168 Days to Opening Day 2008

Last off-season, Rattler Radio counted down the days to Opening Day 2007 with various baseball related numbers. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.

Today’s book, with 168 days to Opening Day 2008 on April 3, is The Storytellers by Curt Smith.

Smith, who has done many books on baseball announcers, collected stories from play-by-play announcers and put them in The Storytellers.

The excerpt from page 168 is a story from Lindsay Nelson, the voice of the New York Mets.

People do that with professions. They get to the end and say, “Gee, maybe I shoulda’ done something else.” I don’t feel that way a’tall. I think baseball broadcasting is the best thing in the world. How couldn’t I after October 16, 1969? The fifth and last game of the World Series at Shea Stadium. Curt Gowdy and I were doing it for NBC. If the Mets won the game and, thus, the Series, I’d do the locker room show. In the ninth inning, I left the booth for the clubhouse. That’s when the enormity hit. After seven years of famine, this was the Mets’ time of plenty, and I’d been there from the first.

I get to the elevator. I remember it had got stuck in the past. I realize this is no time to be pinned in there. So I raced down the ramp, fought the fans going crazy, and reached the dressing room in time to hear Curt describe the final three outs and say, “The Mets are the champions of the World.” I was on the platform in the center of the locker room, and the door burst open, and here they came! By the time I got done with the post-game craziness, it was past 4 o’clock. I told my wife and kids, “We don’t have time to go home [Long Island], and, anyway, if we don’t go into Manhattan, we’ll miss the party” to be held at 7 for players, their families, and the rest. So we got in the car and drove around Manhattan. Dancing in the streets. Confetti flying. Once in a while a cop would recognize me and go wild. What made the entire year marvelous was that the Mets may endure a thousand years, as Churchill would say, they may win a dozen championships, but they can only do it the first time once, and the first time was incomparable.

No need to put this excerpt into a baseball context.