When I wrote last month (https://www.billjamesonline.com/articles/?AuthorId=23 ) about Roberto Clemente hitting the only walk-off grand-slam inside-the-park home run in major league history, it made me think a little bit about what memory feels like. It was a strange little piece, an experiment prompted by my reading an online article in the hellish waiting area at LaGuardia (it’s not hell, just hell-ish) and wondering if I could possibly get something, anything, written and posted in the 15 or 20 minutes available before they call my row number. Normally, I put a couple of days into planning, researching, writing, rewriting, rethinking, revising a piece before I post it, so  I was basically daring myself to see if I could get anything remotely readable online before I had to clap my laptop shut. Maybe that haste showed. If so, sorry.

But the thing I realized, once I figured out that Clemente’s W-O G-S I-T-P HR just happened to occur sixty-one years to the day before I read about it, was how long ago sixty-one years was—or rather how long ago it WASN’T.  I remember Clemente very well—I saw most of his career, though not the first few years of it (I turned 3 about a month before the day described in the article) but I remember vividly seeing Clemente as a young outfielder. He had a charismatic, almost royal, presence, especially in those days when Batting Average was still king and OBP wasn’t even a bump in its mama’s belly. For some reason, I remember a black-and-white photo of him down on one knee in the outfield: I’ve never quite seen any other player in quite that pose. It reminded me of an Irish Setter pointing at a bird, Clemente’s angular body down on one knee. What was he doing? Making a catch? Falling after making a throw? Anyway, 61 years isn’t that long a time to remember—I’m sure many of us have memories that go back 61 years—I know I have one or two, and I’m far from the oldest guy on this site. The first baseball game I ever saw was in late 1961, though, and if my logic holds up, that means that there were guys sitting in Yankee Stadium with me that day who remembered very well games before the American League began, and no doubt some even older guys who remembered a lot further back than that.

That strikes me as remarkable, somehow, that when I was very young I knew men who remembered parts of the nineteenth century but regarded those memories as nothing special. The nineteenth century now seems to me like a time just after dinosaurs walked the earth, but 1956? I can describe the sailor cap my dad wore that summer, or the precise shade of red my infant brother’s face turned when he cried that year. I actually have one very clear memory of my brother’s birth in 1955, and I find that 62-year-old memory fairly amazing in itself, for the clarity of it and the certainty of the scene I’m able to recall. But now I’m questioning my own sense of certainty.

I used to live next door, in upstate New York, to an older guy who remembered having seen Babe Ruth play, which struck me as amazing, but really when you come to think about it, Babe Ruth didn’t even die until 1948, and he died very young, 53 or 54, so of course I had neighbors who remembered him playing outfield for the Yankees—I just didn’t fully realize how close the past is to me, is to us all, on a personal level.  F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, and I was able to interview in 2013 the woman who had been his secretary the last few years of his life, and to talk to Budd Schulberg, who had been Fitzgerald’s collaborator on a movie script in 1937. Both of these nonagenarians had sharp memories of Fitzgerald, and spoke with perfect lucidity as they told me about his daily routines. (They were also slightly annoyed, I think, that they were in such demand to discuss events of 70 years earlier, and that so few of the interviews concerned the lives they lived in those 70 busy years.) Somehow, I’d assumed that when I got to the point when I had memories that were over 60 years old, my mind would have frazzled and those memories would be as valuable and as tangible as dandelion spores in a strong breeze.

When I think of all the things I’ve wasted in my lifetime, and that’s a lot of waste, one of the biggest is not sitting down and taking notes when older people were willing to tell me about their lives. My dad served in Europe and in the Pacific during World War II—I can still feel my eyes rolling whenever he was willing to talk about his experiences during the war. He didn’t like talking about the war at all, but sometimes he would be reminded of something that happened to him as a young soldier. I, however, couldn’t wait to change the subject into one more relevant to me, not understanding that knowing about my dad’s life would be far more valuable than some pop song or TV show. Now that resource is long gone, forever lost, and I marvel at my own self-centeredness in having been unable to recognize the value in older people’s memories.

The images that keep replaying on a loop inside my cranium, even those over a half-century old, maybe especially those, are remarkably vivid. My brother likes to tease me about remembering useless stuff about baseball in the 1960s, and I do remember baseball from that decade far more sharply than I remember any other decade, partly because I didn’t have that much to focus on at the time other than baseball, and partly because I have reinforced those initial impressions with much re-thinking and research into the period since then.  Truth to tell, I probably watch 10%, maybe 5%, maybe less, of baseball games today than I watched when I had nothing better to fill my days and nights with, or so I thought. I used to know the names of every utility infielder in MLB, and I could tell you some anecdote or oddball stat or association with every player in baseball, often many anecdotes and stats and stories about the most ephemeral players in the game, but now, honestly, I see the names of starting players, even MVP candidates, and I don’t know a damned thing about them—what’s worse, I’m not alarmed at my ignorance; in the same way I used to dismiss everything that happened before I was born with a casual "Well, that was before my time," I often view things that are happening in MLB right now with "Well, that was after my time."

