By Bob Gaydos

My glove from 1952.

    Having been a sports editor in my career (two years with The Delphian at Adelphi College and a couple of years with The Sun-Bulletin in Binghamton), it was common practice for me to start the day with the back pages of the newspaper — the sports pages — especially when I was feeling pressured by the other news of the day.

    Like today.

    Today, many of those newspaper pages have disappeared, replaced by a hodgepodge of news sources on social media. You have to be careful whom you believe, what’s true and what’s not.

    Well, yesterday on Facebook I came across a sports story that made my day. For the first time ever, which is to say the 75 years it has existed, the Bayonne Little League all-star team is going to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa.

    Damn!

    That’s big!

     If you haven’t guessed, I’m a Bayonne native. I played as an 11-year-old in what I believe was the second year of the league’s existence. Center field. We actually won the city championship thanks in large part to a talented 12-year-old, Luke Tansey.

    As an adult, I got to coach two sons’ Little League teams in Wallkill, N.Y. in the next century.  Even got to make sure my youngest, Zack, got the number of his favorite player: 2. Right, Derek Jeter.

     The point I’m taking my time getting to is that, among American institutions, Little League has lasted and managed to stay pretty much the same for a long time. I think that’s because, whatever’s going on in the world, it brings a community together. In Bayonne or Wallkill or wherever.

    The response I’ve seen on social media about the Bayonne team is proof of that. The whole city seems to be buoyed and lifted by the accomplishments of their young athletes. Busloads made the trip to Williamsport, just as I’m sure busloads did the same for other teams.

    But this is Bayonne, where I once broke up a no-hitter with a triple down the right field line in the new First Street stadium in the shadow of the Bayonne Bridge and made a lucky, home run-robbing catch against the fence in the 11th Street ballpark that actually snared a headline in the next day’s Bayonne Times.

    Little League is a collection of moments for everyone who plays or coaches or has a child playing. It is community at its best, at its basic level, whatever else may be going on.

    In many ways, Bayonne has already won. The players, coaches, parents, everyone involved in the league, the whole city has been given a healthy dose of hope and pride in accomplishment. You can never have too much of that.

     Bayonne is in the Little League World Series! That’s legitimate front page news in the peninsula city. But what the heck, as long as you’re in Williamsport, why not win the whole darn thing? What a 75th birthday present!

     Go, Bayonne!

By Bob Gaydos

My Little League mitt, circa 1951. RJ Photography

Ruminations of an old sports editor:

     The daily grind of following and writing about the Trump/MAGA assault on our democracy can be tiring, so I sometimes turn to sports in search of a break.

      For example, former major league ball player Art Shallock celebrated his 100th birthday April 27. The one-time Yankee pitcher is said to be the oldest living major leaguer.

   Perhaps his most notable moment in baseball history is when he replaced 19-year-old Mickey Mantle on the Yankees roster when the future Hall of Famer was optioned to Triple A for more seasoning. That was in 1951, which is the same era in which I used the glove pictured with this column to play center field for my Little League team. So I’m an old sports editor in both senses of the word.

      Shallock won a few games with the Yankees, collected three World Series rings and never made more than $5,000 a year, but he seems content with his journey.

       Less content recently is Yankees manager Aaron Boone. It’s not enough that he’s going through a divorce, but he recently was ejected from a game because a fan sitting directly behind Boone and the Yankees dugout was harassing the umpire.

     Even when everyone pointed out that Boone hadn’t said anything, the ump still tossed him, saying, “The manager’s in charge.”

      The umpire, Hunter Wendelstedt, stuck by his guns and his ego and the Yankees appealed and, surprise! MLB actually said the ump was wrong and will be penalized. 

       I’d say a couple of weeks without pay for this dumb stunt and a refresher umpire school. The device that charts balls and strikes said he also missed 68 percent of the strikes thrown in the game. A few other umps could use refreshing, too. Robots are looming.

      In another recent case of a major sports entity surprisingly admitting it messed up, the NCAA gave Reggie Bush his 2005 Heisman Trophy back, conceding that times had changed.

        Indeed.

        Bush was given then denied the award for his efforts as a running back at Southern California because his family had benefited financially (trips and gifts) from his success, a big no-no for the world of amateur college athletes. 

         Well, that was then and now is apparently now and today’s college athletes receive lucrative payments for use of their likenesses because colleges have made millions from their efforts, much of which also went to coaches, but not to the athletes (who were supposedly getting a free college education.)

      So, traditional college conferences are now scrambled to get richer TV contracts, coaches and colleges are making millions, college athletes now go where they can get the best contract, the NFL avoids establishing a farm system like baseball did and Reggie Bush is finally getting his Heisman.

