WORLD SERIES TIME

Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers

Many years ago while still a young man growing up in Brooklyn, the city of New York was blessed with three major league baseball teams, the New York Giants who played in the Polo Grounds, The New York Yankees who played in Yankee Stadium, and the center of my world, the Brooklyn Dodgers who played on the sacred grounds of Ebbet’s Field. Every fall, one of the two teams seemed to be playing in the World Series.

As I would walk home from school around 3:15 in the afternoon, I would pass the different apartments and hear the game from the number of transistor radios that were playing on the warm sunny afternoons. You looked at the person with the radio next to his ear he would volunteer the score and situation. “Dodgers are losen, Reese is at bat and it’s da bottom of da ninth.” The news would leave me hoping that ‘Pee Wee’ Reese would come through and a rally would bring my Dodgers home with a win.

But whether they won or lost the World Series was exciting. The games were played like a sport where no one was overpaid, pampered or owning endorsements that made them rich. The players lived in the neighborhood, were close to fans as neighbors and friends. They worked on the off-season in such jobs as butcher, stock man or on a garbage truck. They didn’t make a whole lot in that off-season as they didn't during the season.

Most importantly, the kids could hear and watch the games, then do their homework and talk about the game the next day by what they saw or heard. Today, the networks accommodate the sponsors and the West Coast, leaving the vast majority of children not watching the most exciting time called the World Series for baseball.