Introducing 1973 - Where it all began (for me)

I never got to see Roberto Clemente play. We missed each other by a day.

His tragic death in a plane crash on December 31, 1972 was the end of an era, a simpler time in baseball that preceded free agency, the designated hitter, and a time when the sportswriters protected the players from themselves. Many of these changes were in motion throughout the late 1960's, but the death of Clemente on New Year's Eve 1972 was the punctuation mark on the baseball game my father grew up watching and the one I've watched for the last fifty-one years.

I was born on January 1, 1973, in the proverbial shadow of Yankee Stadium and my father's boyhood hero, Mickey Mantle. I grew up watching another Oklahoma kid, Bobby Murcer, on my not-yet-absentee father's knee. My earliest baseball heroes were Catfish Hunter (the spitting image of my Uncle Eddie), Lou Piniella (because it sounds like vanilla), Thurman Munson (one tough S.O.B., according to my dad), and Reggie Jackson (larger than life, complete with his own candy bar).

I don't remember 1973. How could I? I wasn't yet a year old. My earliest baseball memories are of 1976 and '77, flashes of games that may or may not be recollections from evening broadcasts or later remembrances of highlights seen elsewhere. My heroes stem more from their baseball cards than their on-field performances. 

Yet, when I decided to begin a long-term project to replay seasons from my lifetime on the tabletop, it seemed impossible to start anywhere but the beginning. The day after Clemente died. The day my life began.

When I read about 1973, about the formidable Oakland A's on their way to back-to-back World Series Championships, about a Mets team that somehow, some way put it all together for the second time in five years,  about the advent of the designated hitter that began with my own Yankee's Ron Blomberg,  about Nolan Ryan rewriting the record books for neither the first nor last time, and about Willie Mays, maybe the greatest ever, the kid, playing one last season in the sun, for me it all comes back to what it must have been like to play in the shadow of the death of Clemente, one of the most respected and beloved players of all time.

It was the end of an era.

But all endings are beginnings.

And baseball, for me, began in 1973.