Harmon Killebrew

Today is not a day for writing about politics or about the Middle East or about the economy. Today is a day for writing about the intertwining of baseball with my life, and about the strange ways that memory and emotion and character and fate are all improbably but ineluctably bound up together. The occasion for this meditation is the death of Harmon Killebrew at age 74 of esophageal cancer.

Harmon Killebrew was my boyhood hero and idol. His first full season in the American League was 1959, during which, on June 1, I turned eight years old. Baseball meant everything to me. The Washington Senators were my team, of course, as they had been the team of my father and all his brothers. My uncle Myron, may he rest in peace, was an absolute Senators fanatic (also a Redskins fanatic, but that is another story). My father was close behind in his enthusiasm. Born in 1905, he was 19 years old when the Senators won their only World Series. The year was 1924. He told me many stories about it, as did my uncles. It was a central part of the holy writ of Garfinkle family oral tradition. It is why most years I try to visit Walter Johnson’s grave on or near the anniversary of his death.



I myself was never a great player, although of course I wanted to be more than anything in the world. Standing 5'8" at my absolute tallest in adulthood, and with poor eyes from an early age, I was hardly prime material for a would-be athlete. I was very coordinated physically and pretty fast, however, and worked to become a very good defensive infielder. But I had but meager upper body strength, so I couldn't hit the ball very far, or even hit it very often against fast pitching because I couldn't see it all that well. I didn't realize this at the time, of course, and so it really bothered me. (This is why I was so amused when I read the other day that a Washington Nationals hopeful now in the minor leagues, a young man named Bryan Harper, suddenly caught fire at the plate after it was discovered that he was nearly blind as a bat and got fitted out with contact lenses.)

If that were not enough, I couldn't play outfield very effectively because, if I ran to catch a ball, my glasses, back in those days the plastic sort with temples that did not wrap around my ears, would bounce around on my face so that the ball appeared to hop through the sky this way and that like a drunken dragonfly. That is no way to catch a fly ball. I played catcher sometimes. I liked being in the thick of the game and I wasn't afraid of getting dinged by a foul ball off my shoulder or leg. But the fact that I couldn't hit the ball that well at a time when my eyes were getting worse and my glasses were not keeping up with the deterioration made it tough to make the team. Determination and spirit mean a lot, but they cannot entirely make up for not being able to see the ball.

In Arlington, where I grew up, there was a pretty sophisticated league for kids, with games under the lights with paid umpires at 4 Mile Run Park, and commercial sponsors who provided sharp uniforms and all the rest of the first-rate equipment we had. My best friend down the street was associated with the team called Broyhill, and I went along with him to try out for that team. The team was sponsored by a guy, Joel Broyhill, who owned a local furniture store and who soon got elected as a Republican serving our Congressional district for number of years. Anyway, I went to all the practices and tried my best, and I was the last cut before the season started.

I was the last cut fairly, in my opinion. Coach Clayton had to abide by the league rules, and he could submit a roster only so large. There was maybe one other kid I thought I was better than, but it was a close call. I could field better than he could, but he could hit better than I could. His name was Tom Warnock and he was really a good guy.

But the real reason I got cut was fate. A kid named David Adams, a handsome freckled red-haired kid, had come back to town. He had been in my first grade class at John Marshall Elementary School, and he was a natural born leader. His father was in the Navy, and he had left the area with his parents after first grade; he returned after practice for Little League had begun in 1961 or maybe 1962 (I'm not sure which), but he played second base––my preferred position––and there is no doubt in my mind to this day that if the U.S. Navy had not seen fit to return his father to the Washington area, I would've made the team and been the starting second baseman. This was a very important lesson in life to learn: randomness matters.

Now, my father was sure that my disappointment was a matter of anti-Semitism. I was sure he was wrong. I had no reason to think that Coach Clayton even knew I was Jewish. It just never came up. There was nothing about me at the time that was particularly Jewish. I never said "oy" or anything like it. And as I say, if I had been coach Clayton, objectively I would probably have done the same thing he did.

Coach Clayton said I could be the batboy and continue practicing with the team, as a kind of consolation prize, and I accepted. That is one decision I have always regretted. Not that I ever gave up trying to make a team. I loved the game too much for that. I went out for baseball at Yorktown High School, and I did make the team. I was not a starter and I didn't play very much; I was used "sparingly", as they say, mainly as a late inning defensive replacement at shortstop or second base. I did not make a single error. And I did get on base from time to time, albeit sparingly....

Anyway, I never aspired to be a homerun hitter like Harmon Killebrew. I was more in the mold of a Zorro Versailles, who was the Senators' shortstop back then when I was a kid. Or maybe the third basemen, Eddie Yost. Still, when Killebrew hit 42 home runs in 1959, he gave us Senator fans hope.

