Still Pitching Read Online Free

passionate, reverent detail? It was as if he was talking about a work of art.
    Another reason that Hymie was so driven to pursue his racing pleasures was, I believe, because of a midlife bout with tuberculosis. When he was in his early forties, the doctors removed a diseased lung and told him that if he wanted to live more than another five years, he would have to quit smoking and chasing the horses. To my grandfather, it was a worse punishment than the diagnosis. So he made the only compromises his temperament would allow: in place of the stogies he started smoking Tipperillos, and for six months he skipped the trotters and went only to the flats in the afternoon. But as soon as he could convince my grandmother he was healthy, Hymie was back at the pharmacy in the mornings and doing his usual double shift at the tracks.
    Anyone looking for a cautionary tale here will be disappointed; my grandfather lived this way for the next thirty years. He died, appropriately enough, at Roosevelt Raceway. It was a sudden heart attack, and he went quickly. When the medics found him, he had four winning tickets in his shirt pocket.

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    If you grew up in New York City between 1947 and 1957, you were witness to a period that sportswriters and baseball historians still refer to as the golden age of New York baseball. That reign began with the Dodgers signing of Jackie Robinson, the first Negro ball player in the major leagues, and it ended with another first—the Dodgers’ and Giants’ migrations to Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1957.
    What’s most remarkable about those years is that at least one, and most often two, of the three New York teams—the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants—appeared in the World Series. This streak was interrupted only by the Cleveland Indians—Boston Braves Series in 1948. Even more extraordinary is that from 1947 until 1957 the three New York teams won a total of nine world championships. The Yankees won seven of the eight World Series they appeared in, the Giants won one of their two appearances, and the Dodgers won a single championship along with six National League pennants. All of the city’s newspapers—and there were more than a half dozen dailies back then—routinely referred to the World Series as the Subway Series.
    My parents, and it seemed most of the men and women of their generation, rooted for the Giants. On hot summer nights they’d sit with our neighbors out on the front stoop, swatting mosquitoes, sipping coffee or beer, and listening to Russ Hodges and Ernie Harwell broadcast the games. Every so often, something one of the announcers said would trip off a memory. Then my dad and Mr. Creelman, the police detective from down the street, would start reminiscing about the great Giant teams of the twenties and thirties. Mostly, they’d boast about their Hall of Famers: Frankie Frisch, Bill Terry, John McGraw, Carl Hubbell, Mel Ott. I was envious that they’d actually seen these players in person.
    If my father’s friends were Giant rooters, most of the guys in the neighborhood clique and the rich kids from Neponsit were Yankee fans. When they weren’t playing ball at recess, they’d smugly invoke their team’s immortals—Babe Ruth, Lefty Gomez, Lou Gehrig, and Joe DiMaggio—as if they’d actually grown up with those players. They’d lord it over everyone in the schoolyard that their Bronx Bombers, their Yankees were “becoming a dynasty.”
    That kind of gamesmanship was de rigueur. Bragging rights were important currency in the schoolyard. One time, I heard Frank Pearlman ragging on poor Sherman Carlson for being a Brooklyn Dodger fan. Sherman was one of those guys who was always getting picked on. He was a math brain, a slight skinny kid with bad skin and horn-rimmed glasses. Every day, he wore rumpled brown corduroys with a slide rule attached to his belt. He was a walking target for mean-spirited jerks like