I show my age by recalling the stumbling Saturday Night Live language of fictional Dominican baseball player, Chico Esquela. The Garrett Morris New York Mets character was a regular on Weekend Update during the late seventies. The catch phrase, “bery, bery good to me,” was soon adapted by SNL fans to define their benefits from other occupations and pursuits. 

Baseball was certainly ”bery, bery good to me” in a lot of ways, beginning with my interest in reading newspapers and magazines. When I was five or six years old growing up in south Alabama and first began understanding the concept of baseball, I started skimming the sports pages of the Mobile Register for scores of games. My dad was a former semi-pro pitcher and nurtured my interest in baseball.  I have early memories of going with him to see the Mobile Bears, the Southern Association farm club of the Brooklyn Dodgers. 

By the time I was ten or so, I had become obsessed with baseball, reading everything I found about the game and its players—in Mobile and elsewhere. At the age of eleven, the Sunday Register published a baseball story that I submitted to its lead sports columnist. My reporting offered an “in-depth” analysis of the Bears outlook for the 1947 season. Seeing a credit line on the story may have been the genesis of my reporting career. However, it would have been a sub-conscious desire since I never considered reporting until it was literally forced on me after my dreams of becoming a rock and roll disc jockey were sidetracked fifteen years later.

My interest in sports went beyond the Bears. I followed football, basketball and boxing with almost the same enthusiasm. My reading material expanded to include sports magazines and kid’s books about athletic heroes—all of which fueled childhood fantasies being a star in whatever sport happened to be in season. Unfortunately, I was a mediocre athlete. My greatest exploits were leaping around the bedroom while giving play-by-play accounts of my game winning homeruns, touchdowns and Championship fights.  The play-by-play experience in describing imagined feats would come in handy. Two of my jobs moving up the career ladder as a radio newsman were a result of having dual-skills as a reporter and play-by-play announcer.

As a kid, I got my big break in sports in 1948. A junior high school friend was the Mobile Bears batboy. While I was at a game one Sunday afternoon, he recruited me to work as the “roof boy.” The job entailed retrieving foul balls that landed atop the grandstand and were blocked by a rear screen from going into the parking lot. Other duties involved clubhouse chores before and after games, and running errands for players.

Sitting alone during games atop at Mobile’s Hartwell Field, I did play-by-play of games, along with a running commentary. Baseball is a game of long lulls. And filling the gaps while players scratched their private parts and otherwise took time between pitches helped me improve my skills as a bullshit artist. If people in the stands could see me, they probably figured I was a handicapped child. Anyway, I learned to keep my lips flapping even when there was nothing to say. 

Rubbing elbows with professional athletes taught me to keep my mouth shut. The biggest perk of the job was  interacting with players before and after games. I quickly learned to be the proverbial fly on the clubhouse wall, observing and listening. I had nothing relevant to say to players except, “Here is your coke and hotdog.” Silence is an important journalism trait—especially in interviews with people who enjoy the sound their voices. Sometimes, they reveal the unexpected. 

Baseball’s most important benefit to my journalism career, perhaps, was an oddball memory that I developed for facts, figures and events. I use the term oddball because of the selectivity of my memory. Throughout my careers a reporter, I had the ability to recall specifics of conversations, documents, and obscure material for months and even years. Indeed, my memory was nearly photographic in visualizing sources of information. As a result, I rarely needed notes to do complicated interviews. This was amazing to my producers and camera crews because I was notorious for the number of takes it required for me to do simple on-camera narrations that I was supposed to have memorized. And my memory of names of people I meet for the first time has always been horrible.

A few years ago, I had something of a revelation in determining the possible source of my memory gymnastics. While standing in line to buy baseball tickets and yakking to a friend about baseball players and statistics, he asked me how I recalled such trivia. The question brought to mind a long ago baseball board game I played as a child. The game featured cards for all the major league players. The cards displayed the statistics of every major league player—the number of singles, doubles, triples, homeruns and outs he recorded in his career. I eventually memorized every one of the players statistics. I can still recite the line-ups of a few teams. It was a great mental excercise, which over the years, helped me overcome  educational deficiences and improved my b.s. skills immeasurably.

So I as prepare for a new season, I am happy to say that baseball was “bery, bery good to me.”

My memoir, Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger, is available at amazon.com and independent bookstores. It offers much more than $19.99 worth of laughs. It is an account of my illustrious (I choose the adjectives) career.