Bobby and Me

Bobby and me went to different high schools. Most of the Jewish kids went to Dorchester South, and everyone said that's where you ought to be if you had any brains and were thinking about going to college. Dorchester North was home for the jocks and the kids who couldn't wait to take woodworking or get into the auto repair shop.

About the only time I ever got into the part of Dorchester where Bobby lived was to play baseball on Sunday mornings. The games usually started in May and kept going right through most of October. You just played pickup every week, with the two captains choosing up sides, until enough guys showed up to field two teams.

There was this real tremendous playground over there called Talbot Park. You could probably have eight ball games going at one time if no one else came down to play soccer or cricket or touch football. There was one diamond that was laid out beautifully at the far end of the field with a grandstand on the first base side that could hold a few hundred people. It was built out of concrete and had long wooden benches. I never saw more than thirty or forty people in the stands there at one time, except for the Fourth of July, when it was a good seat for the fireworks show. For us, it was the closest thing to a big league field that we had.

A couple of guys in tan uniforms with a City of Boston patch on the shoulder mowed the infield grass on that diamond every week and then did about another 200 feet into the outfield. There were no fences, but some of the players on the park league teams that used that field hit balls you knew were legitimate home runs when they went fifty feet or more on the fly past the line where the maintenance crew quit mowing. They fixed up the batter's box with chalk, just like you'd see at Fenway. And they had white lines going from home down to the bases, but they didn't bother with a coach's box on either side.

There were four more diamonds in the middle of Talbot Park, with a big wire backstop separating each two fields, home plate to home plate. The teams that played soccer went to one part of the park that was all grass. Some of us used to watch it for a while, but we never got interested in it. It was just boring. There was no action and no scoring compared to baseball. On some Sundays, the black guys who came from the Caribbean islands showed up for a game of cricket, dressed in white, head to toe. And there were always two or three softball games going on wherever there was a little room left. They just walked off the distance between bases and threw someone's shirt or jacket there to mark each one.

Each of the diamonds had a regular bunch of guys who showed up to play every Sunday morning. By 8:00 there'd be batting practice going on at all the fields, and the game I played in always got started as soon as everyone there had taken at least three cuts. Most of the guys were in their late twenties or early thirties, but a few were a lot older. Two of them with gray hair were the managers every week. They're the ones who chose sides. One always wore a Boston Braves hat even though the team had already moved to Milwaukee. Mr.Braves was usually in a hurry to get the game started. He'd flip a bat to the other guy—his name was Pete and he wore a short-sleeved sweatshirt every Sunday that said "Norwell" on it. From the spot where Pete caught it, they took turns...