     Further signaling the steady demise of amateur athletics, medal winners are apparently going to be awarded cash prizes for the first time at the Paris Olympics this summer. Ain’t capitalism great?

     Oh, and lest we forget, you can now legally bet on pretty much anything in any sport, while the game is in progress, in (sort of) full confidence the athletes aren’t doing the same. 

    I patched together this sports report mostly from social media because, if you haven’t noticed, traditional — to wit, newspaper and magazine — sports reporting has been replaced by sports personalities with opinions “reporting” on TV. 

       Sports Illustrated, having laid off most of its staff, was recently saved from oblivion when some company said it would keep the onetime sports standard bearer going as a monthly, not a weekly. 

      No thanks. Not when the magazine has lost its immediacy and stable of top sports writers that once included Frank DeFord and the incomparable Jim Murray.

      Plus, The New York Times actually eliminated its sports staff, reassigning reporters to who knows what and hiring something called The Athletic, whose writers apparently know a lot about WAR and leaving the park velocity in baseball and whatever conspiracy theory potential Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers is currently spreading.

     Red Smith they are not (when he was writing about sports with The New York Herald Tribune as well as The Times.)

      Nor are they Al DeSantis in Middletown, N.Y., Joe Gross in Annapolis, Md., John Fox and, well, me in Binghamton, N.Y., or Dick Young, Jimmy Cannon and Mike Lupica in New York City or, for that matter, the Newark Star-Ledger’s Jerry Izenberg, who once lent me his typewriter at Yankee Stadium so I could write a piece about Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer, whom I had just interviewed while he was sitting in a whirlpool bath. Yes, naked.

      Guess those were the good, old days.

PS: Thanks to just-retired John Sterling, longtime Yankee radio broadcaster, for all those marvelous home run calls. “It is high! It is far! It is gone!“ A sterling effort.

rjgaydos@gmail.com

By Bob Gaydos

Derek Jeter

Confession: As coach of my son’s Little League team, I used my responsibility as uniform distributor to make sure that Zack got the number he wanted. Number 2.

Yeah, it’s the number probably 90 percent of the kids wanted, but I never felt guilty about it because: (a) the smaller kids got the lower numbers and Zack had a delayed growth spurt and (b) c’mon, what dad wouldn’t do what he could to help his son got Derek Jeter’s uniform number?

For those who may have been on another planet, Jeter is retiring after 20 years as a New York Yankee. This is his last week as a major league baseball player. The season has been a continuous homage to his career and, more significantly, to the professional, dignified manner in which he has lived it. Number 2 has been Number 1 when it comes to athletes as role models.

Some people (not Yankee fans) have complained that the Jeter Love Train has been a bit much this year, with tributes paid to him in every ballpark the Yankees visited. I can understand that, but when the commissioner of the league says he’s proud that Jeter has been the face of baseball for a decade or more, I think it’s important. There has been no hint of scandal attached to Jeter for his 20 years with the Yankees. No steroids. No arrests. No trash-talking or posturing.

And, by the way, only five players (Pete Rose, Ty Cobb, Hank Aaron, Stan Musial, Tris Speaker) have compiled more hits (3,460 and counting) than Jeter. He happens to have been a hell of a ballplayer. Clutch hits. Clutch plays in the field. Mr. November. The Captain. Five World Series rings. Mr. Consistency. More games at shortstop than anyone else. Never played another position. He is a guaranteed first-ballot Hall of Famer and any baseball writer who doesn’t vote for him should have his voting privileges rescinded.

Jeter managed all this in the toughest market and media center in baseball — New York City. Funny thing though, while he qualifies as an all-time great and conceding that playing with the Yankees has helped burnish his image, Jeter doesn’t even make the list of top five Yankees of all time in my opinion. That would be Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra. Still, being number six to that group is no small thing and it’s hard to imagine anyone breaking in to that Top Six club.

Mostly, when I look at Jeter’s career, I’m impressed with how quietly he went about his job, how almost routine he made the anything-but-routine appear. I don’t know how humble one can be when millions of fans shower you with praise every day for a year, when TV commercials extol your nice-guyness. Of course, Jeter has made hundreds of millions of dollars from baseball and those product endorsements. But that’s the world we live in and he has managed to carry it off with a sense of grace and dignity. You don’t hear those words used much around athletes these days.

Not to belabor what is really only repetitive, I felt an obligation to publicly thank Derek Jeter for showing youngsters how to go about whatever they do in life with a sense of purpose, responsibility, dedication, modesty, focus and respect for others. For showing them how to be grateful for the gifts they may have. That he also played baseball much better than most others was icing on the cake.

So here’s to Number 2. That number will be retired by the Yankees this year, which means a new generation of young ballplayers will have to find another number to demand. And a new group of dads will try to make it happen.