Graig Nettles and the End of the World
Sometimes, I believe that there has been nothing more important than Graig Nettles, especially on days like today when my son, at second base, turns his shoulders towards right centerfield, a low floating pop-up that seems out of reach from him and the nearby centerfielder. A fortuitous breeze and a few quick steps bring my son close enough to give it a shot. He extends his glove, takes a little air, and snatches it. In our local newspaper, the reporter will call the catch “fantastic.” In a summer league state championship game of mostly 15- and 16-year-olds, my son is 14, in the field because he can make plays like this one. The catch ends the inning, and his teammates corral him, as he skips in, a wide smile taking him to the dugout.
I know this brief ecstatic pulse my son feels, and I know I can point it back to Nettles, the heralded Yankees third baseman from 1973 to 1983, and my lifelong desire to dive for a baseball, the thrill of retrieving what seems irretrievable. Nettles was the one I imitated for years when I peppered tennis balls against the front cement step of our Long Island house. If I slung one at a good angle, it could bounce me a ground ball that I would scoop up and throw against the brick front of the house as if to get the out at first. And I would skim the Penn 3 or Wilson 2 hard enough with enough distance to give myself diving plays like Nettles, wearing out a patch in the yard, experimenting to find combinations that are only happenstance in real games, a pitcher’s throw combined with a batter’s swing. This love for fielding led to a career in college, where a field hockey player, my future wife, sat on a bleacher on a spring day and noticed me, the second baseman.
But even to trace something as simple as fielding a baseball, it’s never an easy path back, always a chance to get snagged by the overgrowth like the fierce rhododendrons in our yard’s bordering underbrush, which I would claw as a boy, sweeping the area for wayward tennis balls.
It brings me back to Cranford, New Jersey, where I lived my first five years, when important decisions were finalized. I later learned how much those years shape us, so much of the brain developed, so much locked in. Most importantly, I would be a righty, and my team would be the Yankees, Graig Nettles my baseball hero, and Spiderman my other hero. In the Jersey years, before our move to Long Island, everything was ahead of us- with my parents, my two brothers, my sister, and me. The eldest of their families, my parents were the first to marry, their siblings following suit in what were the wedding years so many families know, followed shortly by the baby years.
Our beloved Yankees, too, were about to embark on great things, the larger-than-life George Steinbrenner promising better times, a restoration of glory, of the kind of years my father knew, when he lived through the Mantle years. After being swept in the 1976 Series by The Big Red Machine, Reggie Jackson signed in the offseason, so hopes were high on opening day in April 1977, starting the season 1-0 with a combined shutout from Catfish Hunter and Sparky Lyle.
Two days later, my father’s youngest sister, June, died, her heart failing, as she dropped on the cement ground of a tennis court. That day, I was in the backseat of our old brown station wagon, just my father and me, a car ride so important yet I cannot remember it. In GPS today, it's a 14-minute drive from our Cranford house to my father’s childhood one on Grove Street in Elizabeth. Where are these places we’ve been but don’t remember? Was the radio on? Were we listening to the game?
For the Yankees, theirs was an unexceptional loss, while my father and I climbed the steep staircase of his parents’ duplex, a musty smell I still inhale in memory, my grandmother in pieces, an apartment full of grieving just beginning. As we entered, despite the unfathomable sorrow, my grandmother, upon seeing me, pointed to my father and said, “Get him out of here.”
I remember nothing of mourning, nothing of the sorrow that must have been ripping through the hearts of my family. I don’t even remember my Aunt June, only the large portrait that my grandparents hung on a wall right past the entrance from the long staircase, her kind smile and large brown eyes beneath, dark brown hair swept up beneath her nurse’s bonnet, our family heroine, kindness her superpower, beloved on her hospital floor by her colleagues and patients, the dazzling baby sister, the youngest of four children, gone two months shy of her twenty-fifth birthday.
But weddings went on, babies were born, and life kept intersecting with the Yankees, who kept winning while the Bronx Zoo roared on. On a June afternoon when my mother went into labor with my younger brother, Billy Martin challenged Reggie Jackson to a fistfight in the third base dugout at Fenway Park.
But what about my hero? Old photos put me in a Spiderman costume, my bold choice over the grandness of Superman and Batman and the rest of the Hall of Justice, waiting for the sound of the trouble alert or the intergalactic alarm signaling a need to stop something terrible from happening, perhaps stave off the end of the world. But what about Nettles?
A good guess is October 13, 1978. The Yankees, trying to repeat as champs, trailed 2-0 in the World Series, the season likely decided in Game 3. Ron Guidry pitched, and Dodgers hitters sizzled down the third base line one shot after another. Nettles, like a goalie, dove to his left and his right, his body’s fullest reach, sometimes crouched, as if shielding himself to what was coming, the searing top spin from the hard dirt to his valiant glove, play after play, to the gasp of Guidry, the announcers, and the crowd, who watched as he preserved the Yankees’ tenuous lead and helped return them to victory.
I must have been watching, but I don’t remember, nor do I remember the televised pregame of Game 4, when the lineups were called out at Yankee Stadium, a video still found on YouTube. Coming off the must-win, the crowd was exuberant with each player called, rising, of course, for Reggie Jackson. But when Bob Shepherd announced Nettles, the Stadium crowd erupted to a higher level, which went higher and higher.
“What a tribute!” said Tom Seaver, one of the color commentators with Tony Kubek, who agreed, amidst the noise, adding, “Wow. Standing ovation for defensive play!”
“Unheard of,” said Seaver.
Shepherd waited for almost a minute, as the cheers hit a crescendo twice, the Yankees faithful yelping as the large outfield screen showed a grinning Nettles sheepishly taking it in, offering an extra tip of the cap, a subdued acceptance of the overwhelming praise.
Even though I don’t remember it, I choose this as my moment, when thousands hailed this kind of hero, not one with mighty strength but one doing all he could to stop something bad from happening. This carried me through the 1980s and the days I do remember, when I stayed steadfast despite the “almost-good enough” Yankees decade, those summers when I would watch every game, including Old Timers’ Days when the titans like Mantle could still trot out to the first baseline and Joe DiMaggio, too, reminding me of all the glory I missed.
Today, I watch my son celebrate in the dugout after his stellar play. Just a few days before, I received word from my parents that their Long Island house, after over 40 years, is under contract. They will leave the cement step and brick wall, where I pretended to be Graig Nettles, a house with too many expenses and empty rooms. As this summer game resumes, I leave my search for what is irretrievable, memories I cannot access yet still hover- my grandmother’s mourning finger, as her world came to an end, doing all she could, in that precious moment, to defend me from something terrible.
SCOTT PALMIERI is a professor of English at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. His writing has been published in Sport Literate, Aethlon, Hobart, The Twin Bill, The Leaflet, The Alembic, and The Result Is What You See Today: Poems About Running. He played baseball at Providence College and continues his love of the sport through writing, coaching, and playing, as long as his legs will allow, in a senior men’s league. He lives in Wakefield, Rhode Island, with his wife and three children, his biggest fans.