Actually, he hit 43 roundtrippers that year and won the crown––at least he did so in my mind, because one shot he hit down the left field line at Fenway Park that was called foul was actually a fair ball. The witness to that fact was none other than Boston Red Sox left fielder Ted Williams. If you can't believe Ted about a thing like that, then you can't believe anybody. This did not lead me to hate Rocky Calavito of the Cleveland Indians, with whom Killebrew is tied in the record books for that year. But it was a lesson in injustice that struck me very hard at the time. To an eight-year-old, robbing a hero of his reward as undisputed home run king of the American League is an enormity of unspeakable proportions. In those days stuff like that was not allowed to stand on Mighty Mouse or Crusader Rabbit--no way. I don't think World War III, had it broken out toward the end of the 1959 season, would've bothered me nearly as much.

My sharpest memories of Harmon Killebrew are entwined with personal matters that occupied not the year 1959 but rather the year 1960. There is conclusive empirical research that shows how short-term memory is transformed into long-term memory through the hippocampus at times of great emotional engagement, whether that engagement is traumatic or enrapturing. We remember everything, or nearly everything, surrounding key emotional moments in our lives. It is part of the way our brain works, that it is promiscuously associational except in those rare moments when we bring to bear our critical facilities on a problem. This emotional imprinting is particularly strong in young people; its power usually ebbs as the years tick on. Some people never experience traumas or other emotional focal points when they're young, and so they do not understand the phenomenon. But I do.

I remember as though it were yesterday, for example, the evening of September 26, 1960. That was when the first televised presidential election debate took place, between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. I was sitting in front and to the left side of the dark red sofa on the living room floor in my usual position watching our small black-and-white television set. I remember at a certain point my father leaning over and taking hold of my upper right arm with his left hand and saying to me, "Audie"--that was my nickname--"you see that man right there--Richard Nixon? Don't forget that face. He's a dangerous man, a liar and a crook." My father was a member of the Teamsters Union, so he knew plenty about liars and crooks, and from several angles of incidence.

Why do I remember this so well? Because my mother was sick. She was still in the house, and I can see her in full late-Eisenhower Administration colored hues sitting in the living room on the evening of September 26 watching the debate with my father and me. But she was clearly sick, again she was sick and would have to go back to the hospital; and I knew it. I remember vividly knowing it, and I remember being quietly worried out of my mind to the point of incipient panic.

Then just a few days later, on October 2, a Sunday, the Washington Senators played their very last game in Griffith Stadium. It was against the Baltimore Orioles, and they lost. I was there. I cried when it was all over, and I really mean all over. As all of us kids knew, arrangements had been made to move the team to Minneapolis for the 1961 season. A new franchise, also called the Washington Senators, was to implant itself in Washington.

This, of course, was catastrophic news, if not the actual end of the world than the closest thing to it I could imagine. Most of the adults who were baseball fans in the Washington area commenced to hate Calvin Griffith for his treachery and betrayal. Me, I couldn't be bothered with who the owner was. All I cared about were my heroes, my guys. This was a time when the core of major league baseball teams tended to stick together for longer periods of time than became the case after the advent of Curt Flood and free agency. You got to know these guys and think of them as a group. When a player you liked got traded, or got sent back to the minors, or got hurt bad, or retired, it was a serious emotional occasion. Since I'd been four or five years old I recognized and was rooting for most of these guys, so I could not abandon them just because the franchise was leaving town. I made a determination: I would be a Minnesota Twins fan, and I would very deliberately care less about the new Senators. And that, in turn, meant that the Twins' slugger, Harmon Killebrew, had always to do better than the new Senators' slugger, Frank Howard. I wanted and I even prayed for Frank Howard to strike out every time he went to bat. He struck out quite a lot, and so naturally I took some credit for that. I could really pray up a storm back then when it came to certain subjects.

Rooting for the Minnesota Twins turned out to be fairly easy in part because the new Senators were terrible, even worse than the old ones. In their first season they lost 100 games, an ignominious achievement in the baseball world. Worse from my point of view, the old stadium, Griffith Stadium, was no longer the home of the Washington team. A new stadium, RFK, was built, and it was very hard to get to from Arlington, and it was a terrible stadium--too cold, too large, too remote from the field. I hated it because I hated the fact that it reminded me of what was now gone forever.

I loved Griffith Stadium in part because when you walked toward it you always smelled fresh baking bread. This was no mystical illusion; the Bond Bread factory was just down the street. That was where I first met David Eisenhower, and that was where my father took me to every Senators-White Sox doubleheader, because at Sealtest Dairy where he worked he knew some guy who worked for the Park Police who could somehow get tickets for the White Sox games. So back in those years I saw a lot of Luis Aparicio, Nellie Fox, Sherm Loller, Early Wynn and their slugger, Ted Kluszewski, and the rest of the White Sox, who, as baseball fans will know, won the American League pennant in 1959––a rare event back then when the despicable Yankees did not win. My father never took me to a game at RFK, but there are special reasons for that of which more below.

