Who here saw the Seattle Pilots play baseball?

I was discussing Ray Oyler’s career earlier today, as one does (Oyler has the lowest career batting average of any post-1900 player with at least 1,000 at bats), and this naturally reminded me of his appearance in Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, where his nickname of “Oil Can Harry” was explained as a consequence of “always looking like he had just changed a set of rings.” BTW he’s 31 in the above photo, once again illustrating the perennially recurring topic of how much older people used to look. In Oyler’s case I suspect smoking was playing a role, as he died of a heart attack at the age of 43 in 1981. It’s remarkable how when America was healthy middle aged men were dropping dead from heart attacks pretty much on the regular but that’s a topic for another post.

Anyway. . . I have tremendous affection for Ball Four, which I read at the age of 11 after picking it up from a paperback rack in a gas station when my family — my parents and five kids at the time — drove from Ann Arbor to Yellowstone in a 1970 Chevy Impala. We became a party of nine after picking up my mother’s parents in Jackson Hole and driving to Denver. Speaking of Mexicans, we were staying at the Old Faithful Inn and one night as an economizing measure our parents decided to make sandwiches in our rooms (I think we had two) rather than eating in the hotel restaurant. My mother told the older boys — I was the oldest — to stand by the door when the bellboy brought a bucket of ice. We had no idea why she asked us to do this of course so the bellboy (a college student probably) walked right in with the ice. My mother was pretty mad at us, because this gringo was going to think we were a bunch of Mexicans eating sandwiches because we didn’t want to pay for dinner in the hotel restaurant. Even at that tender age I remember thinking that this was a precise description of the situation, but of course I didn’t understand many other aspects of it, such as the fact that my mother came to the USA for the first time in 1949 at the age of 18 to go to the University of Texas, and was shocked to her core by the sight of “white” and “colored” drinking fountains.

Where was I? Ah yes, Ball Four. What a great book that is if you haven’t read it, especially if you’re a baseball fan or a fan of professional sports in general, but even if you’re not, because it’s a fascinating glimpse of one slice of the sociology of American life in 1969, plus Bouton was a really smart and observant guy, and a very good writer as well, although a lot of the latter may have been his editor Leonard Schecter.

Which brings me back to the question which inspired this post, to wit did any LGMer actually see the Seattle Pilots play, either in person or on TV? I checked and they were on the NBC Game of the Week twice during their lone season of existence. Absurdly they never managed to sell their local TV broadcast rights to anybody so they weren’t on local TV, which even as long ago as 1969 was a catastrophically bad thing from the viewpoint of the dollars and the cents, which explains how they got sold after the season for $10 million (!) to Bud Selig in Milwaukee. That’s about $70 million in today’s money but still.

In one of those circle of life things, the only other MLB team to play only one season in their original city were the original Milwaukee Brewers, who were one of the first eight American League teams in 1901, but high-tailed it to St. Louis after the season, where they became the Browns. The Browns eventually became the Baltimore Orioles, which is a story the details of which are complicated and rambling.

To my son Homer… (Homer says Woohoo!) …and his entire family… (D’oh!) …I leave these: a box of mint-condition 1918 liberty-head silver dollars. You see, back in those days, rich men would ride around in Zeppelins, dropping coins on people, and one day I seen J.D. Rockefeller flying by. So I run of the house with a big washtub and… hey! Where are you going? (in the car) Anyway, about my washtub. I’d just used it that morning to wash my turkey, which in those days was known as… (cut to mall) …a walking-bird. We’d always have walking-bird on Thanksgiving, with all the trimmings: cranberries, injun eyes, yams stuffed with gunpowder. Then we’d all watch football, which in those days was called baseball…