In 1958, Grandpa switched his energies from rooting for “dem bums to simply rooting for WHATEVER team was playing for the hated Yankees! What’s ironic about this is that after he got married to my grandmother (who was from East Harlem), they moved into an apartment at 104 West 174th Street in The Bronx, a mere half-hour walk to Yankee Stadium! And my father grew up as a YANKEE FAN (naturally, just like any other kid who lived so close to Yankee Stadium!) NO ONE ever hated the Yankees more than my grandfather! NO ONE! So it took real guts for his son to root for the Yankees, which was the one thing that his father hated more than ANY SINGLE THING in the WORLD!

Then the Mets came along, and he rooted for them, and my father moved to Queens after getting married and sort of lost interest in baseball. BUT NOT MY GRANDFATHER!!!! HE DESPISED THOSE YANKEES, MAN!!!

And I would have to guess that he despised anything that had to do with the city of Los Angeles, as well. (Although he never WENT to California, as far as I’m aware of.)

But a funny little footnote about this is that I have an acquaintance who lives north of San Francisco, and SHE hated the Giants for an interesting reason. She grew up loving the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League, and when the Giants came along, that was the end of her beloved Seals. She HATED the Giants! She’s a Cubs fan living north of San Francisco, HATING the Giants!

Glen

My wife took me to Cooperstown the year after he passed, and they at the time had a display on the 1954 World Series, including video of Mays’ catch. It was the first time she had ever seen video of the the catch that her dad always talked about.

What a lot of people fail to realize is that the “golden era” of baseball, at least as far as attendance was concerned, was NOT the 1950s.

Attendance was pretty low in the 50s. A lot of this had to do with demographic changes; the flight from the cities of the Post-War era, people being fearful of going to the ballparks that were in burgeoning ghettos. More people than ever lived in the suburbs and owned their own cars, and there was poor parking for venues such as Ebbetts Field and the Polo Grounds. How the Yankees managed to stay in the South Bronx in the 50s is a mystery that I don’t understand, but they managed to stay. (I seem to recall that they came PRETTY darn close to moving the Yankees to The Meadowlands sports complex in New Jersey in the early 70s).

An excellent and pragmatic book that I recommend on this kind of thing is “The Dodgers Move West” by Neil Sullivan. It’s an unsentimental and objective view on the Dodgers shift to California (along with the Giants, of course ), and the story behind other franchise moves of the 50s (the Braves moving from Boston to Milwaukee, the St. Louis Browns moving to Baltimore and become the Orioles). It’s a fascinating book.

Glen