I was not the only one who felt this way about the Twins and the new Senators. My friend Johnny had an older brother named Paul who took the same point of view and who, like me, retained it for decades. From day one I have been a Twins fan, even though I have never been to a game in Minneapolis. I've only been to Minneapolis I think two times, and both times the Twins were not around––once they were on the road and once my visit occurred in the middle of a frozen Minnesota winter. After Camden Yards was built in Baltimore, I would occasionally go there to see the Twins. But I have followed every box score, almost without exception, since April 1961. And of course, I was rewarded for my loyalty. The Twins became a winning team, even winning the World Series in 1987 and in 1991.

Meanwhile, the new Senators franchise never accomplished anything. Worse for those who trusted the owner, Bill Short, after only a decade he yanked the team out of Washington and took it to Texas, where it became the Texas Rangers. That franchise suffered long and hard until just last year. If any new Senators fans followed that franchise to Texas as I followed the old franchise to Minneapolis, I don't know about them. And hard-hearted bastard than I am, I don’t care about them. At least I avoided being heartbroken a second time when the new Senators also left town.

Since baseball returned to Washington just a few years ago, in the form of a National League franchise, with the Nationals coming down from Montréal where they used to be the Expos, I have been torn in my loyalties. It hasn't been for any practical purposes a difficult choice; since the Twins are in the American League and the Nationals are in the National League I could root for both--except, of course, during interleague play when the two teams played one another. On those rare occasions my head told me to root for the Nationals but my heart continued to root for the Twins. How could I switch allegiance? What would Harmon Killebrew say?

I confess that it has been somewhat easier to remain a Twins fan not just because of habit and the investment of so much emotion over the years, but also because the Twins have been competitive in recent seasons and the young Nationals franchise so far has not. But now, at the very moment of Harmon Killebrew's passing, that has changed, at least temporarily. The Twins this year flat out stink. They are the worst team in baseball, and it doesn't matter whether the reason has to do with injuries or whatever; it just is what it is, and it is bad. The Nationals, meanwhile, are getting better. They might even finish the year at .500.

Now, I am no fair-weather fan. I have suffered through more losing seasons, I think, as a Senators and Twins fan than most––excluding, of course, the long-suffering masochists who root for the Chicago Cubs. But I think that with Harmon Killebrew's passing I am now emotionally prepared, after more than 40 years in the Washington baseball wilderness, to finally flip my allegiance. I will still cheer on and hope for both teams, but when they play each other, I will pull for the Nationals. And I will look to the Nationals’ box score in the morning before I peruse the Twins’ box score. (It also helps, let me just say in passing, that the Nationals are in a league without the obscenity of the designated hitter rule. It is one of my hopes that the American League will jettison this blot on the game before I die.)

As I said earlier, the Senators and Killebrew are all bound up together in a large but shapeless emotional wad somewhere down near the pit of my stomach. I remember so vividly the Nixon–Kennedy debate and the pain surrounding the last Senators' game in Griffith Stadium because on October 21 of that same year, of 1960, my mother died. She was 52 years old; she died of cancer. My quiet panic on the night of September 26, 1960 turned out to have been fully justified.

I, her only child, born when she was 44 years old, was at age nine and a half fairly quickly shipped off to Miami Beach, Florida to live with two widowed aunts until my father could figure out a way to put our lives back together, which he did by remarrying and giving me a stepmother. But under the circumstances, making frequent trips, or actually any trips, out to RFK once I was back living in Arlington was really hard to do. I suppose we could have gone to see the Twins when they were in town, but for some reason it just never happened.

It took decades for me to realize that one of the reasons I continued to trust in the Minnesota Twins, continued to be emotionally bound up in them, was because they attached me back to my life a time when my mother was still alive. My decision to be loyal to them was of a piece with an implicit decision to remain loyal to my mother's memory. It sounds crazy, I know, but in the promiscuously associational way our brains work, it actually makes perfect sense. I knew as a nine-year old that the Angel of Death tarried too long in Washington during the month of October 1960: First he took my beloved Washington Senators and my hero Harmon Killebrew away from me, and then 19 days later he took my mother, too.

You might think that a mother’s death and what amounted to sudden exile from a father and familiar surroundings would make all the baseball stuff seem very small by comparison, but if that is what you think then you have forgotten what it is to be a child. Pain vibrates and easily fuses with other pools of hurt in the inner world of a nine-year-old boy. It was as if the known borders of my personal universe had suddenly dissolved; I no longer knew what was real or if anything was still reliable. When the wind gets knocked out of you from several directions at once, you are in no position to analytically discern the causes.

So yes, I mourn Harmon Killebrew, but unlike most mourners, I have a special reason for feeling so deeply about him. It was not just that he was a great player for my favorite team. It was not just the 573 home runs. It was not just that he was a great guy off the field as well as on it. It is that in my childhood memories, it is as if he knew me together with my mother, my father, my aunts and uncles, my friends, my dog and my parakeet, everyone and everything. He was always there, and in a way he has always been there, back then, wherever and whenever that was and, in memory, still is. And that is what lets me say, with tears in my eyes, "I love you, Harmon; rest in peace. Say hello to my mother if you meet her in the great beyond."