Published April 29, 2020
FENWAY PARK, in happier times.
[We know that in the current shutdown many of you, like us, are missing that lifelong rite of spring that is baseball. We hope that this piece, written 10 years ago by Item columnist Mark Sardella, will make your hardball withdrawal a little easier.]
Last week, I attended my first Boston Red Sox opening day, a game against the World Champion New York Yankees. My father, Steve Sardella, was born 89 years ago this week in Wakefield, Massachusetts. These two seemingly unrelated facts are linked in my mind because my father was a huge Yankee fan, despite having lived his entire life just outside Boston.
I don’t know exactly how to explain my father’s allegiance to the Yankees. It may have had something to do with the fact that the Yankees were among the first teams to sign Italian-American players like Tony Lazzeri, Frankie Crosetti and of course, Joe DiMaggio.
Growing up, I received my early baseball education watching Red Sox broadcasts with my father on a black and white TV. Back in the days before cable, my father was reduced to watching the only televised baseball available, even if it was the Red Sox, a team that he detested as much as any Bronx-bred Yankee fan.
Still, he would patiently answer my baseball questions, while giving his own editorial spin on the game. These were the waning days of the Yankee Dynasty, whereas the Red Sox were perennially fighting to stay out of the American League cellar. It could be tough watching a baseball game on TV with my father if you were a Red Sox fan.
If a Red Sox player made a good play or if they won, they were “lucky.” If Boston beat Detroit, for example, my father would say, “The Red Sox didn’t win – the Tigers lost.”
RED SOX vs YANKEES, APRIL 2010
Like any good Yankee fan of his time, my father despised Ted Williams and his successor in left field, Carl Yastrzemski. He derisively referred to Yaz as “God,” because he believed that Yastrzemski had an inflated image of himself. “God’s up,” my father would announce to the TV each time Yaz strode to the plate.
My father also had no use for Boston baseball announcers on TV and radio, whom he believed favored the home team. Maybe he assumed that in every other city the announcers were objective whereas he was forced to put up with this bunch of homers, which included the legendary Curt Gowdy back when the games were sponsored by Narragansett beer and broadcast on Channel 5 and WHDH radio.
My father would be all over the Red Sox broadcasters if they misspoke or made a factual error in calling the game. “Are they selling the Narragansett or drinking it?” he’d wonder aloud any time a Red Sox announcer made a mistake.
I got to watch last week’s opening game against the Yankees from Section 9, not far from where we sat one night in 1966 when my father took my brother and me to Fenway Park for our first Red Sox game. My most vivid memory of that game is Tony Conigliaro hitting a home run that was still rising when it hit the net that used to sit on top of the left field wall.
In my younger days, my father and I disagreed on almost everything – not just baseball. Still, I was happy that my father got to watch on TV from his bed at Melrose-Wakefield Hospital as the Yankees’ Dave Righetti tossed a 4-0 no-hitter against the Red Sox on July 4, 1983. It was one of the last games he would ever watch.
Now that I’m older and wiser, I’ve come to appreciate some of my father’s more conservative views. The more birthdays I have, the more I understand where he was coming from.
But I’ll never share his love of the New York Yankees – not, as my father would have put it, “if I live to be a thousand years old.”
[This column originally appeared in the April 15, 2010 Wakefield Daily Item.]
