Our 50ths

Two ongoing golden anniversaries will be celebrated this year. 

Fifty years ago this summer, I became interested in baseball, and baseball cards. My first memory of BB on the radio dates back to the eighth inning of a game played on my birthday that June.  

On the playground was a girl, who in winter wore a blue knit cap with a white Olde English "D" on it; who was more interested in the baseball cards my friends and I brought to school than dolls or skipping rope. 

Margaret Catherine Bernadette O'Hara. The only kid in third grade with four names.

She has been a friend and confidante through sock hops and proms, from doo-wop to British Invasion to psych-folk to disco to hair bands to chillout, in good times (1968 and 1984) and bad (2003, 43-119).

Maggie May, grow old with me. The best is yet to come.

The place where we grew up wasn't pretty. (God, you should see it now.) It wasn't New York, or LA, or even Detroit, equally flat and gritty, with the Tigers, and Tiger Stadium. But Steve Boros played for the Tigers, had a card in the 1961 set, and was from our home town. On the card's reverse side, as if we needed more proof that he was ours, appeared the words FLINT MICH.

Ernie Harwell passed last May. Over the off season, we lost Bill Lajoie, who assembled the 1984 world champs, and Sparky Anderson who managed them. 

Steve Boros passed four days after Christmas, and it is his loss Flint-ites feel the deepest.

He had a degree in literature from the University of Michigan, wrote short stories, and a one-act play called "Men And Boys." "The play is kind of way out," he told a SPORT Magazine writer in 1963, for a story on ballplayers with more cerebral off the field interests. 

He managed the Padres in 1986, when Terry Kennedy sought his advice; not on hitting, but Shakespeare.  See the play (Romeo and Juliet), Boros told him, and then look for a good volume of literary criticism. 

"See how she leans her cheek upon her hand! O, that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch her cheek! (Act two, scene two.)  

For Kennedy, maybe a catcher's mitt? 

As a scout, Boros broke the game down to its smallest parts. His advance reports noted that Dennis Eckersley, on 3-2 counts to left-handed hitters, liked to throw back door sliders. It was a 3-2 Eck slider that Kirk Gibson hit out in the ninth inning of game one of the 1988 Series won by Gibson's Los Angeles Improbables. A most remarkable team, whose triumph was due in no small part to Steve Boros' patient research. 

The same guy -- OUR guy -- who, on that first Tiger team whose roster we can still name, played third base. When Maggie ditched her girl friends to come over and assure a clutch of baseball-mad third grade boys that, despite our fondness for Boros, Rocky Colavito was the cutest Tiger. 

Don't knock the Rock, she still advises, a bare sixteen hours before the start of our 50th season of baseball. 

And, when someone with four names who's been by your side for a half century makes such a request, there is the inclination to honor it.