Baseball’s Been Bery Bery Good to Me

I am dreading Opening Day. This will be the first baseball season my father won’t be calling me to ask,  “What time are the Cubs playing?” or “Are the Sox playing tonight?” or “What station for the Cubs game?” or  “Did you see last night’s game?”

Before cable, my father had no problem finding baseball games on TV. Cubs were on channel 9 and Sox on 32. Last summer, however, he was 93 years old and staying in a nursing home due to a fall. He was confined to a wheelchair and later to bed, unable to manage the remote control except for the power button.

Setting the TV channel for, say, one team’s afternoon game made it logistically impossible for him to also watch another team’s evening game, which would inevitably air on a different channel.  I did my best. When I visited him for lunch, served at 11:30 a.m., I’d set the channel for the afternoon game. I’d leave written instructions, listing time and channel for the night game, in hopes the staff or whomever might visit later in the evening would read my note and change the channel.

If I visited my father in the late afternoon, I could set the channel for the evening game and I would write a note detailing the next day’s games. My notes always disappeared, the staff was always changing, and when my father pushed too many buttons on the remote, or the wrong ones, the remote and cable box would get out of sync. I’d get a call from him, just as the evening game was starting: “Call the cable company. The TV is broken.”

I couldn’t ease his suffering, but at least I could make sure my father never missed a televised Cubs or Sox game. I should mention that when I was visiting him, he sometimes nodded off. But in the event he was alone and awake, I was determined the TV would be set to the right channel.

For as long as I can remember, baseball was an important part of my father’s life. During the season, my father scheduled his office hours around games. He was a pediatrician, and in the sixties and seventies his medical office was at 3355 North Clark Street, near the corner of Roscoe, under the L tracks. (The building was demolished in the late 1980s and a parking lot—for Cubs games—replaced it.)

He’d close his office at 12:45 p.m. and walk two blocks north on Clark Street to Wrigley Field. There were always comp tickets courtesy of the players waiting for him at the box office—he claimed to have never bought a ticket in the more than 50 years he lived in Chicago. Often my father went to the games with his good friend, Enrique Maroto, a Cuban who had played for the American Negro League in the fifties. Whether or not the game was over, my father left at 3:30 p.m. to reopen his office for the afternoon and early evening.

My father came to know many Latin ballplayers in the 1970s when they were in town for games. There were autographed baseballs lying around our house like popcorn on a movie theatre floor. Don’t ask—there are none left. My father gave them away. He’d say to visiting friends, “What team you want? Cubs, White Sox, Phillies, Yankees, St. Louis?”

Part of my father’s daily routine was a stop or two at a Cuban storefront restaurant called Liborio for a cafecito and gossip. The restaurant was on Broadway just north of Irving Park, not far from his office and Wrigley Field. On game days Latin ballplayers from both the Cubs and the away team took up several tables. Once I met my father at Liborio and we had lunch with the three Alou brothers—Matty, Felipe and Jesus. It was rare for all three to be in the same city on the same day.

Jose Cardenal and my father cracking up. This probably was not a special occasion—my father dressed like this everyday, but that’s another story.

I remember the afternoon I first met Bert Campaneris, probably in 1973. I worked in my father’s office after school and when I entered the building, I found Campaneris sitting in the waiting area, talking to patients and their families crowded around him. Campaneris’s cousin Jose Cardenal also visited my father’s office, sometimes to wait out the rush hour traffic following a game. Cardenal’s daughter, Bridget, and I were friends. I went to several games with her—our seats were in the wives section, behind third base.

Jorge Orta and his father, Pedro Orta, who was also a ballplayer, visited our house on several occasions. Minnie Minoso and Cardenal attended my father’s 80th birthday party and made fun of each other throughout the dinner. My father’s acquaintance with Cookie Rojas dated back to Cuba, when Rojas was ten years old, and lived in the same Havana apartment building my parents did.

(c) Ecobio. My parents lived on the top floor and Cookie Rojas lived on the ground floor of this Havana apartment building in the Vedado neighborhood.

Several years ago I found a photograph taken at Ditka’s restaurant of my father with Cookie Rojas and other friends in the online edition of Nation’s  Restaurant News. Unfortunately, the site has been removed but I saved the caption:

Photo: Ditka’s manager Ed Minasian, standing left, and general manager Jim Rittenberg welcome restaurant visitors, seated from left, Dr. Domingo O’Cherony, team doctor for the California Angels baseball team; Frank de Lama, Angeles team trainer, and Cookie Rojas, Angels manager.

Clearly, my father wasn’t the California Angels team doctor but he must have enjoyed pretending he was for one night. Boys will be boys.

My father (left center) and me (right center) at a pregame party at Murphy’s Rooftop, circa 1985. Wrigley Field grandstand in the upper right corner.

Sources: “Sports Themers Score Big,” Nation’s Restaurant News, May 16, 1988.