I think of myself as a curious person, but my curiosity now extends to areas beyond contemporary baseball—I’m looking backwards to understand more about baseball history, but I’m also interested in expanding my knowledge in other fields entirely, beyond baseball, beyond sports, beyond my professional areas of expertise, which has been focused narrowly on certain American writers of the 20^th century. Bill likes to rail against expertise, but I (and he) have made decent livings out of being experts in our specialized areas, as have most of you, I’m quite sure—we tend to know a lot about a very limited sphere of information (what Isaiah Berlin liked to call "Hedgehogs," as opposed to Foxes, who according  to Berlin know a little bit about a lot of things), and that to me seems a very useful organization of information: I want my plumber to be extremely knowledgeable about pipes and sewer lines and such, and I don’t really care if he’s also an opera aficionado or a master chef in his spare time, while I’m pretty sure my students want me to be extremely reliable on Fitzgerald’s impressions of the 1926 silent film version of The Great Gatsby and couldn’t care less about my career as a bartender or a rock guitarist (both of which I abandoned early on, for a stunning lack of aptitude). I’ve always admired people who are expert in several divergent areas—the incongruity is always a marvel: while I admire Bill no end for his depth of understanding about baseball, for example, it pleases me even more that he is also knowledgeable about American crime stories or ancient Rome, so I’m trying to widen my own areas of expertise now that I have a little time in which to do so.

As I try to branch out, however, I’m always reminded of all the chances I had, and lost, to explore paths I walked right by earlier, not thinking to take a detour from my chosen route. (Frost’s road not taken, his point being, I think, that some roads are necessarily not taken, not that he made an especially poor call with that one road.) While it’s not a lie to say that I saw a lot of great ballplayers in my youth, a lot of those memories are only technically within my memory banks. I can produce ticket stubs as evidence that I saw Brooks Robinson play third base, or Mazeroski playing second base, but I don’t know that on the days I saw these things my attention was focused on Robinson or Mazeroski. It’s often fun, when I take some neophyte to see a game these days, I try to point out the one or two players who might someday make a good story that you saw them play a game. I took my girlfriend (not a baseball fan) to see the Mets play the Brewers in early June this year, and I asked her to pay special attention to Michael Conforto, more by way of default than anything else. It’s just impossible to pay your full attention to every player on the field at once, and it’s more fun to concentrate on just a few, if you have any idea which ones are worth your effort.  I think I’m compensating for my own failure to strategize along these lines when I went to games as a neophyte, or even as a hardcore baseball nut.

I’ve inadvertently made some odd experiments in memory in the past few years, especially as concerning my friend Joe. You may recall that Joe, who celebrated his 95^th birthday this spring, had very briefly broken bread with Ted Williams in the service during The War, and had baseball stories to share with me dating back to the early 1930s. The funny part is that I’m surprised, and Joe is embarrassed, to find out how often Joe’s sharp, vivid memories of baseball games hang a bit off-plumb. Sometimes a little off, other times a lot, but nearly always contradicting facts that Joe confidently asserts as 100% accurate. As I said, I’ve grown suspicious of "certainty" above all else.

A Giants’ fan (NY Giants—Joe doesn’t care for the SF johnny-lemaster-come-latelys), he told me a few weeks back about a masterful shutout (27 up, 27 down, one baserunner erased on a DP) that Carl Hubbell pitched against the Dodgers in Ebbets Field in the front end of a July 4^th doubleheader, or possibly a Labor Day doubleheader, as his career was closing down, in either 1940 or 1941. Joe told me the score of the game, the score of the second game, the batting star of both games (a backup catcher named Harry Danning), and several other details. He told me where he sat in Ebbets Field, as he painted a lively picture of a baseball game he’d seen over 75 years ago. I marveled at his total recall.

It will not surprise you that I could find no such game on Retrosheet. I looked for July 4^th and Labor Day doubleheaders for 1940 and 1941, and then for 1942, and then for 1939 and 1943. (Hubbell hung on for quite a while as what we would now call a back-of-the-rotation guy.) Nothing even close. Which was too bad because I’d hoped to surprise Joe with the boxscore of the game he had so richly described to me. When I reported my findings, Joe still insisted that I had to have overlooked something, so certain was he of what he’d seen (and had been remembering so fondly all these years).

