One of the great traumas of my childhood occurred in 1921, when the Pirates showed how easily they could throw away a pennant if they really put their minds to it. In late August, within sight of glory for the first time in twelve years, they traveled to New York with a seven-and-a-half-game lead for a series with John McGraw’s Giants. Unbelievably, they lost five straight games and never recovered either their momentum or their morale. The Giants went on to win the pennant, leaving thousands of 11-year-olds in the Pittsburgh area with cases of cynicism, tics, and intermittent nausea, all of which were to linger for several days before giving way to great expectations for the next season.

That was the fine thing about baseball: no matter how depressing the let-downs, they were always supplanted—from inning to inning, from week to week, from year to year—by visions of splendor soon to come. Some hero would surely hit a homer with the bases loaded in the ninth. Fresh rookies would be coming aboard next spring, each one a potential star of the first magnitude—a dazzling second baseman, say, who would be a joy to watch in the double plays, or an outfielder capable both of great leaping catches to spoil enemy home runs and of knocking the ball out of the park the next time he came to bat. Or perhaps the team would acquire a pitcher who combined the grace of Christy Mathewson with the speed of Walter Johnson. At the very least the hated Giants might fold up and decay over the winter, giving the Pirates a clear track in the spring.

Given the laws of chance in a pastime that ran to 150 games or so a season—with an endless span of seasons ahead for an adolescent fanatic—how could such hopes fail in the long run? In the short run one could take the bumps and feed on anticipation. Dreamy as it all was, no one could say it was a harmful introduction to a life in which those same elements of vision, failure, and renewed hope would forever appear, disappear, and recur.

Actually watching major league ball-games was an insignificant part of a young fan’s activity. Until 1955, no city west of St. Louis even had a major league team, although all of them had fans. I was among the fortunate for whom a “home team” was nearby, allowing at least the possibility of a rare and thrilling view of heroes in the flesh. From the small town of Scottdale, where I passed my grammar school days, it was some sixty miles to Pittsburgh—not a great distance now, but forbidding enough in the early twenties. There weren’t many highways in our area (we had no car in any case), and the railroad schedule allowed for just one train a day

Little as the team profited from my attendance over the years, I was at all times busily involved in its affairs. During the season there was foremost the job of keeping myself well posted on the daily game. Until my family moved to Brooklyn in 1923, this activity meant no more than reading the sports pages of the Pittsburgh Gazette the morning after the game. Commercial radio was in its infancy then, and in Scottdale we were never first with anything.

New York—even that part of it known as Bensonhurst—was a far cry from Pennsylvania with fully 14 dailies on hand, each with its own staff of glittering sportswriters. Most of the afternoon papers ran editions late enough to carry the results of that same afternoon’s games (night games were undreamed of). And with two or three stationery stores in the neighborhood, it was easy to slip out after supper to sneak a look at the scores, often displayed on the front page in type large enough to allow a boy a quick read before he could be shooed away by an irritated shopkeeper. The details could then wait for the next day, a treat to look forward to if the team had won and, if it had not, then serenely to be endured in the knowledge that the next game, with rosy prospects, was only hours away.

In the first few weeks that followed the hysteria of a World Series and the end of another season, baseball was the dark side of the moon. A feeling of emptiness rather than depression occasionally washed over me, especially when I picked up the paper and found not a line about the only sport that mattered. College football prevailed from October on, and except for local high school games football had never quite gotten to me. The calendar ruled the sports world then, and people would no more dream of scrimmaging in June than they would of canoeing in January.

Even in the dead of winter, though, there were bits of relief for the baseball junkie. One could pit two teams of baseball cards against each other on the kitchen table in a game that anyone with a pair of dice might have devised. In mine a two or a four was

More exciting, from mid-December on, reports began coming in from what the cliché experts of the press invariably called the Hot Stove League. These were the news stories, speculations, and sheer gossip about player trades, holdouts, and other such activities, all of which reached a climax when the baseball club owners gathered for their annual meeting. There was talk, too, of bringing up brilliant rookies from minor league farm clubs, which the majors controlled and intensely scouted for talent drawn from the country’s sandlots, high school fields, and occasionally college campuses.

Reading those springtime sports pages, one might be baffled rather than pleased—even angry, as I was—to see, for example, that the team was dropping Rabbit Maranville—a superior shortstop, I thought, knowing little of his health or spirits. Of course I knew even less of the man whom Barney Dreyfuss, the team’s crafty owner, had brought in to replace him: Glenn Wright, one of baseball’s magnificent shortstops. With the inimitable Pie Traynor at third, opposing batters would for years hardly dare hit a ball to the left side of the Pirate infield.

Neither could I yet know of other prospective greats then on the horizon, heroes to delight the soul, like the Waner boys, “Big Poison” and “Little Poison,” who were destined, like Traynor and Carey, for baseball’s Hall of Fame. In time one learned to accept change—and even revel in the prospect of it.

Before long, it was February, in itself as wretched a month as there is in the calendar, but—and what a but—it was the month in which the call went out summoning ballplayers from hibernation. Daily reports from camps in Florida, Arizona, and California—the Pirates generally trained in Paso Robles, I recall—fed us a steady stream of vital information: how the heroes shaped up, what rookies looked promising, the seeming effect of the winter’s trading—in short, all the gossip of the business that could be swapped with one’s fellow maniacs and tolerated for perhaps a minute or two by others.

Once my family had moved east, and beyond the possibility of my ever getting to Forbes Field again, the Pirates appeared at long last to be on the verge of greatness. That was in the spring of 1923, when I was 13. Although I was now technically a Brooklynite, it had not for a moment occurred to me to transfer my allegiance to the Dodgers, much less to the Giants. Especially since new Pirate names were in the air and, with them, a stronger-than-ordinary scent of victory.