My bank looked like a metal coffin. You’d put the coin on top and a skeletal hand would snatch it. All my life’s savings were locked in that tin haunted mansion bank. I wasn’t saving for college but for something more important: Bat Day at Yankee Stadium.
The big game was on June 20, 1971, when the Yankees played the Twins. Every kid in attendance got a free Hillerich & Bradsby Louisville Slugger with a player’s signature on the barrel. This year they were giving out Roy Whites.
At eleven, my potential sources of income were birthdays and allowances. My parents didn’t believe in allowances. They believed in begging. It would be years before I could deliver newspapers, so I resorted to cleaning windows and doing odd jobs for tenants in our apartment complex. Their homes smelled of mothballs, nicotine, or old people. Sometimes all three.
At this rate, I’d reach legal drinking age before I had enough to buy these tickets. A supreme sacrifice was in order. Effective immediately, any money my mom gave me for lunch or snacks went straight into the fund. No more Twinkies. No Ring Dings. No Hostess fruit pies either. Life is cruel.
Withdrawal day came. The bank sat heavy in one hand, my now-loose husky jeans cinched tight by the other. I opened the hatch underneath and the loot spilled onto the kitchen table, the tally: twenty dollars and seventy-eight cents—just enough for two tickets.
I took all the change and ran across the street to the bank. I swapped the change for bills, then hightailed it to the Cross County Shopping Center. One of the stores had this neat new thing called a Ticketron that let you get tickets without having to go to the stadium. I handed over the cash my battery-operated, bony-handed accomplice had collected, and the machine spat out two tickets for Bat Day. It had weird computer-made letters and codes all over it. I snatched them and gamboled home like I’d just heisted a Drake’s Cakes delivery van.
Bat Day was always on a Sunday—Dad’s most sacred day of the week. The tickets were going to be a surprise. I had my work cut out for me.
“My ‘nerves from the war’” was his go-to excuse for anything he didn’t feel like doing. Yet he always seemed plenty fit to go to Yonkers Raceway, which was at least three times a week. He’d come home, wolf down dinner, face fixed in a hypnotic smile, head filled with pony dreams. We knew better than to stand in the hallway on those nights for fear of being trampled during the great exit.
I formulated a strategy: present Dad with the tickets at dinner and let Mom do the selling. She reluctantly agreed, asking only that I let her handle it.
Mom made her infamous stuffed cabbage for dinner—olive drab bundles of overcooked doom drowned in tomato juice. I could barely tolerate the boiled chopped meat concoction on a freezing winter night, but today was unseasonably hot—pushing into the eighties. The house stunk like a school cafeteria somewhere in 19th century Minsk. We weren’t Ashkenazi; it just smelled that way. She plopped a generous portion in front of Dad—along with a side of freshly minted Ticketron passes to the game.
“What’s this?”
“Well, Sam,” Mom explained, “Chrissy bought two tickets to the Yankee game for the two of you.”
“Bat day?!”
A quick fizz of shock flickered in his eyes, then back to normal. I’d seen that look before. It was always shot around conversations about baseball, or whenever I’d ask him to spring for new equipment.
“C’mon, Sam, he bought them with his own money.”
“Yeah, Dad, it’s Bat Day. Every kid gets a free bat! I got us great seats.”
He shot Mom a look and got up.
“We’ll see.”
He disappeared into the bathroom. I don’t know if he had a vision on the throne, or maybe it was the bran muffin. But when he emerged—big smile on his face—he consented to take me to the game. And with that, he took off—an Italian trotter-seeking missile fleeing the shtetl.
Dad was no stranger to bats. Before he became one of the most feared stove repairmen in Westchester County, Dad worked at a baseball bat and club manufacturing outfit in the Bronx.
Yankee Forge Bats had once been a proud, family-owned company called Bronx Slugger. Dad took great pride in the bats he produced, each one hand-carved to perfection. His nickname around the plant was “Curly” for the voluminous amount of ringlets on his head—though “Scrub Brush” would have been more fitting.
One of my first memories was lying in my crib, a mobile of tiny bats spinning overhead to the tune of “Take Me Out to The Ballgame.”
Dad’s departure from the bat company was anything but amicable. In 1962, amid industry consolidation, a large corporation bought out the company. Dad was downsized. Now, whenever he saw a bat, it stirred an old wound.
It was rough going for a while. He couldn’t watch a baseball game without going into a frenzy about “being put out to pasture”, and occasionally—“I hope he spends it all on medicine!”
His fixation ebbed through the years—although he was never able to buy furniture unless it was made from Flame-Hardened ash, like a good bat.
June 20th came slow—days and nights ticking off the calendar, visions of me waving my free bat with 30,000 other kids.
We parked the car at the Stadium—a 1968 red Chevy van, modified to fit all of Dad’s stove repair equipment and parts. It sat two, three, with the addition of a milk crate courtesy of Dellwood Dairies.
Dad, a world-class bullshitter, tried to con his way into getting better tickets at the booth—something about his vision and the war. Stonewalled. I grabbed my bat as did Dad, who was forced to put it back because, you know, kids only.
We walked out of the darkened, concrete vestibule and into the June sunlight of the place. The old Yankee Stadium was a cathedral to behold—cavernous, with ornate wedding-cake facades spanning the upper deck. A Kelly green outfield stretched 447 feet from home plate, dead center. A giant flag pole and three monuments on the warning track were still in play, so if you hit one that far, it would often send the outfielder into a separate game of hide-and-seek with the ball. The World Championship banners were hanging from the rafters today, as well as the red, white, and blue bunting flowing down from the mezzanine.
