First Person / Stories from the 'Hot Stove'
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When I was growing up on the working-class South Side in the 1950s, Pittsburgh was still a baseball town, with boxing second, and Steelers and Pitt football a close third. We had hockey, but it was minor league, and, without an NBA team in Pittsburgh, basketball was mostly high school and collegiate.
After the Pirates played their last game in late September, we had to wait until mid-April before the beginning of another baseball season. Of course, we had the Same Old Steelers to kick around until December, and, if Pitt's football team was having a great season, there was the possibility of a New Year's Day bowl game after Pitt's traditional final game with Penn State around Thanksgiving.
In January, we still had the hockey Hornets, who managed to win a Calder Cup or two, and the Duquesne Dukes, who, with All-Americans Dick Ricketts and Si Green, won an NIT tournament in 1955 when the NIT was still prestigious. We also had the Wednesday Pabst Blue Ribbon and Friday Gillette Cavalcade fights that I watched with my father at our neighborhood beer joint while he told me stories about local legends, like Harry Greb, Teddy Yaroz, Fritzi Zivic and Billy Conn.
While those other sports were entertaining , like most diehard Pirate baseball fans, I couldn't have survived the winter months without the Hot Stove League to keep my baseball memories warm and my hopes alive while I waited for next year. The Hot Stove League was a colorful name for the wonderful storytellers who filled the off-season void and stoked my imagination with tales of glorious baseball seasons past and larger-than-life heroes.
All winter, I'd comb through the daily Sun-Telegraph, Post-Gazette and Press sports pages for stories by Chilly Doyle, Al Abrams and Chet Smith about Pirate heroes, hopefuls and has-beens. I'd also read the weekly Sporting News for Fred Leib's Hot Stove League column and his occasional obituaries of baseball legends. Mr. Leib, one of the first journalists inducted into the writers' wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame, wrote so many obituaries over the years that he became known as baseball's undertaker.
On a frigid winter's Saturday, I'd sit on top of the heated oven of our kitchen stove and listen to Bill Stern's radio series and his stirring voice telling me to get ready for stories that were "some legend, some hearsay, but all so interesting that we'd like to pass them along to you." Never one to let the truth stand in the way of a good story, Stern once told the apocryphal deathbed tale of Abraham Lincoln, who, with his final breath, told Abner Doubleday to save the Republic by spreading baseball throughout the land.
On weeknights, I'd warm myself in the South Side branch of the Carnegie library, looking through its treasure trove of baseball books, while I waited for the Ormsby recreation center around the corner to open its doors at 7 p.m. I'd kill time by reading the baseball novels of Clair Bee and John Tunis.
Ormsby, with its undersized basketball court and its claustrophobic basement game room, was an evening refuge during those snowy Pittsburgh winters of my childhood. It had basketball leagues, hosted park district tournaments and was the home court for nearby St. Casimir's.
I'd sometimes watch the league games or play pick-up basketball or horse on open court nights, but I spent the better part of my evenings downstairs in the game room.
The ping-pong and carom tables were popular, but I always headed for the Cadaco All-Star Baseball board game. While snow was falling on Ormsby's bandbox of a ball field, I sat down next to a hissing radiator and spun a metal arrow around a circular disc to see if Babe Ruth or Ralph Kiner was going to strike out or hit a home run.
Generations before the popularity of fantasy baseball leagues, a Yale baseball coach used statistics to create a board game made up of a spinner and circular player discs for both all-time greats and current all-stars.
Nowadays electronic games can simulate a baseball game, but all we had to bring a board game to life were our memories of the colorful radio broadcasts of Rosey Rowswell. Our Rosey had to be colorful because he didn't travel with the team and had to re-create away games in a local studio from ticker-tape transmissions.
With the sound of the ticker tape in the background, Rowswell would bring a Pirates road game to life with expressions, like "it's the old dipsy doodle" when an enemy batter struck out or "there goes a doozey marooney" when a Pirate got an extra base hit.
Rowswell's best moment came when a Pirate hit a home run. The ticker tape may have read, "Ralph Kiner... home run" but Rosey would shout, "Get up stairs and raise the window, Aunt Minnie, here she comes." We'd hear the clomp, clomp, clomp of Aunt Minnie's footsteps, then the loud crash of breaking glass because Aunt Minnie "never made it. She never made it."
These days when newspaper sports pages sometimes read like the business or gossip section, the radio belongs to political demagogues and a baseball best-seller, recently made into a Brad Pitt movie, is called "Moneyball," I'm glad I have my "Rosey" memories of the Hot Stove League to help me through the dark days of winter.
First Published December 31, 2011 12:00 am
