The Stickpin

I often write about the Hall of Fame. Here is a story that appeared in FAN Magazine #7. It was my introduction to Mike Schacht, who had advertised in the SABR Bulletin for baseball stories with a father/son theme.

When my father died, I was the one who went through his things for Mom, to sort out anything valuable from the junk. I was 26 and had performed this task before, the “archeologist” sifting layers of someone else’s past, wondering about the meaning of the stuff collected over a lifetime. Poems and photos and rings and holy cards from the funerals of friends and relatives.

In my father’s stockpile I found an old stickpin, something I’d seen years before. It had been his father’s pin, perhaps excavated from my grandfather’s belongings after he had died.

My paternal grandfather, Mike Carney, was an Irish cop in Pittsburgh at the turn of the century. He died before I was born, but I was told that he was the first in my family to get hooked on baseball and the Pirates. Baseball was an occupational hazard for him, a rough sport played by rough men cheered on by rough fans. Policemen were admitted to games free if they were in uniform, to help keep order in the grandstand. Mike Carney took in as many games as he could.

No doubt he was on hand in 1909, when Forbes Field opened. It was built in just four months. Sure, steel was handy, but I like to think that the construction crews were motivated like the cathedral builders of Europe, by a sort of religious fervor — the fervor of a city in a pennant race. The Pirates, descendants of the Alleghenies, had been there a few times before, winning in 1901, ‘02 and ‘03. But in 1909 they won 110 games, led by Honus Wagner and Fred Clarke and Howie Camnitz and a kid pitcher with a great nickname, Babe Adams.

Forbes Field opened on June 30. The Pirates lost that day, but Mike Carney came home with a souvenir metal stickpin. It was a few inches long, a tiny catcher’s mitt with a baseball inside, engraved with the historic date. He kept the pin until he died, and so had my father.

Perhaps the pin was worn on those special days, when my grandfather took his whole family to the old ball game, dressed in their Sunday best (because they rode the streetcar) to see Pie Traynor and the Waner brothers. I imagine my father as a teen, and his brother and sister being tremendously excited on those trips to Oakland, while Gram Carney packed a lunch and went along for the ride and understood none of it.

When the pin became mine in 1972, it brought back memories of the Mike Carney who was my father. Games of catch, or hitting fungoes on warm summer evenings at North Park. Dinnertime debates over whether Dick Stuart was the new Ralph Kiner. Dozens of trips to Forbes Field with my family, with lunches packed by my Mom, to eat between the games of a Sunday doubleheader. Always taking along pencils to keep score, while we rooted for the Bucs.

Memories of 1960. That summer I was a teenager, and when the Pirates charged to their first pennant in 33 years, then beat the unbeatable Yankees (on Maz’ homer), it was a climax of not just a season, but of years of rooting.

When the Pirates won again in 1971, my father and I got to go to the only World Series game either of us would ever see. I was working in Cleveland, but my father got two tickets to the first night game in Series history, so I could drive home, root the Bucs to a win with my Dad, and be back at work next day.

The pin also reminded me of hundreds of letters that I exchanged with my father after I left Pittsburgh for college. Baseball was a frequent topic. I was out of range for KDKA and Bob Prince, but my Dad wove the radio play-by-play into his letters, digressing for a triple by “Cleem” (his shorthand for Clemente) or noting Prince’s colorful images (”… that was as close as fuzz on a tick’s ear.”) His letters came several times a week, sometimes twenty or fifty pages long, in his distinctive, effortless longhand. In between his predictions, in between hits and runs, I got to know my father.

So when I found that stickpin from the 1909 birthday of Forbes Field, I decided that it belonged in Cooperstown, donated in my father’s name. He had been a Hall of Fame fan.

I moved to upstate New York a few years later and started my own family. My wife will never be a baseball fan, but tolerance is one of her many other virtues. My kids are learning and liking the game, and we root for our local Blue Sox.

When the Pirates won the pennant in 1990, I was a teenager all over again, rooting as hard as I ever did in 1960. But that season will also be memorable for an event on a rainy June morning.

My sister was visiting from Pittsburgh, and together with my son, we drove off to Cooperstown, to see if we could find a certain stickpin in the Baseball Hall of Fame. I found it first, in a wall display commemorating Forbes Field. For us, it recalled so much more than a ball park.

My father is buried in Pittsburgh, where family visit with flowers and remember him. I visit Cooperstown and do the same.

[Just one more note: the stickpin from 1909 is not always on display at the Hall of Fame, it is one of hundreds or thousands of artifacts that rotate between the galleries and the “attic.”]

The above is an excerpt from Issue #437 of Gene’s Notes From the Shadows of Cooperstown. To read the rest of the issue (or past issues), click here.