Baseball grandest game of them all America’s pastime helps makes spring special season for fathers and sons

Spring is finally here in Maine. This time of the year can only mean one thing: Baseball.

With apologies to all the young ladies who may have played catch with their mothers or their fathers, for me this will always be the season for fathers and sons. Backyard games of catch are as indigenous to baseball in this country as any home run hit by an major league player on any given day. It remains something right out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

People who know my father Doug well might be surprised to read a story that has become quite famous in our family through the years.

You could set your clock by my father’s schedule almost every day. Up at 6 a.m., and out the door by 7 a.m., he returned home each weekday evening in time for supper at 6 p.m. One night after the evening meal, he made his way to the back yard, affectionately known as Brown Stadium to the west side Bangor kids.

The neighborhood boys were having a rousing game of baseball. Our ballpark had a Green Monster in right field, an old green metal shed that – I kid you not – produced the same ball-to-tin thump sound which Fenway Park’s green wall did in left field for so many years before the grounds crew changed the material makeup of the thing to rubber, or hard rubber, at least. No tinny sound today at Fenway.

When my father saw us playing ball that day, he didn’t just stand there and watch us and give pointers from time-to-time like he usually did. This time, he took off his suit jacket – he always wore two-piece tailored suits on the job – and placed it over a lilac bush in right field. The flowers were in bloom, which didn’t seem to bother my father. Dad, I’m thinking, Mother will not be happy if you ruin that jacket.

“Where am I playing?” he hollered.

“Right field,” I hollered back. “Cover the wall.” I ran out and gave him my glove, and the game continued.

As memory serves, my team didn’t put up any runs that half inning, so back out to the field we trotted.

One of the kids inserted my father into the batting order. As luck would have it, he came up in that inning and promptly lined a ball to the deepest part of our yard in left field. He raced around the bases like a seasoned veteran and stopped at third base, huffing and puffing a bit, I must confess.

You could have knocked the rest of us over with a feather. By the time my father left the field, he had thoroughly impressed us boys that he could, in fact, still play this game.

While he was putting on his suit jacket, he motioned me to the lilac bush. He looked to be limping a little, and putting his arm around me there, he said, “Don’t tell your mother why I’m limping.”

Truth be told, he spent the next day – Saturday – in bed, recovering from a “bad cold.” My sister and I knew that he was recovering from sore muscles, most of which hadn’t been used in this type of athletic activity for more than 25 years.

Other father-son baseball memories with my Dad include our first trip to Fenway Park in Boston in 1961 to see our beloved Red Sox take on perennial World Series champions, the dreaded New York Yankees. My Mother was never much of a baseball fan, but she always enjoyed the family outings.

I have wonderful memories of my first trip to storied Fenway. I remember how green the grass looked. Color television had yet to be popular in our neck of the woods, and the splendor of the grass – you could almost smell it – and the sight of that big gigantic wall in left field combined to give a young boy memories he would cherish for a lifetime.

Two of my own three sons have already made their own inaugural visits to see the Red Sox play in Boston. We purposely took them separately so they could soak up the ambiance of the old park on their own. I asked each of the boys what they saw first. Believe it or not, their responses were the same as my own: The green grass and the sight of the towering Green Monster.

To this day, my father still calls me following Red Sox games to recap the action of that day’s proceedings. When the Sox won the World Series last fall, he was excited as I’ve never seen him. Surely, in this part of the world, a championship Boston Red Sox team was cause for celebration. That night in October, my two oldest boys made calls of their own to their father following the final out in St. Louis in the World Series. Like other baseball memories, this father-son one will continue long into the new season and beyond.

From games of catch in the backyard to the Boston Red Sox in the summer, baseball is surely the grandest game of them all.

NEWS columnist Ron Brown, a retired high school basketball coach, can be reached at bdnsports@bangordailynews.net