What Baseball Means to Me by Drew Pelto

By: Drew Pelto

Baseball is about so many things. Strategy. History. Diversity. The smell of freshly-cut grass on a local park diamond and the stale cigarette smoke of an old ballpark. It’s about the feel of flipping through vintage cards, of a ball hitting a mitt, of sitting on hard, hot bleachers. Stadium Mustard on a Kahn’s footlong– only Clevelanders will understand. It’s about adaptation– whether it’s adapting the game to be played in your back yard instead of a three-acre space, or adapting to a new position because your knees can’t handle it behind the plate anymore, or adapting the entire gestalt of the sport into a simple card-and-dice format (I’ve been playing a lot of MLB Showdown during isolation).

For me baseball is about family connection. The sport has been a part of my family from the first moment my ancestors came to a new country.

On July 4, 1909, my grandfather arrived in his new home of Boston in Upper Michigan’s Copper Country, following a six-week journey from Tervola, Finland with his mother, two older sisters, and a younger brother. Northern Finland had little in the way of sports: pesäpallo wouldn’t be invented for another fifteen years, hockey wouldn’t appear on a wide basis for another twenty, and eukonkanto didn’t have a championship until 1992.

But weeks after arrival, my grandfather turned into the biggest baseball fan you could find. The neighborhood boys, many from immigrant families like his own coming from Finland, Italy, Germany, Croatia, Quebec, Ireland, and England, created their own team. Their creation of the Boston Pirates lasted as an amateur baseball organization well into the 1950s. Baseball as a player didn’t last long for him: by the time he was 15, Grandpa was working in the copper mines due to a lack of workers in the World War. But he was a fan for life, watching the Pirates and catching major league games on the radio and eventually TV whenever he could pick up games from Detroit, Chicago, or the future Milwaukee Braves and Toronto Blue Jays.

On my grandmother’s side of the family, baseball wasn’t quite as big as it was for my grandfather, but her oldest brother played on those same Boston Pirates in the 1940s as a top first baseman and pitcher. When Bob Feller and Joe DiMaggio hosted a camp in Florida for returning soldiers and other young prospects to be seen by scouts, a group of businesses in the Copper Country paid for him and a teammate to travel down and participate in it.

Needless to say, my father followed in Grandpa’s footsteps. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was a pitcher, outfielder, and middle infielder for the local Little League on the Pirates as well– total coincidence. But like my grandfather, that didn’t last long. Being a lefty and only about 5’7″ severely limited where he could play. Aside from Little League and some company softball teams, he too was limited mostly to being a fan.

I didn’t make it any further than they did: I could play almost any position in Little League, but couldn’t hit a beach ball. After four years mostly as a catcher and middle infielder, my .077 average was enough to tell me I should hang up the spikes and stick to weekend lob-pitch pickup games and eventually the Emerson College Wiffleball League, where I was a Cy Young finalist. However, I too ended up as a Pirate coincidentally.

I never met my grandfather much. They moved from Boston to Laurium and finally to blink-and-you’ll-miss-it New Allouez. I was seven when he died, and we only got up to see him once a year for a week. But I remember him watching in the summer of 1989, and in his aged, weary, Finnish-accented voice telling this five-year-old how “Dere was dis little kirl down ta road, she play Little League, she hit tat pall way out to da trees dere. You konna let da kirls peat you?” before I’d go up and try to crush a plastic ball over his flowers, past the neat rows of raspberry plants, and into the precisely-planted jack pine trees. And a year after his death, as I watched a 1992 Blue Jays-Rangers game on a black and white TV, rabbit ear antennas pointed north toward CKPR in Thunder Bay, Grandma reminisced about how Grandpa always watched the Jays any time he could, since they had the clearest signal in the Copper Country. In the offseason, Major League pitcher George Brunet lived next door.

I turned six years old in 1990 and later that year I went to my first two ballgames. By this point, my family had relocated. My grandparents were still in Upper Michigan: unless he got to a game in an early 1920s trip to Chicago, my grandfather died without ever attending a Major League game. My dad had moved down to Lower Michigan, then onto Iowa, and finally Ohio where I spent most of my life. Dad used to try to get to a ballgame in any Big League city he visited. He saw Kaufman when it was still Royals Stadium; another favorite in Steve Carlton pitching against the Cubs at Wrigley; and a 1966 game at Yankee Stadium when he saw New York and Washington when visiting his sister. In Iowa, he and my mom often attended Cedar Rapids Reds games, getting to watch some big prospects for the Reds including Eric Davis, Paul O’Neill, and Chris Sabo.

It was while living in Ohio where I became a fan, cursed with cheering for some terrible Indians teams. I don’t know how I ended up a fan of his, but Cory Snyder was my favorite player from the moment I first saw a game. Even now, coming up on 36, I have a huge collection of Snyder cards– over 200 different ones, plus a game-used bat, and a few autographs. In 1990, I went to my first game, seeing the Indians beat the Tigers 12-4. A month later, we saw Dave Stieb finally complete a no-hitter after two failed attempts in 1988, beating the Tribe 3-0.

I got started as a serious collector in 1991. My dad had been a card collector too, 35 years before, having nearly-complete sets from 1957 all the way up to about 1964; at some point though, he gave them all to a friend. I had a few cards before then, but nothing major; just some that I had gotten as random gifts. But one day with some birthday money burning a hole in my pocket, I went with my dad to K-Mart and paid $1.49 for a rack pack of 1991 Donruss cards. That first pack of cards had a card of our lone star in Cleveland in Sandy Alomar Jr., plus Dave Stieb, and Cory Snyder. Needless to say, I was hooked. Nearly 30 years later, I’m still at it.

The Indians lost every game from the Stieb no-no all the way up to the final game we saw at the old Stadium where they blew a 7-2 lead to the Yankees, dropping it 14-8. Fortunately our first game at the all-new Jacobs Field featured Albert Belle cranking a walk-off grand slam off Lee Smith.

I’ve been to far more games in Texas now, along with a game each in Montreal, Minnesota, Boston, St. Louis, and Detroit. But for me, the two stadia in Cleveland will always bring a sense of home and a sense of connection to my family. I don’t get back to Cleveland much more often than every couple of years, but my dad and I always try to get to a game together, typically the A-level Lake County Captains as they’re a fifteen minute drive for him.

In 2014, I made it up for the National Sports Collectors Convention, and as I stopped by my dad’s house, he handed me a box. Just before my grandmother moved into an assisted living facility in the early 90s, we went through her house to make sure there wasn’t anything left that we wanted. And somehow, surviving 20+ years in the attic, we came across two bags of 1962 and 1963 Topps cards from my dad’s collection as a kid. He was giving them to me. Since then, I’ve mailed off about 40 or so to players to sign; only two never came back to me.

There are a lot of things I don’t have in common with my predecessors. My grandfather was a union copper miner who never took a day off for fifty years. My dad is a Reagan-era Republican with a masters degree in electrical engineering. I border on being an anarchist with a nearly useless journalism degree. But the one thing we all could always agree on was baseball.