50 Years!

Yesterday, September 9th, was the 50th Anniversary of the first baseball game I ever went to.  We had just moved into a new house in the Bay Area and my grandparents and my uncle had come out to visit from Ohio.  The Reds were in town to play the Giants and my father, my grandfather, my uncle and I all went to the game.  It was a Saturday afternoon game that the Giants won 2-1 on a walk off two run home run by Dave Kingman.

To be completely honest, I remember almost nothing about the game.  Really the only thing I remember is a foul ball landing near us that my uncle failed to corral.  (My uncle - who is a big baseball fan, especially for the Reds - says he's never gotten close to catching a foul ball at an MLB game ever since.)  And it's not like this game was a huge catalyst in my love of baseball - it wasn't until 1975 that I started following the game and collecting baseball cards.  But it was my first game.

In looking at the box score for the game, I'm struck by a number of things.  The big thing is how low the attendance was - 6,199!  I don't think I've ever been to another MLB game with attendance that low and I've been to many minor league games that had more people.  I was disappointed that neither Willie May nor Willie McCovey was in the lineup that day - Mays had been traded to the Mets four months earlier and McCovey was suffering through an injury plagued year.  On the other hand, I saw Hall Of Famers Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan and Tony Perez along with Pete Rose and Bobby Bonds.  

If you had told me that there'd have been one player from that game who went on to play in Japan, I'd have guessed it was Bernie Williams, an outfielder who spent seven years in the Giants organization and one with the Padres before joining the Hankyu Braves for six years starting in 1975.  But, no, Williams didn't play in the game (although he was on the roster at the time because he pinch hit in one of the games of a double header the next day.  The one player from this game who eventually played in Japan was Reds center fielder Bobby Tolan, who spent 1978 as a member of the Nankai Hawks, hitting .267 in 98 games.  There are no known Japanese cards of Tolan - Calbee pretty much only did Central League players that year - but Tolan's photo appears in the "Americans In Japan" section of many of the editions of the late Wayne Graczyk's annual "Japan Pro Baseball Fan Handbook".  I scanned this photo from the 1988 edition:

Oh, and how did I celebrate this anniversary?  At a baseball game, of course: