I'd like to take a moment to send out some funky birthday 75th wishes to my father, Irwin, who played such a major role in getting me interested in baseball. When I was ten years old, he took me to see Bang The Drum Slowly, taught me how to read the back of a baseball card, lent me his copy of Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer and got us tickets to my first-ever major league ballgame — Yankees vs. Tigers at Tiger Stadium, May 30, 1976 — and I pretty much took it from there. Without him, Big Hair & Plastic Grass would never have been written.
I wish I had a photo to share of him and I playing catch, as we did so many times during my childhood, or going to a ballgame together. But we weren't the kind of family that took a lot of picture of each other, and any such photos we might have once had probably got lost in one of our many moves. So instead, here's a photo and video of Linda Ronstadt — one of my Dad's favorite singers, and whose music made up a significant portion of my childhood soundtrack — singing "The Star Spangled Banner" with organ acompaniment (unlike with, say, Beyonce, no backing tracks or pre-recorded vocals were involved) at Dodger Stadium before Game 3 of the 1977 World Series.
My Dad, a diehard Brooklyn Dodgers fan in his youth, had switched his allegiances to the Mets long before the Dodgers resumed their rivalry with the hated Yankees in this particular Fall Classic. But I know he really enjoyed seeing Ms. Ronstadt in a Dodgers jacket, just the same...