Turned out-- thanks to Joe remembering wearing a jacket to the game, which he says he wouldn’t have worn to a July 4^th or early September game--to have been a Memorial Day double-bill. Joe got the score wrong (but fairly close) and Danning did have a good day (3 for 11, with 2 doubles and 3 RBIS), but Joe had been mis-telling this story in detail for several decades now, positive he was remembering correctly every last detail: https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BRO/BRO194005301.shtml is the box score.

He was even more positive about one detail in the only World Series game he ever saw, the final game of the 1942 Series between the Cardinals and the Yankees, in which he described for me his pleasure at seeing Joe DiMaggio get thrown out stealing second base. We had discussed earlier our annoyance at Yankee fans’ insistence that DiMaggio literally never made a base-running error nor threw to the wrong base—I told Joe of the sabermetric view that every Attempted Stolen Base on DiMaggio’s stat line plainly showed a record of the only type of base-running error we (sometimes) kept a record of, so certainly there were instances of DiMaggio misjudging his jump, an outfielder’s arm, etc. on other types of running plays that we don’t track records of so readily. More significantly, and this applies equally to  baserunning errors and errors throwing to the wrong base, a low error-rate (as opposed to a zero error-rate) is actually a sign of excellence: we all make mistakes, and the only sure way to guarantee against errors is never to try. An outfielder who never tries to nab the lead runner while the trail runner advances an extra base is simply playing over-cautious baseball, conceding all sorts of extra bases routinely to runners.  Sometimes, the smart play is to throw the ball with only a 75% or 90% chance at nabbing him—naturally this means that 25% of the time, or 10%, both runners will be safe, but there is obviously some figure  (well below 90%) that justifies throwing to the lead runner’s target, even though throwing to the trail runner’s target would cause that trail runner to hold.

What I believe, and what Joe believes, is that DiMaggio was a superb baserunner and thrower who probably did make a few errors in judgment per season on the bases and in the outfield, as superb runners and throwers will, but Yankee fans and Yankee announcers and other idiots just enjoyed bugging us by proclaiming a zero-error rate for DiMaggio, so it pleased us both that Joe remembered so well Dimaggio getting thrown out to snuff a rally in the 1942 World Series’ deciding game. "And it was in the ninth inning, too," Joe added. "The Yankees had DiMaggio on base, they were only behind by two runs, and he ruined everything by getting thrown out trying to steal second base. All by himself, he turned a promising rally into a no-one-on, two-outs situation. I can see him, trotting back to the dugout, head down. The Series ended a minute later.  It was beautiful."

Problem was (you’re way ahead of me), that the 1942 Series stat line showed DiMaggio (and the Yankees for that matter) with 0 caught-stealings, and when I checked out the play-by-play for the final game, I found that DiMaggio didn’t get up to bat in the ninth inning.

When I reported this to Joe, for a second I thought he was angry with me, as if I were lying to him or teasing him. "I can see it—" he started to say.

"DiMaggio trotted back to the dugout," I chimed in. "Head down."

"Yes," Joe said, shaking his head vigorously, up and down. "Yes."

"No," I said. "Didn’t happen like that."

"Let me see that box score," Joe said. "I know what I saw."

What Joe saw, it turned out, was that Joe Gordon, the Yankees’ other star-Joe, had singled to open the bottom of the ninth, then advanced to second base on an error but promptly got himself picked off second base for the first out of the inning, blowing a gigantic hole in the 9^th inning, two-runs-down rally his single had started. DiMaggio never got near the field in the bottom of the ninth, but somehow Joe remembered what he wanted to remember, DiMaggio slinking off the field in red-faced shame at his moronic attempt to steal a meaningless base that wrecked the Yankees’ slender chance to steal back the 1942 World Series from the Cardinals.

I had wondered, briefly, if Joe could have been confusing the final game of that World Series with the final game of the 1926 World Series, also where the Cardinals defeated the Yankees, ending on a very famous caught-stealing by a very famous Yankee slugger, but of course that was ridiculous. Joe was only four years old in the fall of 1926, so how he possibly have an image in his head of Babe Ruth slinking off the field in red-faced shame, etc. etc.? And while I still find it ridiculous, that is exactly what human memory does, conflating all varieties of experience into one experience, turning our lives into a smorgasbord that we pick and choose from, making up plates to suit ourselves, plates that have no order or reason or logic to them sometimes, just the disorder of our minds that fossilizes itself into vivid memories we swear by.

