shows up for them.
SPEAKER_03:You interviewed over 400 people for the Sandy Koufax book, players and coaches and friends and fans. And what I love about what you did with the book is that you wove all of those details, all of those memories and uh anecdotes around one of the greatest games that has ever been pitched, Koufax's perfect game on September 9th, 1965. By the seventh inning, both Sandy Koufax and Bob Henley, who was the starter for the Chicago Cubs that night, had no hitters going. Um and the last time a double a double no-hitter had been thrown was uh back in 1917. Lou Johnson ends up getting a hit in the bottom of the seventh inning. But Koufax still has his no-hitter going into the ninth. And that's when we get to Vin Scully's ninth inning call. Now, Vin knows that something special is happening. So Ven calls his producer, calls down to the truck, and says, We need to record this last half inning, which was unusual at the time. They didn't record every single game.
SPEAKER_02:He did it anytime a dodger had a a a no-hitter, he would do that. He would record the the last half of last half inning.
SPEAKER_07:But tonight, September the 9th, 1965, he made the toughest walk of his career, I'm sure. Because through eight innings, he has pitched a perfect game. He has struck out 11, he has retired 24 consecutive batters.
SPEAKER_03:And in this half inning, as Koufax was reaching for perfection, Skoly gave the exact time of night. It is 9 41 p.m. on September the 9th. Chris Krug, the Cubs' first hitter that inning, comes to the plate and strikes out.
SPEAKER_07:Sandy reading signs into his windup 2-2 pitch. Basketball got him swinging.
SPEAKER_03:Joey Amalfatano was Sandy Koufax's 26th out.
SPEAKER_07:0-2 to Amalfatano. They strike two pitch to Joe. Basketball swinging and missed strike three.
SPEAKER_03:And then the Cubs have one last chance with Harvey Keane.
SPEAKER_07:The time on the scoreboard is 9.44. The date's September the 9th, 1965. And Kopanks working on veteran Harvey Keane.
SPEAKER_03:And there are a couple of pitches where you think, okay, wait a second. Maybe Sandy is out of gas. Maybe there's nothing left in that divine left arm of his.
SPEAKER_07:Very high, and he lost his hat. He really forced that one. That's only the second time tonight where I have had the feeling that Sandy threw instead of pitch, trying to get that little extra.
SPEAKER_03:But with the count, two and two.
SPEAKER_07:Two and two to Harvey Keene. One strike away.
SPEAKER_03:And Vin Scully records that strikeout. The perfect game.
SPEAKER_07:Sandy into his wind up. Here's the pitch. Swart on and miss the perfect game.
SPEAKER_03:He just lets it breathe. He didn't talk for 38 seconds.
SPEAKER_02:Feature that in this world. Right. Somebody not feeling compelled to feel to fill the empty air and the empty space.
SPEAKER_07:On the scoreboard in right field, it is 9.46 p.m. in the City of the Angels, Los Angeles, California. And a crowd of 29,139. Just sitting in to see the only pitcher in baseball history to hurl four no-hit, no-run games. He has done it four straight years, and now he capped it on his fourth no-hitter. He made it a perfect game.
SPEAKER_03:The pace of play has thankfully sped up thanks to the pitch clock, but there is still this, I think, this chasm between players and the fans that didn't exist in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Not the way that it does now. But you offer in the book some really thoughtful ideas about how we can uh how baseball can reconnect with fans, um, and specifically for the younger generation. The future depends on getting kids to not only play baseball, but come to baseball games. One of the things you said in the book is that it if you want them to love baseball, you have to let them touch a baseball, steal a blade of grass, rub some dirt on their hands, feel the enormity of the ballpark. One of the ideas you have is having players in the stands, guys who were maybe on the disabled list for 10, 15, 60 days, going in the stands during the game, signing autographs, spending time taking pictures. Joey Vado uh famously did this at Great American Ballpark back in September of 2022.
SPEAKER_02:What was really um striking about that uh moment for him and for his telling of it to me was how apprehensive he was. There was a feeling of is this gonna be safe? Am I gonna be okay? What are they gonna want from me? What are they gonna do? That uh tells you everything you want to know or don't want to know about the estrangement between players and fans. About the chasm, right? Uh it's it is, it is, it is a very large chasm. And he, you know, he summoned his his his um his courage and he and he went up there. And he the word he used to describe the experience was it I was charmed. Now, you know, and people have said to me, Oh, well, it was Cincinnati, you know, people in Cincinnati are nicer. Um, and and Mike Rizzo, who's then the general manager and president of the Nats, said, Can't do it. Can you see Bryce Harper, you know, wandering around Yankee Stadium? And I said, No, but he's not a Yankee. Right, yeah. You know, and they do have like lots of security.
