Willie’s Going to Philly

It was a beautiful June day in Albany, so my friend Tony and I decided to drive over to the ballpark to see that day’s AA game between the Albany Athletics and the Reading Phillies. We parked in the residential neighborhood near Bleecker Stadium and talked about what we hoped to see that day. I said that I wanted to see a lot of home runs, and Tony said he wanted to see a no-hitter. When we got to the ballpark, we paid for our tickets, got some beers and hot-dogs (Albany’s local Emil Meister dogs), and selected seats on the third base side, right near the field. While we waited for the game to begin, we talked baseball—mostly about our favorite team, the Mets, who had just made a trade for Keith Hernandez, a trade that we thought would make our perpetually disappointing team a much better one.

Bleecker Stadium was an old ballpark that had originally been built in the 1850s as a water reservoir off Clinton Avenue in Albany. During the great depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt directed his jobs relief program to convert the obsolete old reservoir into a multi-purpose stadium, which opened late in 1934. The stadium was surrounded by an eighteen-foot embankment, through which three visitors’ entrances were cut. Each entrance had been dedicated to the veterans of a particular war—the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I. In 1983, the Oakland A’s moved their double A affiliate to Albany, where they played at Bleecker stadium. Two years later they became a farm team of the New York Yankees and moved to a new ballpark, Heritage Field in Colonie, just outside the city of Albany.

By 1983, when we went to the ballpark to see the A’s and Phillies play, it was already showing its age. Bleecker Stadium had never been anything fancy—hard aluminum benches for the fans, dugouts that looked like something out of a little league ballpark, and grass on the field that seemed to struggle to retain a greenish hue. The park was almost exclusively filled with Albany fans, and when a Phillies player named Willie Darkis launched a homerun to left field, there was only a smattering of applause. “There’s the first home run,” I said, “right on schedule even if it was by the other team.” In their half of the inning, the A’s went down in order, and Tony and I watched as Willie Darkis trotted over the visiting dugout just in front of us on the third base side. He was a big man and looked like a classic power hitter.

Two innings later, Willie Darkis was up again, and once again he hit a long home run. This time, as he rounded the bases there was a little more applause than there had been for the first one. The Phillies were now up by two or three runs, and the A’s struggled to get runners on base, eking out walks here and there, but never threatening to score. When Darkis came up again, he got another hit—this time a double, as I recall. The Phillies kept building up their lead, with a smattering of home runs thrown in the mix. By the seventh, I was already satisfied that I’d gotten to see a game with a lot of home runs, and when I mentioned this to Tony, he pointed at the scoreboard. Despite all the baserunners the A’s had managed to get via walks, they were being no-hit. Tony grinned and we bought another beer.

When Willie Darkis came up for his fourth at bat, there was a flurry of excitement in the stands. The big man was having a big day. When he pummeled a fast ball high and deep, most of the fans stood to see if it would go out of the park. Even Darkis watched as the ball climbed higher and higher until it sailed over the wall lined with advertisements for local businesses. He glided around second and...