108 Stitches: Loose Threads, Ripping Yarns, and the Darndest Characters from My Time in the Game - Hardcover

Darling, Ron

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 125018438X ISBN 13: 9781250184382

Verlag: ST MARTINS PR, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

This is New York Times bestselling author and Emmy-nominated broadcaster Ron Darling's 108 baseball anecdotes that connect America’s game to the men who played it.

In 108 Stitches, New York Times bestselling author and Emmy Award-winning broadcaster Ron Darling offers his own take on the "six degrees of separation" game and knits together wild, wise, and wistful stories reflecting the full arc of a life in and around our national pastime.

Darling has played with or reported on just about everybody who has put on a uniform since 1983, and they in turn have played with or reported on just about everybody who put on a uniform in a previous generation. Through relationships with baseball legends on and off the field, like Yale coach Smoky Joe Wood, Willie Mays, Bart Giamatti, Tom Seaver and Mickey Mantle, Darling's reminiscences reach all the way back to Babe Ruth and other early twentieth-century greats.

Like the 108 stitches on a baseball, Darling's experiences are interwoven with every athlete who has ever played, every coach or manager who ever sat in a dugout, and every fan who ever played hooky from work or school to sit in the bleachers for a day game.

Darling's anecdotes come together to tell the story of his time in the game, and the story of the game itself.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ron Darling is the New York Times bestselling author of Game 7, 1986 and The Complete Game as well as an Emmy Award-winning baseball analyst. He was a starting pitcher for the New York Mets from 1983 to 1991 and the first Mets pitcher to be awarded a Gold Glove.

Daniel Paisner has collaborated with dozens of public figures on their autobiographies and memoirs. He is also the author of A Single Happened Thing and the acclaimed chronicle of the 1998 baseball season, The Ball.

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108 Stitches

Loose Threads, Ripping Yarns, and the Darnedest Characters from My Time in the Game

By Ron Darling, Daniel Paisner

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2019 Ron Darling
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-250-18438-2

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
Acknowledgments, 
Epigraphs, 
Warm-Up: The Ties That Bind, 
1. Drop and Drive, 
2. "A" Is for "Aase", 
3. Coming Up, 
4. "H" Is for "Hodges", 
5. Some Crying in Baseball, 
6. "Q" Is for "Quirk", 
7. Head Games, 
8. "Z" Is for "Zimmer", 
9. In the Booth, 
10. The Only Living Boy in New York, 
Cool-Down: The State of the Game, 
Index, 
Also by Ron Darling, 
About the Authors, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

Drop and Drive

How far does this through-line stretch?

Well, for me, it reaches all the way back to 1883, when a journeyman catcher named Dell Darling had a cup of coffee with the Buffalo Bisons of the National League, alongside future Hall of Famers Dan Brouthers, Deacon White, Pud Galvin, and player-manager Jim O'Rourke. Darling collected three hits in 18 at-bats, over six games, although if you described his short tenure in this caffeinated way he wouldn't have had any idea what you were talking about.

A cup of coffee? What the hell was that?

This particular Darling would come back a couple years later and stick with Cap Anson's Chicago White Stockings, establishing himself as a reliable utility man, and he rates a mention here because of his name, which in a sidelong way also happens to be mine. See, like a lot of baseball-mad kids, I was in the habit of losing myself in the statistics and ephemera on the backs of the baseball cards I used to flip and trade with my brothers. I was a sucker for baseball history, and with a name like Darling it was only a matter of time before I started scouring the pages of the Baseball Encyclopedia to see if there were any other Darlings who'd played the game. I suppose I would have done the same thing if my name had been Smith, or Jones, or Molina. These days, of course, I could do a search online and see if I shared not only a name but a birthday with any of the all-time greats, or a hometown, or a hobby, but when I was a kid our search engines were pretty much confined to alphabetical order — a familiar crutch I'll lean on as these pages develop.

What's worth remarking on Dell Darling's otherwise unremarkable career, which spanned a total of 175 games over parts of six seasons, was how it ended — and, relatedly, how it bumped against a story that made an indelible mark on what was left of my childhood.

