1 Day to Opening Day 2008

Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is tomorrow. This off-season, the countdown was based on books. Each day between October 14 (when there were 172 days until Opening Day 2008) and today, I picked a random book out of my library and excerpted a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I did not to repeat a book during the countdown. I also didn’t have to dip into some of the paperbacks based on old Dr. Who episodes. Boy, I’m glad that I didn’t have to admit that I still have a copy of Dr. Who and the Deadly Assassin somewhere in my bookcase. That would have been embarrassing……

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Today’s book is 36 Former Stars Recall The Game I’ll Never Forget as told to George Vass. The excerpt is from what should be numbered page one, part of the introduction to the book by Vass……Look, I just made an admission that I’d like to take back. I can number the page however the heck I want. It’s the last day, for crying out loud.

While even at a tender age I appreciated being able to follow the events of World War II as reported by the newspaper’s wide-flung Foreign News Service, I was even more intrigued by the sports pages, which featured such writing luminaries as columnist John P. Carmichael and sports editor Lloyd Lewis, the latter of whom was also a noted Civil War historian.

One of the most memorable features of the sports section was an extended series of first-person, as-told-to stories called “My Greatest Day in Baseball.” The vast majority of them were written by Carmichael, who had an exceptional talent for relating anecdotes, as well as enabling the subjects of his interviews to tell their stories in their own way, in their individual accents, so to speak.

In that wonderful series, he and several other contributors, including Lewis, served as “conduits” to enable such great old-time players as Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Clark Griffith, Tris Speaker, and dozens of others to relate in their own words their most memorable games and on-the-field experiences. Eventually, these stories were published in book form in a collection that has been reprinted several times.

The series “My Greatest Day in Baseball” was a thrilling education in the game’s history from the turn of the century into the early 1940’s. It was a virtual seminar, a series of stimulating lectures in newsprint as delivered by those who played major roles in some of the games most dramatic moments. Their highly personal accounts – which happily often included emotional reactions – of some of baseball’s most notable incidents made fascinating reading, often far surpassing in vivid style and detail the objective and relatively dry accounts of the sportswriters who perforce had to look on as outsiders at the events unfolding before them.

Put today’s excerpt in a baseball context.