The 2025 baseball season marks my 75th anniversary of following the game.
The year 1950, including its baseball season, has several memories for me. Besides going to my first baseball game with the yeshiva day camp, it was the first year we had a television and the first year my grandparents moved in with us.
We lived in a lower three-bedroom flat in a house in the main Jewish neighborhood of Detroit, and my best friend Mosey Carlebach lived in the three-bedroom flat upstairs. Each floor was identical, three bedrooms that could accommodate two beds, only one bathroom for all of us and a kitchen that could seat six around its table. The dining room had a breakfront and a table, and the front room had a couch and wide soft chair and a big brown television cabinet housing a small black and white screen.
The first program we watched was on Thursday evening at 7:30. The Lone Ranger wearing a mask on a big white horse riding across the 12-inch screen shouting, “Hi Yo Silver.” To this day The Lone Ranger, played by actor Clayton Moore, was and is my favorite TV hero. You can Google my hero and watch episodes on your computer.
Once a week or so an afternoon baseball game was televised. However, there were no captions showing the name of the player, or his batting average, and 75 years ago, the black and white games were covered by mostly one camera in the upper deck behind home plate showing the pitcher, batter, catcher and most of the umpire.
In 1950 Detroit had a great radio play-by-play man in Harry Heilmann. He was a super-duper superstar for the Tigers for 16 years. The former outfielder retired in 1932 after spending two years with the Cincinnati Reds and compiled a .342 career average. During his peak with the Tigers from 1921 through 1927, Heilmann batted .380 and in 1923 batted ,403 with a .452 on base percentage.
Heilman was a great story teller, but unfortunately, 1950 was the only season I heard him, as he died from a fast-moving cancer the following spring training, a short time before his 57th birthday. In my baseball radio history collection, I have a short blurb of Heilmann calling the end of perhaps the most famous and exciting Tigers victory in their history. It certainly was in 1950.
It was a beautiful midweek June afternoon game between the Tigers and New York Yankees. The Tigers were losing 9-to-6 in the bottom of the ninth. The Tigers loaded the bases with two out and my favorite player Hoot Evers came up to bat. Hoot got his name from watching cowboy movie actor Hoot Gibson movies often while growing up. Thousands of Detroit fans reacted to his at bats at every home game with an owlish type of call, “Hoot, Hooot, Hoooot.”
Evers was in the middle of a career year in which he would bat .323, hit 21 home runs and drive in 103 runs. Hoot lined a shot that passed center fielder Joe DiMaggio and DiMag chased it all the way to the center field wall as three runs scored tying the game. Heilmann excitedly said DiMaggio fired the ball to second baseman Billy Martin who fired to catcher Yogi Berra, but too late to catch Evers at the plate.
Fueled by Hoot’s inside the park grand slam home run, the Tigers kept pace with the Yankees in the pennant race and both teams were tied with 91-53 records with 10 games to go. However, Yanks manager Casey Stengel pulled the right strings and New York won the pennant by three games. While my first season of following baseball ended in disappointment, it was exciting and I spent the off-season reading all the baseball publications I could get my hands on.
