CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter
I have several signed photos of baseball players. They are all Cincinnati Reds, like Edd Roush and Joe Morgan, except for one. On top of my file cabinet is a photo with Lou Brock’s signature. Strangely, the photo is not of Lou. It’s of me, saying the opening prayer at a conference where Lou was the speaker. Todd Lindley, who had organized the event, knew I was a baseball fan, and arranged for a photographer to take the picture, and for Lou to sign it. Just why he and Lou thought it was a good idea to sign my picture with Lou’s name I’m still not sure.
For that conference, I was a quasi-Cardinals fan, especially since I was seated between Lou and his wife for the meal. I was excited. I was going to talk baseball with one of the best players ever. I could ask him questions no one had ever thought of before, like “What did you think of that Ernie Broglio trade?” [1] Except his wife had just become an ordained woman of the cloth and wanted to talk church stuff with me. I wanted to yell, “No, Jackie, I don’t care about church stuff! I’m a preacher just for the big bucks! I want to talk baseball!” But, of course, I didn’t. I did the polite thing. We talked church stuff. Actually, it was a pretty good conversation.
But I missed my chance to talk baseball with a real player. The only other MLB player with whom I’ve ever had a whole conversation was Dave Parker, when he was with the Reds. We were in the right field bleachers, and when Dave came out to take his position, I yelled, “Hi, Dave.” He turned around and waved and said, “Hi.”
I have been a Cincinnati Reds fan since birth, mostly because Grandma Mac was a Reds fan, and partly because I share a home town, Oakland City, IN, with the Reds HOF center fielder, Edd Roush. His twin brother, Fred, was commissioner of the church league when I played on the Methodist team. The then-retired Edd sometimes came out to hit line drives to us.
The Cardinals, though, was the team you got on the radio in Oakland City. KMOX. Harry Caray. It was also the closest team geographically, so if you got to go to a major league game, it was in St. Louis. Thus when Benny Albin invited me to go with him and Bob Keeton and Bill Burns to see the Cardinals play the Dodgers at Sportsman’s Park, when I was a high school freshman, I jumped at the chance. We went primarily to see Gil Hodges, the Dodgers first baseman, since he was from Petersburg, just up the road from Oakland City, and had started his athletic career, basketball as well as baseball, at Oakland City College.
Benny’s old Chevy had trouble on the way home, late at night, so we had to spend the night in The Star Hotel in Flora, IL. We had only enough money for one room, with two beds, and we had to sleep in our underwear. The fire escape was a big old gnarly rope, like the one for climbing in gym class, tied to the radiator. I was sorry the place didn’t catch on fire; I thought sliding down that rope in the heart of Flora, IL in our underwear, would make a good story, and Benny was the editor of the school newspaper, and I was the—in my own mind—star reporter, so we’d have a scoop.
Well, I’ve gotten away from Lou. He, of course, was still in school himself that night we went to Sportsman’s Park, listening to KMOX, learning how big league players stood at the plate from Harry’s descriptions, playing in the Collinston, Louisiana version of the church league, a fan of the Dodgers, because of Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, but of Gil Hodges, too, I’m sure, even though Gil grew up in “the Mississippi of the North.”
From the radio and every place he went, Lou learned the ways of “the eternal game” so well. He was a joy to watch, even for those of us who cheered for other teams. And he was kind enough to put his name on a picture of me—that ought to confuse ancestry.com!
John Robert McFarland
1] Lou said, “I love Ernie
Broglio. Without him, I would have been Ernie Banks, a life-long Cub who never
got into a World Series.”
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