Baseball Season by Janice Fried:
I am a Yankee fan and it isn’t just because I was born in The Bronx. I give thanks to my dear friend Allen Gimbel for this. Neither my parents, nor my brother had any interest whatsoever in sports so when I suddenly took to reading the sports section and watching the games, they didn’t quite know what to make of that.
My mother grew up in The Bronx with three athletic brothers who would listen avidly to the games on the radio. You can imagine how she felt having her daughter suddenly listening to “that drone”, which was how she referred to baseball broadcasts. Phil Rizzuto? A drone?
My dad grew up in The Bronx too but he was a NY Giants fan mainly because his older brother was. As he got older, he lost all interest in the game.
But Baseball just took hold of my heart.
I began to read baseball books. I was reading “Eight Men Out” by Eliot Asinof when I met my husband who was reading “Ball Four” by Jim Bouton at the time. It was destiny.
For a while, I became obsessed with the story of the 1919 Black Sox scandal and read every book I could find, fact or fiction, about Shoeless Joe Jackson, including the wonderful novel called “Shoeless Joe” by W.P. Kinsella which the movie “Field of Dreams” was based on.
This image, which was done a number of years ago, was in honor of poor old Joe.
