01/19/2018
RICK: It’s a cool, drizzly Friday afternoon in early June, in Cleveland, and I’m still a skinny teenager. At around four p.m., I decide to pick up our avocado-green touch-tone telephone and call SKyline 2-4661.
“Y-y-y-ellow.”
“Hey, Miles. It’s Rick. Wanna go to the Indians game tonight?”
“Yeah. Maybe. Who they playin’?”
“Washington Senators.”
“Wow, Rick. Clash of the Leviathans!” (Miles always had a big vocabulary.)
“Hey, pal, it’s baseball!”
So we hop on the rapid transit, and for 25 cents we’re whisked downtown to Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Humongous Cleveland Municipal Stadium, which had about 76,000 seats for baseball, 66,000 of which would be empty that damp night, even though a pretty good pitcher by the name of Wilfred “Sonny” Siebert was starting for the Indians. Now, in those days the Tribe had some great starting pitching. Our weakness was our hitting. One-through-eight we had way too many someday-possibly-could-be’s and never-was-and-never-will-be’s. Or, as Miles more economically puts it, “banjo-hitters.”
Well, the game starts and there’re these two women sitting directly in front of us, jabbering away non-stop, not paying attention to the game at all, and I can tell right off the bat: they’re baseball wives. You know the type: long, long legs; lots of hair-with-air; that real ex-model-slash-ex-cheerleader look; what today we would call trophy wives. So Siebert’s pitching a great game, and long about the sixth inning or so, one of the wives — oh, let’s call her “Bobbi Jo” — looks up at the scoreboard and says to her girlfriend, uh, “Rayette,” “Oh my God! Sonny hasn’t given up a hit yet.” Miles and I look at each other. Our “Bobbi Jo” … is Mrs. Sonny Siebert!
Well, for the rest of the game, these two women say not … one … word. They just sit there like waxworks. Very tense waxworks. And then, with two outs in the top of the ninth, Bob Savarine hits a high fly ball that smacks into Chuck Hinton’s mitt in left field, and Mrs. Siebert’s husband has what was then the 11th no-hitter in Cleveland Indians history. The two baseball wives scream and jump up and down hugging each other.
And then, “Bobbi Jo” does this totally unexpected thing: she turns to me and holds out her arms as if to say, “How about a hug from you, too, young man?” And so, in a state of teenage athletic rapture, I hug my first baseball wife. It will turn out to be one of the most perfect days of my youth.
In my sports-crazed life I’ve seen games in 28 major-league ballparks, attended a World Series game, an All-Star game and was at the first major league game ever managed by an African-American. But I’ve never witnessed another no-hitter in person. And I’ve never had the chance to hug another baseball wife.
Well, not yet, anyway.
