So the NBA is over, Vancouver is no longer on fire and Tiger Woods probably won’t step on a golf course until September, so that must mean its baseball time. Now I’m a huge Mets fan, so that means I have very little to look forward to this summer. But as I sit back and listen to the radio here in my transplanted home town of Los Gatos, California, I’m reminded by radio host Damon Bruce of KNBR fame, one he brought up one of those long lost childhood memories. It’s one of those things that remind you that without a doubt, it’s baseball season. We all have these memories here are my Top 5 childhood traditions from my days in the Sandlot:
5 – Drake’s Cakes Baseball Cards – I will never forget how I used to think about Drakes Cakes when I would walk through a grocery store. I mean all the time it was Yankee Doodles and Devil Dogs on the brain. Oh I wasn’t a fat kid, and it was only during baseball season. I mean I like me a Yankee Doodle just like any kid, but during the baseball season I wasn’t even interested in the cakes inside anymore but who was on the back. I remember one year I was very young and I got a Carl Yastremski card on a package of Yankee Doodle cakes and it made my month. I mean I cut the cards off the bottom of the box before we even opened it. Another time I remember insisting that my mom buy me a box of Funny Bones because Mike Scott was on the back. If you know anything about Drake’s cakes, Funny Bones are the most God awful snacks in the history of snacks. Funny Bones ranks right up there with Bit-O-Honey.
4- Flipping Baseball Cards – Oh this one is something special. A book load of memories attached to this one. Memories that Jay are very much a part of as well. For those of you who don’t know exactly what flipping is let me tell you. Flipping is when you take a stack of your baseball cards and put them up against your friends stack in a game of chance. The game goes like this, you hold your cards face down and you flip them over one by one into a pile. The way to win is to get a match that is picked before you start flipping. Sometimes it was by team, year of the card, color of the border or type of card. So an example is if we pick type of card, and I put down a Fleer and then my buddy puts down a Fleer, he wins the pile. We used to play this game for hours because it seems like we had endless amounts of baseball cards. And sometimes our piles would get to be like hundreds of card high. I think the largest pile ever was when I took 300+ card from a fat bully named Matt in our neighborhood. That’s when the “it’s getting’ nasty” quote came into play and remained a joke amongst us for years. This game did prove to be costly though, by the time I was a teenager I started pricing out my baseball cards as an actual collector and realized I use to have the entire 1978 Topps set. I think it was listed for roughly $10K at the time. DOH! Oh Well, memories are priceless right? At least that’s what I keep telling myself. 
3- Panini Baseball Sticker Books – This has to be one of my favorite things of all-time. Every year from the age of 5 to like 12, my father would open the summer with a new “Panini” MLB Sticker Album for the corresponding year. These albums were broken down into teams and all-stars, and there were roughly 7-10 stickers per page. Then throughout the summer he would come home from work with boxes of unopened packs of stickers. Looking back, we weren’t rich or anything so I’m not sure if my Dad bought these stickers or if it was a “they fell off the back of the truck” situation with his buddy at the old smoke shop; I don’t care now and I didn’t care then. Just thinking about those packs and spending literally hours on those days opening them and placing them in the books is making me misty and nostalgic. The coolest stickers ever were the All-Star stickers. They were gold and silver and very special. I would always get like uber excited when a Met was an All Star that year, it made my season. It’s the little thing you remember right?
2- Mini-Helmets – So thanks to Damon Bruce for bringing these up and reminding me of all these great traditions from my past. These were definitely awesome and coveted in my neighborhood. They were mini-helmet cups from Dairy Queen that they would serve a sundae in, and then you would take the cup home and rinse it out and you had a collectable team helmet. The problem was living in New York, you would only get the East Coast assortment; the Red Sox, Yanks, Mets, and Phils, that was it. So that was a mild bummer but no worries, you could still at least collect your favorite team and when you’re young that’s all that mattered. There were these other super mini helmets you could get I think in cereal boxes and then you could do cool things like arrange them in divisional standings order and track it in your room for the season. I know, I’m a nerd. So here’s a cool thing though (if you want to talk about being thrown back to my childhood, check this out) last summer I walk into Baskin Robbins and they were running the Helmet Sundae deal and they had every team. You know what I did right? I bought 30 sundaes last summer.
1-Wiffle Ball – So the rite of passage, the game to end all games, the past-time of the neighborhood; WIFFLE BALL! Let me tell you, when I say that we played wiffle ball from morning until night, that’s exactly what I mean. We had several stadiums to play in; that’s right they were stadiums. I had a home field in my back yard with a fence to hit the ball over and a greasy neighbor to get pissed at us when we hopped his fence to get our ball. Jay had a spacious field with no fence so there were quite a few plays at the plate in his stadium. Then there was the obstacle course in J.J.’s backyard with roughly 50 trees on a ½ acre property (they really loved nature). So we all had our home-field advantage. Then there was the big time; the Airport Fields. That’s where we went when there were a lot of people playing that day. Anyway, our games were epic. We had our own commentators, it was usually who was up to bat or who made the play in the field, and we had, in our minds, the World Series of Wiffle Ball every day. We pretended we were pro ball players of course, and it was extra cool because with a Wiffle Ball you can almost pitch like a pro. You could get a wicked curveball with a Wiffle Ball. We’d set up a lawn chair to be the strike zone and backstop and in my stadium we had a pro home plate that we sunk into the ground when I was very young so it was really professional (a plastic/rubber diamond in the ground = pro stadium, God to be a kid again). There were fights and arguments and competitive moments but overall it was just fun.
That’s what baseball meant to me as a kid, playing Wiffle Ball during the day, flipping cards during breaks in the action or rain-outs. Then going to DQ and getting a Helmet Sundae, then coming home and catching some of the Mets game with Dad while sitting with my Drake’s Cakes cards and my sticker albums on the couch. Baseball was awesome when I was kid.
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