Hounding baseball players for their autographs was never easy. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't like getting up at four in the morning to deliver the Bronx Home Post, or carrying stuffed cardboard boxes of white bread, canned fruits and vegetables, and multiple quart bottles of Ballantine beer from Silver's Grocery up five dark flights of stairs. Living only five blocks from Yankee Stadium made autograph collecting a pretty accessible activity.
Waiting for professional baseball players to emerge from their safe confines at the Concourse Plaza Hotel, and walking a couple of blocks with them to the Stadium was pretty neat. They’d even talk with you every once in a while. However, waiting at the top of the stairs for them as they arrived by subway, or standing in the parking lot on the lookout for team buses to pull in from some downtown hotel, was a crapshoot for most of us, but a well-honed art form for others.
As a 10- year-old, I was mentored -- and escorted around -- by my friend's older brother, who after four or five years of autograph collecting, knew the lay of the land.
Although he was only 15, he attacked autograph hunting with a professional mien. His pre-autograph collecting preparation checklist wasn't written down, but it was precise: "Are your cards sorted by the team in town?” he’d ask. “Do you have enough ball point pens? Do you have your scrapbook of glossies? How about a pad for players you don't have cards or pictures of?"
If it were Yankee Stadium, you'd have your Yankee cards and cards for the appropriate visiting American League team. If you had ventured off into upper Manhattan and you found yourself in the parking lot of the Polo Grounds where the New York Giants had played since the turn of the century, you made sure you had all your National League teams sorted out.
We were on a mission; we were fans -- everyone rooted for their favorite teams – and, in our own unique way, we were fanatics.
Collecting autographs was a competitive sport: sprinting to grab a place in line before anyone else; getting your spot by the subway; honing your pitch to the players; knowing who were the tough ones ("Hey Mickey (Mantle) please sign, please sign, please Mick,") and who were the guys who'd sign without much of a fuss. After the games, when the going got really tough (lots more competition) you’d hand the rapidly departing players a stamped self-addressed post card and hope they’d sign it and send it back to you.
Late at night, you sat on your bed in your third floor walkup apartment and you took inventory. Most of the time, nothing of note had happened at the ballpark, but if you scored an autograph of Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson or Willie Mays, you were in heaven. And, the next day, when you met up with your fellow autograph-seeker fanatics, there was always a story to tell, moments to be revisited. You were in an exclusive club.
Being in that club separated you from the other kids in the neighborhood. It's what kept you apart, and made you special. You had honed a skill that few had; you understood the intricacies and, if you will, the inside baseballedness that your buddies weren't privy to.
You were a fan and you fanatically pursued your goals, but you never thought of slamming Louie, the 45 year-old veteran collector, over the head with a baseball bat and stealing his autograph collection.
You never thought of ripping off the other collectors for an autographed baseball card, no matter how rare that card and autograph was. You never imagined forging autographs to trade for real ones. There was a mutual respect for the skills of those standing besides you as you geared up for the hunt. In our small universe there was elation and disappointment, and unbridled passion, but you never saw your competitors as the other, so outside your own sphere that you demonized them.
When Bryan Stow was nearly beaten to death in the parking lot outside Dodger Stadium on opening day in 2011, because he was wearing the colors of his team, the San Francisco Giants, it was surely an example of a world gone mad. What could have possibly motivated the perpetrators? Why would wearing Giants orange and black so incite a Los Angeles Dodger fan? Why did our shared humanity mean nothing in that parking lot on opening day?
At soccer stadiums across Europe racist taunts have become the all-to-often norm. Fans toss bananas and make gorilla sounds when Black players take to the Pitch. Ironically, when the "other" is playing for their team, there is no such taunting.
Sports mirror the world we live in. While hurling racial epithets were standard fare at baseball parks around the country when Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier in 1947, good-natured booing or razzing of an opposing team player has a long tradition in American sports.
What turns fans who identify with their teams and their teams' outcomes, into fanatics who experience a sporting event as a life-or-death experience?
Whether sports, politics, religion or any other area where certainties abide, alternative viewpoints are excluded, empathy is non-existent, and passions run high, there is always a danger of fanaticism.
Unlike Louie, who apparently seamlessly sailed into autograph collecting in his forties and fifties, my days standing out in front of the Concourse Plaza Hotel, hanging out at the 161st Street IND subway stop, running through parking lots when the player buses arrived, were numbered. My mentor would soon join the Air Force. And I was grappling with the fifth and sixth grades; wrestling with how not to get on the wrong side of Mrs. Castilla and Mrs. Maher.
Maybe we were fanatic-lite: We were certainly single-minded in our pursuits. Perhaps an occasional elbow nudged our fellow autograph-seekers out of the way. I was, after all, going after my target with reckless abandon, at least as reckless as a ten-year-old could muster.
At some point during my teenage years I put scotch tape over most of the autographs and they are now, what in the business is called “degraded.” Other autographs – especially the ones signed in pencil – are fading with the years. What’s left of my collection of baseball cards is in a box in my closet. But it doesn’t take much for me to bring down my scrapbook and share a few stories with family and friends.