Here's the front end of that tale:

About a year after his final big league game, Darling married a woman from his hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania, named Anna Crum. The couple wound up having seven children, but before all those kids started piling up my namesake made a whole new name for himself, when he was connected to a series of railroad heists that seemed to borrow a page from the stagecoach robberies that had once been a sad fact of life in the Wild, Wild West. Allegedly, Darling and the other suspects would hide out on these passenger trains, and while everyone slept or drank or stared at the passing scenery they'd toss luggage and other belongings from the moving cars. Then they'd hop off the train and double back to assess and collect their ill-gotten gains.

Quite a legacy, huh? No, it's not like we were related or anything, but I had enough trouble wearing a name like Darling when I was growing up, so it's not like this black mark would have done me any favors if I thought to mention this loose connection to any of my friends.

It turned out Darling's role in these robberies might have been overstated, because he was released shortly after his arrest, together with several of his former teammates, including a somewhat more accomplished ballplayer from Erie named Lou Bierbauer. With that bit of unpleasantness behind him and the stain on "our" good name not as bad as it first appeared, Darling tried to latch on with another professional club, eventually retiring to Erie, where he found work doing odd jobs, mostly as a blacksmith and painter. He died just after the birth of his seventh child, at the age of forty-two — quite possibly from the long-term effects of an old baseball injury, according to some newspaper accounts. What was curious about Darling's passing was that he died around the time his purported accomplice Bierbauer was widowed as well, throwing the former Mrs. Darling into the arms of the suspected train robber. Anna Darling wound up marrying Bierbauer, and the couple went on to have two children of their own, who joined the Darling kids and Bierbauer's three children from his previous marriage to form a bustling Brady Bunch–type household.

Some story. And the bridge to the next story I want to tell is that it marked one of the first times in baseball history that teammates ended up sharing the same spouse, a rarity that would serve as the backdrop to one of the most sensational stories of my own baseball-aware childhood. As reaches go, this one's a bit of a stretch, I'll admit. But when you follow the bouncing ball you never know where it might land ...

In 1973, as many readers will surely recall, New York Yankee pitchers Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich ended up trading wives, a domestic shuffling that confused the hell out of this twelve-year-old Massachusetts kid. Oh, man ... this was a big, big deal, more Peyton Place than SportsCenter, about as far removed from a turn-of-the-century Brady Bunch scenario as you could get, and a sure sign to us Red Sox fans that the hated Yankees were in league with the devil. Actually, the two teammates didn't just trade wives — they swapped out their entire families, right down to the family dog. It was a weird, wild story, and a sign of the times, I guess, only at twelve years old I couldn't think what to make of it. It was exciting and lurid and a little bit creepy, and it had almost nothing to do with baseball other than the concomitant fact that the game just happened to be the place of business for these two friends and teammates. Still, whenever I heard the name of Fritz Peterson, who went on to pitch 11 seasons for the Yankees, Indians, and Rangers, or Mike Kekich, who pitched for the Dodgers, Yankees, Indians, Rangers, and Mariners over nine big league seasons, I was taken back to the Swingin' Seventies, where players wore shag hairdos and porn mustaches and wide-collared leisure suits that would have made their predecessors lift an eyebrow and wonder what the world was coming to.

Well, what it was coming to was ... this.

For years afterward my mind would flash back to the tabloid headlines that had attached to this story, and when I was chosen in the first round of the Major League Baseball draft by the Texas Rangers, a team that had been Peterson's last stop in 1976, and one of Kekich's last stops in 1975, I thought about it yet again. Keep in mind, I didn't think about it a whole lot — it was just a fleeting thought, really, but once I learned what it was like to move about in the game, and to throw in with a group of twenty-four other guys in pursuit of a shared goal and our separate and hardly equal livelihoods, I began to look on this story in a whole new light. For some reason, I was dimly aware of this Texas connection, since I'd...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ST MARTINS PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 125018438X
• ISBN 13: 9781250184382
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland