Todd was ahead of the game.
He was two years older than me, a neighbor three houses down the street. He was one of the founding members of his high school varsity soccer team, and he was always a league ahead of me in the city baseball little league. We had another life with people our age, but when the summers rolled around and the Indians were playing and we were free of school and its daily demands, I was over Todd’s practically every day.
Only I wasn’t going over to a house. I was entering a baseball mecca, one in which I had privileged access, where imagination and love of the game was unlocked. Where Babe Ruth could bat against Randy Johnson. Where a slugger named Harmon Killebrew inevitably socked one into the left field stands (the roof of Todd’s family garage).
Todd was a genius in expressing his passion for sports. Whether it was tennis against the garage door, bike racing around the block, golfing in the yard, tackle football in those polyester 1980s uniforms with the plastic helmets, Todd brought these sports to life.
But nothing equaled the passion and innovation that was created for baseball. This was Todd at his best, and what transpired summer after summer was something I considered routine, expected…but maybe not, because the excitement and anticipation I felt suggested I sensed this was something pretty spectacular.
And perhaps knowing this private field of dreams was not to last — as summer, as youths — added an inherent glow of nostalgia.
Todd invented a baseball world in his backyard. It really came into its own in the last couple of summers, having perfected the system — the park, the league, the stats — for 3 or 4 years. By our last summer, when Todd turned 16, he was talking about getting into sports management. But even in the earlier years he had an eye for behind-the-scenes, the offbeat, the unusual doings and mechanics that went into the proper functioning of a ballgame. A breadth and depth eye for detail that grasped what made baseball America’s game.
Todd’s care for his backyard ballpark — 76 feet from home plate to the right field fence where a willow tree stood in droopy splendor — was meticulous. He studied how the grounds crew raked the infield, how they uniformly pulled the tarp over during a rain delay; he took delight in their collaborative precision.
Home plate at Todd’s park was only 7 ½ miles from home plate at Jacobs Field (now Progressive Field). That park opened for the 1994 season, and introduced a revitalized Cleveland Indians team that floundered in the waning decades at cavernous Cleveland Municipal Stadium (8 ½ miles away). The final baseball game in that hallowed arena took place on October 3, 1993. Todd and his family were among the 72,390 fans who saw the White Sox shut the Tribue out, 4–0. Mark Lewis, once a heralded rising prospect for the Indians, struck out to end the game.
The epic event was carried by WUAB-TV Channel 43. The broadcasters were Jack Corrigan and Mike Hegan.
The ceremonial conclusion following the game was pure Cleveland theatrics. 90-year-old entertainment icon Bob Hope, who was raised in Cleveland, held a stake in the organization for forty years, sang for the crowd. Heroes who would come to thrust the sword from the stone in future seasons — Belle, Baerga, Alomar, Lofton — watched along with manager Mike Hargrove as former Indians joined them on the field to say farewell. Mel Harder, almost 84, who played his entire pitching career with the Indians (1928–1947) came out to throw the final pitch — he threw the first pitch back when the Stadium opened in 1932.
The grounds crew, in tuxedos, certainly had a field day:
They returned to dramatically dig up home plate, an action that would be created in Todd’s park later that same afternoon. To commemorate the end of the era, we buried home plate under his family’s shed.
The 1993 season was marked with tragedy before it even started. 27-year-old pitcher Steve Olin, who had played four seasons for the Indians, was killed in a boating accident on March 22 in Florida during spring training. Reliever Tim Crews, who had signed with the Tribe that January, was also killed. Another pitcher, Bob Ojeda, survived. Head injuries kept him out of the lineup for much of the season; when he took the mound, the fans gave him a standing ovation.
When Major League baseball players went on strike in August 1994, the Indians were 66–47, potentially on their way to their first postseason since 1954. It was devastating to experience, and many were turned away from MLB because of that strike. It even shortened the 1995 season — that great, incredible season of 1995 — in which the Indians crushed the competition with a league-best 100–44 record.
One of course one can glimpse how magical the season was, with the Tribe’s 46 comeback victories and 29 last-at-bat wins, by watching those clips online. Perhaps the unexpected power of the Indians was best captured by the reaction of Dennis Eckersley after Manny Ramirez sent a 2–2 pitch into the left field bleachers on July 16:
The personal highlight for me that season was not at Jacobs Field, but when I accompanied Todd and his parents to Detroit’s Tiger Stadium on September 3, to catch the last of a three game series against the Tigers.
It was my only time seeing an Indians game that year — Jacobs Field was sold out from June 12, 1995 — April 4, 2001 — and Todd and I got around. As I wrote about that day, September 7:
“I got autographs from pitchers Charlie Nagy and Chad Ogea. Dennis Martinez pointed to me, and Dave Winfield nodded to me. I later declared it the greatest day of my life.”
The Indians won 9–8.
I wrote on September 26:
“The Cleveland Indians are the greatest team in all of baseball. They will finish with the best record in the Majors. On…well, I don’t know when it was, but I tried calling the Indians’ [front office] for playoff tickets along with about a million other people. And guess what? In exactly one week the Indians will play the first postseason ball game in 41 years! We will most likely play the Red Sox. Right now, the Indians are trailing the Minnesota Twins 8–3. Belle has 47 home runs. MVP bound? I sure hope so.”
The Red Sox’s Mo Vaughn was that year’s MVP, edging Belle by eight points.
Although the 1995 season ended in defeat for the Indians at the hands of the Atlanta Braves, the Fall Classic an anticlimactic and disappointing conclusion to that year, it was still an effort on a huge proscenium that did not go without drama:
Todd’s ballpark, needless to say, was a microcosm of that atmosphere — long before it materialized in Jacobs Field and arguably saved a tarnished league following the polarizing strike. But it was the broadcasting element of baseball that really attracted both our fancies. The broadcasting booth was perched on top of the shed off first base. If we were playing each other, we would call while playing. As Indians fans, we were enormously blessed to hear Tom Hamilton game in and game out, who to this day continues calling the games for the Guardians. Todd and I both recognized without recognizing the beauty and peace of baseball on radio.
Any baseball fan, particularly from Cleveland, will relish Tom Hamilton and Terry Pluto’s Glory Days in Tribe Town: The Cleveland Indians and Jacobs Field, 1994–1997.
“If there is a doctor in the stands, will he please report to the playing field.”
During the Tribe’s glory years in the 1990s, Hamilton’s radio partner was former Indians pitcher, Herb Score (1933–2008).
It was May 7, 1957. Gil McDougal of the Yankees stared down a 23-year-old southpaw, Herb Score. It was the start of Score’s third season with the Indians, winning Rookie of the Year in 1955 and going 20–9 in 1956. He was a two-time All-Star.
McDougal lined Score’s pitch so hard and so fast Score couldn’t react in time. The ball smashed into Score’s right eye, shattered it, sending him flopping backwards, breaking his nose and several facial bones.
Blood seeped from a fallen Score on the pitching mound in a stunned Cleveland Stadium.
McDougal vowed to quit if Score went blind.
But he didn’t. In fact, he would eventually recover his 20/20 eyesight, with a glass eye replacing the shattered one, and a return to the mound in late 1958. He wasn’t the same, that year or the next four seasons, finishing 1962 with the Chicago White Sox. His final record was 55–46.
It was fear of being hit again that changed Score’s pitching motion. But while playing perhaps wasn’t Score’s calling, then he certainly found his destiny in the broadcasting booth. He was the voice of Indians baseball on the radio from 1968–1997, the final seven seasons with Hamilton. His final game was Game 7 of the 1997 World Series, in which the Marlins beat the Indians 3–2 in 11 innings. It was Score who called the winning hit, professional and methodical: “A line drive to center field, the season is over.”
Score died in 2008 at age 75.
The dimensions of Todd’s ballpark: His backyard was fenced, home plate in the northwest corner of the yard. In the early days he had broken off a broomstick and taped it to the fence to mark the foul line which stood for years, slowly leaning into fair territory. Right field and center were the deepest parts of the park. Left was kind to the hitter’s. The grandest and loftiest home runs would be from the left side of the plate. We were both right handed by nature so the lefty homers felt deserved, and there was an awe in watching them sail into the neighbor’s domain, the imposing old couple and their dog, Rebel. Pitcher would be tasked with retrieving the home run ball, cognizant of Rebel’s growl, while the other rounded the bases. We would play into dusk, calling the game either for dinner or light. Sometimes a game would have to be completed the next day. I chronicled a cliffhanger on June 24, 1993 when the result was still pending that night: “It’s 12–9 in the bottom of the 12th…” The outcome is unknown, lost in the annals of summer nights, in the carefree swing of the bat, in the love of a game that still had its innocence, to us.
One time, in 1991, the year the Indians went 57–105, we had a game going while playing one of our own and had to halt the game to marvel at an Indians pitcher called Willie Blair who threw 8 straight balls.
Todd also kept a thorough stats book, the official record book of the league. Box scores were kept. After each batter we would pencil in the at-bat and later, ESPN in the background, he would figure out the average and rankings of the team. My rosters inevitably consisted of the old timers: Ruth, Mantle, Foxx, Cobb, and Harmon Killebrew, who always powered a homer to left. He was particularly proud one time when he obtained an umpire’s palm-sized counter somehow.
One time I was pitching as Nolan Ryan and not having a good game. Todd was announcing as he batted. “Ryan walks Griffey” […] “A shaken Ryan is way behind on Buehlher…” and finally in rage I stormed off the field silently while Todd’s commentary followed: “And Nolan Ryan is actually leaving the field, ladies and gentlemen. He’s going, going, and he’s on his bike and gone.”
In 1995, we hypothesized confronting Cal Ripken to keep him from playing the game that would break Lou Gehrig’s record fo 2,130 straight games. Another time, I stormed out of an illusionary dugout as then-Cubs manager Don Zimmer to argue a point, puffing out my cheeks to mimic Zimmer’s enormous jowels. This was years before Zimmer’s real-life bout with Pedro Martinez:
I wish I could remember my last at bat in Todd’s ballpark, which would have been in the summer of 1996. But what I do and always will remember was that he was a good friend. I haven’t seen him since my dad’s funeral in 2011. But he should know that I always felt better leaving his company, that ballpark, in summer twilight, knowing he’d be around tomorrow, that he in some ways, was looking out for me.
What might he say to me now, as middle-aged men with children of our own? No doubt his positivity and can-do-anything mentality is still flourishing, and me might say to bag up whatever is causing discontent in life and bury it under the shed where that first home plate rots. We knew how to move on then. A new season is here now.
Todd’s advice might be something that resonated with me long ago, which triggered excitement and anticipation each sun-baked morning. He might say, simply, to be Harmon Killebrew.
