Rant #1,512: These Highlights Were Not On ESPN

As regular readers of this column know, I love baseball.

I love everything about baseball, and I have been a fan since 1965, since the very first game I went to, at Yankee Stadium.

I just remember walking into the old ballpark and the enormity of the place got to me.

I really and truly fell in love with the game right there, and this is one love affair that is never going to end.

Heck, I have told my wife that when my time comes, I want to be buried in my Yankees baseball hat, the one that dates from the 1970s, the one I still wear.

Anyway, like most boys my age, I played Little League baseball.

It was in an unsanctioned Little League, one created expressly for the residents of the neighborhood I grew up in, Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, New York.

It was the Rochdale Village Athletic League, or the RVAL for short, and every resident knew about it, and so much of the activity in the community revolved around it way back when.

Originally, the league had baseball and softball teams, but over the years, everything basically became softball, so as I got older, that is the type of game I played.

We had a very, very competitive league, and there were some really good ballplayers in that league.

I was not one of them.

I was kind of small and kind of skinny, and honestly, I really didn't have too many athletic skills.

But I loved to play, absolutely lived for Saturday mornings, when we played most of our games.

I mean, I wasn't very good, and this was going to be the highest level of baseball that I would ever reach--no high school, no college, no pros for me, just Little League.

Yesterday, I don't know how this came up at work, but I recalled one of the funniest things to happen to me in Little League. I can laugh about it now, but back then, boy, was I ticked off about it.

As I said, I was not a very good player. I played second base at this point in time, my father was our coach, and we had a very good team, pretty much camouflaging the fact that I wasn't very good--never the worst player, but far from the best.

Anyway, I was about 13, and I had grown a bit taller in a short period of time.

From my bar mitzvah in May of 1970 through June of that same year, I probably grew about seven inches--yes, seven inches--from 5'2" to 5'9". I never gained anything in height since that period, and that is the height I am now and through my adult life.

Anyway, we were playing a game in the fabled gravel pit, a sectioned off area of the development that was full of gravel. It later became a community garden, I believe, but at this point in time, this was where we played baseball, and as you can imagine, it wasn't the best place to play ball, with all the rocks around.

During this particular game, we had a runner on first, and I came up to the plate. Again, I had just gone through the greatest growth spurt of my life, but the outfielders were playing me all the way in, as they had since I was a Pee Wee player.

I came up to the plate, got a fat pitch to hit, and yes, I hit it.

Not only did I hit it, I hit it clear over the centerfielder's head. And the ball landed on the gravel, ticked off the rocks, and kept on rolling and rolling to the fence.

I smelled inside the park homerun here, and back then, the one thing I could do was run, and I ran for the hills around the bases.

The problem was that the runner ahead of me, Arthur, was as slow as molasses, or as I say, mole asses.

He was as slow as I wast fast, and as I rounded first, he was just a few strides ahead of me at second base, and as I rounded second, he was just a few strides ahead of me a third.

Somehow, he made it home, so I did get an RBI, but he was so slow that I nearly ran up his back at third.

I had a clean triple, but that was the closest I ever came to hitting a home run in the Little League.

I was as sore as all hell. I thought I finally had this one in the bag, but the only bag I got to was third base.

And that is what makes baseball so special, not necessarily this specific play, but the fact that I remember it like it happened yesterday, even though it took place a good 45 years ago.

Baseball makes memories like no other sport, and that is one of the many memories I have of playing in the RVAL.

As the major league season winds down and the playoffs beckon, I am sure that everyone who has played Little League probably has similar memories, and they come up big during this time of year.

Yes, I love baseball. It is, and will always be, our national pastime.

There is just no other sport like it, and while I wasn't a very good player, even I can have some great memories of my time playing the game I loved when I was a kid.

Great memories, and this particular incident, and several others, will never be forgotten by me ... heck, it's not the World Series, but I guess for me, looking back, these memories were my own, personal World Series.

(Photo courtesy of Arnie Epstein.)