By Michael Kaufman 

So the Democrats have retained the majority in the United States Senate. For this they owe thanks to the Tea Party for offering tomato cans as opponents of Harry Reid in Nevada, Richard Blumenthal in Connecticut, and Chris Coons in Delaware. Each of those three would have been certain losers to any traditional run-of-the-mill Republican candidate. Too bad they didn’t have anyone similarly wacko running against Russ Feingold in Wisconsin. His defeat made it a particularly sad night for progressives around the country.

Locally there were few surprises.  I watched Andrew Cuomo’s optimistic victory speech with a healthy dose of skepticism.  He spoke proudly of the New Yorkers who elected him as being united as one, “rich and poor, black and brown and white, upstate and downstate, gay and straight,” blah, blah, blah.  I guess he couldn’t say, “Thanks for voting for me instead of that scary dude Paladino.” He sounded a lot like his father Mario, the former governor, who could stir the emotions with that sort of inspirational rhetoric appealing to “our better instincts” even if we knew it was just rhetoric. Coming from Andrew, about to inherit the titular leadership of the sewage in Albany amidst a tanking economy, it just sounded hollow.

I didn’t believe Andrew when he said that everywhere he went as he campaigned around the state people told him how much they missed his father. It was a nice thing for a son to say, especially with his mom and dad standing on the dais with him, but still kind of hard to swallow. The elder Cuomo served as governor from 1982 to 1994 and was not terribly popular by the time he left office. Besides, folks have a lot of other things on their mind today….missing Mario Cuomo isn’t likely to be one of them. But maybe they were being polite. I could see saying something like that to Andrew if he shook my hand and asked for my vote. Telling him I miss his father would be a lot kinder than telling him I think he is the lesser evil.

I hadn’t seen Mario in a while. He seems to have shrunk into a little old man but he stood beaming on the dais Tuesday night, as if watching his son accepting a trophy as most valuable player in Little League.  It struck me that if Mario had pursued his youthful dream of being a ballplayer instead of studying law and entering politics, Andrew might never have run for governor either. And Mario was a darn good ballplayer, as I learned while doing research for an article on Billy Loes. About 60 years ago he even had a tryout with the Pittsburgh Pirates…. although he preferred basketball to baseball.

“I loved baseball almost as much as I loved basketball, but basketball’s better because you’re always in a crowd in the center of the court,” he said in a 2005 interview with a Catholic magazine. “In baseball I was a center fielder, and it gets very lonely out in center field.

“I was a good ballplayer. The scout who scouted me saw me play against Whitey Ford (who went on to a Hall of Fame career as a left-handed pitcher for the Yankees) as a member of the Bridgeport Bees.  I was playing under the name of ‘Connie Cutts’ because I was still at the time in high school. The scout said: ‘Gee, you looked comfortable out there.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but I played against him three years ago.’  I also played against Billy Loes. Billy Loes was with the Astoria Cubs and Whitey Ford was with the 34th Avenue Boys.”

“Anyway, I had some very good weeks, and the scout said: ‘Would you like to play major-league ball?’ He offered me $2,000 for signing a contract. I got $2,000 for signing, and around then, Mickey Mantle got $1,100 from another scout.

“I went home and told my father in the grocery store. My father said: ‘Why is this good?’ I said: ‘Two thousand dollars is why.’ My father said: ‘I’ll ask some of the customers.’ The people he asked said: ‘Better he should go to college.’ I told the scout that, and he had Branch Rickey (the Pirates executive who a couple of years earlier, at Brooklyn, with Jackie Robinson, had shattered baseball’s color line) write a letter to my father, who of course couldn’t read it. The letter congratulated my father for realizing that my going to college was the right thing to do.

“The contract said I wouldn’t have to show up until after graduation from college, but I went down for two weeks (tryout) in Georgia until the end of August. I got injured, hurt my wrist running up against a wall, and after that I got hit in the head. There were no MRI’s or CAT scans in those days, but the X-ray showed I had a hematoma, a blood clot on the brain. The Pittsburgh doctors said: ‘We want to open you up, take a look.’ I said: ‘I feel fine.’ Just the idea of it….well, that was the end of my baseball career.”

Cuomo’s interviewer was Jerry Tallmer, former entertainment editor at the New York Post. When Cuomo told him how he felt after losing his job as governor, Tallmer said he could relate.  “I know something about that kind of thing,” he told Cuomo.  “Rupert Murdoch fired all of us, 287 of us, including some who’d been there for a lot of years, when he broke the union – the Newspaper Guild local – at the Post.” Newspaper work hasn’t gotten any better since.

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.

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