Milano - Safe at home: confessions of a baseball fanatic

by Joe Torre

The First Pitch

Our Pastimes Past Time

Heroes and Villains

(Baseball x Age)Playoff Appearances = Life

The Numbers

Baseball Finds You When You Need It Most

The Art and Science of Being a Fan

Cheating Through the Ages

If I Were Commissioner for a Day (or Three)

All You Need Is gLove

The Off-Season Blues in G

The Clothes Make the Blogger

The Final Out

When I came out west to manage the Dodgers in 2008, I didnt know much about Alyssa Milano. I knew who she was, but I didnt know about her passion for baseball and the Dodgers. I didnt know that she was a familiar face at most of the Dodgers home games.

My introduction did not take long.

One of the Dodgers most visible and vocal supporters, shes kind of hard to miss for most of us in the dugout. As I began to learn about her love of baseball, I realized that there were certain things we had in common. Like me, shes a former Brooklynite transplanted to Los Angeles. Like me, shes passionate about the Dodgers, but more than that, shes passionate about baseball and its ability to connect her with the past and her family.

Like me, Alyssa has not always been a Dodgers fan. In fact, early on it seemed like she never would be. Her father was from Brooklyn, and as a child he was an avid Dodgers fan. Like so many others from my native borough, his sense of what baseball meant to a city was shaped by what he saw during the years that the Dodgers were Brooklyn. His definition of a baseball community was constructed from the beams of the ballpark and the view from the bleachersa view that I myself was all too familiar with. Understandably, he swore off the Dodgers after Walter OMalley moved the team out west. It was only through the circumstances of her career that Alyssa and her father found themselves in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, following the Dodgers and using baseball to bridge the gap between L.A. and their native New York Citythe gap between his past and her present. As her father reunited with his team, he began to pass on the vision hed left behind at Ebbets Field to his daughter.

I, too, grew up in Brooklyn during the most memorable time of baseball in New York. Like Alyssas father, my vision of what baseball means to a city and a neighborhood was shaped by my earliest memories of life on the side streets off Flatbush Avenue, with players like Jackie Robinson and Sandy Koufax. Though the game has changed a lot since then, Ive carried those memories with me to every team and organization that Ive been a part of. No matter what my role, Ive always been aware of the special relationship between the fans and the team. Ive always played and managed knowing full well how important it is for a city to embrace the team, and how crucial it is for baseball to bridge the gap between generations of fans.

Safe at Home not only taps into the spirit and passion of all baseball fans, it also touches on something more universal. This is not just a book for the most die-hard among us; this is a book for everyonefrom those who buy the jerseys of their favorite players to those who have never even been to a game. It reaches out to everyone because its about the role that baseball plays in all of our lives. Once being a fan is in your blood, its an impossible thing to shake off; and what one takes away from Alyssas writing is a clearer sense of how the game passes from one generation to the next. Many readers will have similar stories and will relate to how Alyssa feels about baseball and the effect it has had on her family.

Perhaps part of what makes Alyssas tale so special is that it looks at this generational gift of baseball from a different perspective. All too often when people talk about baseball hand-me-downs from one generation to the next, we talk about fathers and sons, grandfathers and grandsons, and while those moments are important, they only tell half the story. Rarely have sportswriters and historians paid attention to the ever-expanding role that female fans have played in the support and growth of this game. And rarely have the women been able to tell their stories. Safe at Home gives a voice to these stories that have always been a part of the game but have only recently emerged to take their rightful place in its history.

In the end, Safe at Home is not just a book about the Dodgers and the Yankees or about Los Angeles and New York. Its more than that. To be safe at home is not simply to show up at every game and support your team, its to recognize that your teams ballpark is also a piece of your personal history. And that no matter which players are on the field, they are your connection to a tradition that began many years ago and will, I hope, continue to be passed on from generation to generation.

Joe Torre

Throughout this book Ive made a lot of references to baseball terminology and expressions. While some of you may know these words and expressions, some of you might be left wondering what it all means. To help you through any questions you have, at the back of this book youll find a glossary that explains many baseball terms. Some of these I use repeatedly; some of them are just things you hear if you spend too much time watching SportsCenter . Either way, I hope theyre useful and you enjoy them.

S ome people need yoga to relax. Others turn on Bachs Goldberg Variations. Painters paint. Chocolate soothes some, knittingor a glass of wine, or a crossword puzzleothers. What brings me bliss is a simple sound: the dulcet voice of Vin Scully, calling a Dodgers game. Other women dream of papaya facials and mango pedicures. Give me a hot dog, a pitchers duel, and a late-inning suicide squeeze, and I melt like hot pine tar.

Im in love. Not with Vin Scully, though I adore him. Not with the Dodgers, though anyone who wants to kick dirt on Joe Torres shoesor Tommy Lasordasbetter be willing to come through me first. Im in love with baseball. I didnt plan it and I didnt seek it, but it happened. Somehow, without my trying and with me barely knowing, I fell hard.

Isnt that how it always happens?

A romantic would say it started in Staten Island, where I grew up and where I watched the Yankees on television from the safety of my fathers lap. (That my dad let the men in pinstripes even appear in our home proves the tidal pull of the game; Brooklyn-born, he was a lifetime Dodgers fan who still cursed and spat whenever the name OMalley was uttered in our house, which it usually wasnt.) A romantic would say that the child who falls asleep to the crack of a bat is infected with baseball fever for the rest of her life. But in my case, a romantic would be wrong. So before you decide that mine is the heartwarming tale of a little girl whose life was saved by a fat man pointing toward center field, think again. Growing up, I was not the kid who slept with a glove underneath her pillow. I wasnt the young girl who dreamed of marrying Mickey Mantle (though reporters would later have me romantically linked with everyone from Carl Pavano to Josh Beckett, which Ill get to later). I was just a daughter who loved her father, who loved baseball. Then I was a teenager who loved other things, and I was a working actress living in Los Angeles in the land of the team that broke Dads heart. Even more mysterious, I was rooting for them.