SPEAKER_03:You know, and every one of these teams has a group of players that are uh on the disabled list, like in in San Diego here at Petco Park. Joe Musgrove, who has been hurt all year, could have uh, you know, popped into the stands occasionally and uh and been with fans. I mean, uh it would make such a difference. It's a small thing that would make such a difference.
SPEAKER_02:Major League Baseball doesn't need to think and I'm sorry, let me restate, they don't need to do what Jesse Cole has done with the Savannah Bananas, they need to think the way he thinks. And for a guy on the uh injured list, you know, to go up in the stands uh while he's being paid for, you know, not playing, by the way, um, and sign autographs, nobody tore a groin muscle ever shaking hands or signing an autograph.
SPEAKER_03:Fans first, entertainment always.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, exactly.
SPEAKER_03:But there's some other things that you mentioned too that baseball could do, like Mickey Mantle in the 1950s pregame clinics for kids on the field. Again, you have a group of guys who are either on the disabled list or not available that day. And it's an opportunity to to reconnect with the fans that you will need to sustain the game.
SPEAKER_02:My most radical idea, of course, that I'm sure nobody in Major League Baseball will take seriously, but a lot of people I interviewed who were in Major League Baseball did take seriously. Let's let all kids accompanied by an adult who is sober in for free. All kids under the age of 10 in free. They can do this.
SPEAKER_03:It's true. There's a lot of unsold inventory.
SPEAKER_02:They have a real problem. The inventory is both in the number of games and the number of seats. There's a reason that the recent trend is to make smaller ballparks, not the bigger ones.
SPEAKER_03:I also love the um letting a high school catcher warm up the pitcher.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and I and and the re the response to that was, oh, that's impossible. No, it's not impossible. Why can't you have kids on the on the um sorry, uh uh the guys who sweep the infield? Why can't we have a grounds crew? Yeah. Yeah. Put a kid on a grounds crew. Yeah. Honorary grounds crew member, yeah. Honorary grounds crew member. There are so many ways, and maybe the most interesting one to me, and I it I hadn't focused on it, was uh Dave Roberts said to me, you know, why can't we switch it back so that the home team takes batting practice last?
SPEAKER_08:Right. Right.
SPEAKER_02:That was, you know, I went down to Yankee Stadium from my grandmother's apartment two blocks away when the gates opened so to watch batting practice, right?
SPEAKER_03:So you could see your guys hit and have a chance to get one of their uh batting practice home run balls.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Well, I didn't have that kind of chance because the Sam Esposito glove was not gonna catch anything.
SPEAKER_03:Have some local kids who win a contest who were uh on high school teams come out and shag balls during batting practice.
SPEAKER_02:Or even throw batting practice. That I know they won't go for because everybody's very particular about where the ball has to be. But Dave was talking about when you know when he was a kid and he would watch infield practice, which nobody has anymore, which is clearly evident in Major League Baseball. But um there's so many small things they could do that would add up in a big way.
SPEAKER_03:Listen, Jane, your your new book, Make Me Commissioner, is uh is a must-read. It is thoughtful, it is passionate and very honest about the state of the game. And uh, as I mentioned before, your Sandy Koufax biography remains uh one of, in my opinion, one of the best baseball books ever written. So thank you so much for spending a little time today. Hopefully, folks will go and pick those up and isn't it almost the holiday season? It is, hey, you know, give give one, get one.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think you know, sometimes publishers do that. I'll have to talk to them about that.
SPEAKER_03:But thank you so much for the care and detail and heart that you've brought to preserving the stories of baseball's uh all-time greats. Uh by the way, I also have to get to your book on Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth.
SPEAKER_02:Well, call me back when you get there. We'll talk about them too. There's a lot actually about the building of the old Yankee Stadium. I found not just architectural plans, but architectural critiques of the building that were published in 2023. I'm sorry, 1923. And you need to see what uh what year I'm in these days.
SPEAKER_03:Thank you so much, Jane. I appreciate the time. I appreciate you. Honestly, we barely barely even scratched the surface on what's in that book. She's got a lot of interesting ideas, definitely worth checking out when you get a chance. It's called Make Me Commissioner. I know what's wrong with baseball and how to fix it. And Jane's book on Sandy Koufax, a lefty's legacy, also worth checking out. Both available on Amazon.com. Lost Ballparks is produced by Mike Dunn, Andy Zablakis, Ryan Beard, John Carter, John McBride, Curtis Litzenberger, and Chris Belcastro. Thanks so much for listening. I'm looking forward to being back with you again soon for another episode of Lost Ballparks.
