Dickson - The Hidden Language of Baseball: How Signs and Sign Stealing Have Influenced the Course of Our National Pastime

I was born on July 30, 1939, in Yonkers, New York. My neighborhood in South Yonkers, a few blocks out of the Bronx, was then, is now, and will probably always be Yankee territory. My first full month on Earth was Joe DiMaggio's best month in pinstripes: Between August one and September one, he batted .405, with fourteen home runs and fifty-two RBIs. There were ten games alone in which he produced three or more runs. At about this time Yankee broadcaster Arch McDonaldwith an eye on the sleek, new forty-one-ton Pan-American Airlines intercontinental Clipper aircraftgave DiMaggio his most enduring nickname.

By the time I turned six, I knew that one of the reasons to end World War II was to put the Yankee Clipper back on the field. Another was to bring my uncles back to Bayley Avenue in South Yonkers. In those days four generations of my mothers family inhabited part of 5, all of 19, and all of 31 Bayley Avenue, which was my house. My great-grandfather Phil Lehrbach, who lived at number 5, was a fanatical Dodgers fan, stemming in part from the fact that he had been a business partner of Charles Ebbets in the 1880s: They were among the first to promote and profit from the immigrant sport of bowling, and under the leadership of a jovial restaurateur and great bowler named Joe Thum, they formed the American Bowling Congress in 1895.

In September 1944 my uncle George came home unexpectedly from the South Pacific for a few days of shore leave, and he chose to spend one of them taking me, his adoring five-year-old nephew, to Yankee Stadium. We boarded the old Hudson River Day Liner in Yonkers, chugged downriver, and got off in the Bronx, where we grabbed a cab to the stadium. We arrived very early, as my uncle was a devotee of batting practice.

He was in uniform with a chestful of campaign ribbons and the arm patch that identified him as a Seabee, a member of a navy construction battalion, which, among other things, boarded damaged, often burning, and sometimes sinking ships and tried to repair them. In the late summer of 1944 a decorated sailor at the ballpark was a rarity, and the man at the booth waved us through the turnstiles with a wink and without charge. An usher took us to the Yankee clubhouse, where a few of the players were lingering and where Tommy "Old Reliable" Henrich was holding court. Henrich, who had come up with the Yankees in 1937 and had been a major factor in the 1941 Yankee World Championship, was in the uniform of the Coast Guard and, like his teammate DiMaggio, out of the lineup for the duration of the war.

Henrich immediately took us under his wing and got us seated in the owner's box, where we were fed by vendors who refused to accept payment and fans came by for Henrich's autograph. Positioned between these two great men in blue uniforms, I felt like an Arabian boy-prince one might have seen in news reel films.

This was, of course, exactly how I thought life should be led, and leaving the park that day, I decided that I loved baseball. It would be several years before I understood that this outing was not typical, though it remains vivid for me to this day and allows me to believe that there are, in fact, perfect moments in an imperfect universe.

Both my uncles came back from the war safely, and DiMaggio and Henrich quickly reclaimed their positions, respectively, from the less than legendary Tuck Stainback and Bud Metheny. In the months after the war my great-grandfather, then in his eighties, taught me all he could about the game while we sat in his stuffy one-room apartment under photos of himself with Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Babe Ruth, and others. The Dodgers were his team, but he could not get DiMaggio out of his head and talked about him incessantly.

Listening to this immigrant who was almost eighty years my senior was akin to attending a baseball elementary school. My friends all knew what a home run was, but because of my great-grandfather I could tell them that not all home runs were equal and that a right-field pop fly in Yankee Stadium would be a home run at the Polo Grounds.