Fan Dave Schaub’s submission to Baseballisms.com reprinted with permission. Note – Author Cecilia Tan discusses this World Series Game 7 during her appearance on our Cover the Bases podcast. Giants fan’s emotions are expressed in this Peanuts Comic Strip. Thanks Dave!
Trying to think back on that autumn day in October of 1962…I was a transplanted Canadian, having just moved to the U.S.A. in July…but baseball was already in my blood. Beginning with the 1960 season, I’d followed the game with a quasi-religious passion. Nothing compared to baseball’s grip on the sporting world then…well, in team sports…in America. In Canada, we had hockey, and I’d lived my first 11 years in Toronto, still hallowed hockey ground…but I wasn’t good enough to play. And hockey was just another sport in the U.S., as I was quickly coming to learn.
Now, baseball. That was different. Back then, the only reliable game to see on TV was NBC’s “Game Of The Week.” And in Toronto, where there would surely never be BIG league baseball, we watched and listened to Pee Wee Reese and Dizzy Dean, two delightful old ex-ballplayers, on a station we picked up from Buffalo every Saturday; and almost every week, or so it seemed, they were in Yankee Stadium. Just like “Hockey Night In Canada” every Saturday night was ALWAYS from Maple Leaf Gardens. Symmetry. Predictable. As I became a Yankee fan, their fabulous history was slowly recounted to me…or else I’d read all about it in the sports magazines.
By ’62, I was already a “grizzled veteran” as a fan of the 1960 pennant race with those pesky Orioles; a heartbreaking World Series loss to those darned Pirates; an incredible Year of the Home Run in ’61 with the M&M Boys; and My First Taste of Glory, in five games, over Cincinnati. Little did I know that most baseball fans didn’t get to have two seasons in a row that good for their team, sometimes ever. So all was going well as the Yanks advanced to their 3rd straight Series. But this year, it could be tough again. Willie McCovey. Willie Mays. Jim Davenport. The Alou Brothers. They won a 3-game playoff with the Dodgers, who I liked better back then (prettier uniforms; I really didn’t know the history). [click to continue…]
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