Joe and I spoke about this unreliability as well, which is another thing I like about Joe—he was actually pleased to be shown the things he had sworn by were wrong in critical places.  We discussed traffic accidents we had witnessed in which our testimony was critically flawed—I remembered a green car being broadsided by a red car, only it turned out that it was the red car that had rammed into the green one (and just barely missed ramming into me), and Joe had similar experiences. Human memories, I’ve understood increasingly over the years, are deeply flawed, and we’re just beginning to understand and quantify the depth and persistence of those flaws.

This is why I spend so much time reading Retrosheet, and why I love sabermetrics as much as I do: both provide a solid antidote to the poison of human memory. A little poison (a lloydwaner, in baseball terms) can be a good thing, can inoculate us and even provide pleasure, in small doses—a glass or three per week of Irish whiskey might lead to your finest hours in those weeks, but a bottle or three as your daily regimen will surely wreck your guts sooner or later, and my money’s on "sooner." Remembering stuff vividly from childhood is a great pleasure, but it’s the swearing by those memories that’s so dangerous, a danger that Retrosheet and sabermetrics and recording history seeks to protect us from.

You can make all the wild claims you like about fantastic games, and plays, and feats, you saw as a boy, and until recently it was difficult to prove you wrong, but now when Joe and I and you want to make those claims, we have to do it in the face of recorded facts. The only facts that existed up until the past few decades were newspaper accounts, which didn’t always agree with each other, and which were recorded by human beings capable of committing errors to print. Now, not so much, and getting harder by the day.

When I was trying to trace out this story, I came across a famous DiMaggio story that belies all the "perfect ballplayer" nonsense that his idolators love to indulge in. (If you Google "DiMaggio" and "perfect ballplayer" or other such phrases, you’ll find all sorts of wild claims about him having perfect judgment,  never making a mental mistake, etc., some of the quotes from respectable baseball people as well as fans and broadcasters.) It’s funny, because this counter-anecdote is very well known, and its point is that DiMaggio, when he was a young star, was far from perfect in his judgment—its point is, in fact, that he was a conceited young doofus who learned lessons the hard way. It’s the one about Joe D. playing shallow when Lefty Gomez was pitching, in order "to make them forget about Tris Speaker," and blowing the game by allowing a hitter to blast a ball deep over Joe’s head, losing the game for Lefty and the Yanks.  You all know that one. Isn’t that exactly what I just said—a story about DiMaggio making a mental error?

I came across an excerpt in a magazine (New York mag,  May 1-14 2017 issue, page 102), not the book itself, but it appears in a first-person narrative from Joe. D. himself, so I decided to run a tracer on this version of the story, with the usual unsurprising results: the game (as told) never happened. This narrative (the book is Dr. Rock Positano’s DINNER WITH DIMAGGIO) has Joe supplying enough details to run a tracer: the game took place in 1936, his rookie year, on a day the Yankees "were playing a doubleheader against the Red Sox. I played real shallow and we won the first game. Lefty pitched the second, and he was in trouble." Joe gives a few more details but the only ones that matters for my purposes is that the ball "rolled around out there all the way to the monuments" and the Yankees "lost that game." Since there are no monuments in Fenway, this tells us the game took place in Yankee Stadium.

In 1936, the Yankees played the Red Sox twice in doubleheaders in Yankee Stadium. The first one, on June 30^th, the Yankees swept, so no go. (The pitcher in the second game was Bump Hadley, anyway.)  The next one was on August 23^rd. This time they did win the first game and lose the second, but again, the Yankee pitcher in the second game was Bump Hadley. Now, if the punchline of the story were "You keep playing like that, kid, and they’ll forget Bump Hadley," then I’d look at the boxscore of the second game on August 23^rd to see if maybe that play were there, but, no, it’s always told as "Tris Speaker? You keep playing like that, kid, and they’ll forget Lefty Gomez," which is how it appears in the Positano book. (I'd already forgotten Bump Hadley.)  I could keep looking, for other tellings, or other flaws in the story that make it possible (if the game were an away game, or took place in 1937, or wasn’t part of a doubleheader, or something else.) The minor point is, like most tracers, the story, as told, doesn’t check out, and it wasn’t all that hard to run a check. The major point is that, obviously, Joe DiMaggio did make mental errors, just like every ballplayer—he may have made fewer of them, or made all of them in his first few years in MLB, or compensated for them better, but he wasn’t, as the anecdotes have it, a perfect ballplayer, and the anecdote exists to memorialize that fact.

(A related memory-centric article to follow, in a few days or whenever I get it finished, whichever comes first.)