As Dad suspected, the seats I bought were real dogs, so once again, he went into full bullshit mode—this time with one of the red-coated ushers. These were the days before firm dividers between sections, where you could sneak or pay your way into better seats. The war story was falling on the guy’s deaf, reddened ears, so Dad slipped him a convincer in the form of a 20-dollar bill. The man’s whole Lower East Side disposition changed as he escorted us to our wooden seats right along the first base line, eight rows from the field!
But Dad was not content. He grabbed me by the arm and we headed inside to an area marked, “Players and press only.” A security guard greeted us, or more accurately, stopped us. Before he could get a word out, Dad beat him to the punch: “Tell Phil Rizzuto Curly’s here.”
Phil Rizzuto was one of the most beloved Yankees of all time. A shortstop for the team through the 1940s and ’50s, he was now the anchor in the WPIX broadcasting booth. ‘Holy Cow!’ was his war cry, keeping fans awake through the lean years.
The guard narrowed his bullshit-detector peepers, and creaked off into the shadows. Five minutes later, Phil showed up.
“Hey Phil, how’s it goin’?”
Dad greeted him as though he brought the pastries to Sunday dinner. Phil smiled back, but by the look on his face, I could tell he didn’t know Dad from The Man in the Moon.
“Oh yeah! How are you?!”
Dad didn’t miss a beat:
“Hey! The last time I saw you was at the Loew’s Paradise, I was working with Gene Krupa.” (Which, amazingly, was true—Dad had been his roadie back in the ’40s.)
Phil forced a grin, and I could have sworn his narrow shoulders gave the slightest shrug. He led us up to the WPIX broadcasting booth overlooking the field. He introduced us to the engineers and support staff who made it all work. He walked us back downstairs and bid us farewell—the hallway light a perfect halo over his head. The man was a saint.
Just as he left, the door to the player’s clubhouse opened and the team started filing out—Mel Stottlemyre, Bobby Murcer, one by one, heading to the field. Dad stopped several for pictures, and they obliged—the lone exception being Thurman Munson, who gruffed by with deaf ears. I decided then and there never to name a dog Thurman.
We headed back to our seats, past the Yankees dugouts where bats lay in neat rows. My father suddenly stiffened, narrowing his already narrow eyes.
The game was typical of Yankees baseball of the era—down five-zip by the bottom of the fifth. It wasn’t entirely their fault; the crack umpiring crew had blown several calls—maybe the June heat was getting to them. The boos started in the third inning, the jeers right after, and now the crowd was just waiting for the next bad call. Dad took up permanent residence on the edge of his seat.
His hands locked tighter on the handle of the slugger. It looked like a toothpick in the mitts of a man who once sparred with Sugar Ray Robinson. I could hear the faint creak of wood under pressure.
Dad was locked in. His hands migrated up, around the barrel. He didn’t clap. Didn’t boo. Just kept working the wood, like he was trying to smooth something invisible out of it. He looked like a tea kettle daring the flame. Atomized repression whistled from his ears.
Another blunder by the umps.
“SNAP!” He turned my bat into nunchucks.
The bottom of the seventh arrived. You could see the tension swirling around the rafters as Bobby Murcer stepped to the plate. He took a three and one pitch down the right-field line—the anxious wind helping it as the ball curved just around the foul pole for a home run. Tie game!
But the umps didn’t see it that way. Foul ball.
Dad stood. For a second, I thought he was just stretching. Then the business end of the bat was up, cocked like a Billy club.
White’s signature spun fiercely on the barrel during its flight path toward the umpire’s head.
“Flame-harden this, you sellouts!”
Of all the expletives Dad had let loose, that one stood out.
“CLUNK!” Right on the noggin of the first base umpire, who immediately hit the dirt.
Then, without warning, another bat hit the field. Then another. Then two at once. Within seconds it wasn’t just raining bats—it was a full-blown storm system, the bleachers hurling them like fastballs, the loge dropping them like bombs—a biblical smite from the 60,000 in attendance.
I prayed for my bank’s dead hand to pull me out of this.
Astonishingly, most of the players or umpires weren’t injured, though a few Buster Keatoned over the missiles en route to the dugout. Soon the field looked like a giant pyre, ready to ignite with a lit match or a magnifying glass.
The police arrived and started hauling people off. The ushers, purple and spitting, singled us out—one of them losing his dentures mid-shout. The choppers skittered onto the field, snapping like a bat-chewing land shark before an outfielder kicked them into foul territory.
I should’ve recognized the warning signs. The grimace at ‘Bat Day’—his electric eel eyes weren’t just stuffed cabbage repeating. He came back from his break, but not all the way.
They led us out in cuffs, walking carefully to avoid getting stabbed by the wooden shards.
Dad stopped one of the officers as we were being herded into the wagon.
“Hey, is Timmy O’Neil still with the force?”
“Chief O’Neil is at the 53rd Precinct.”
“Tell him Curly’s here.”
We were released on the spot.
Turned out Dad used to make his night sticks when he was starting out.
That was the last game I ever went to with my Dad.
I’d like to think it was because we were banned from the Stadium.
The bat and the bank are gone, but I kept something more enduring—60,000 witnesses who saw my Dad hit a man in the head with half a bat from the stands.
***
Patrick Carella’s fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Hobart, BULL, JMWW, and Fiction on the Web, among others. Patrick is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso.
