B'klyn Ghosts Are Smiling



		B'klyn Ghosts Are Smiling Coney Island's minor leaguers & ballpark resurrect spirit of game The sea gulls came in a squadron from right field, swooped low over center field, then soared into the sky over left. They had a ghostly look, white against the dark horizon of the Atlantic. So did the distant figures moving on the Boardwalk and the rain-dark sliver of beach. This was in KeySpan Park on a damp evening in Coney Island. The blue dusk had none of the roaring clamor of the Yankees-Mariners series or the glory that had come to a 12-year-old pitcher named Danny Almonte. But this ballpark was in Brooklyn, not the Bronx or Williamsport, Pa. And so there were ghosts everywhere. Brooklyn ghosts. Baseball ghosts. A half-century ago, down in left-center field, there was a place called Scoville's, where my parents and a lot of other Irish people gathered on summertime Sundays to celebrate their life in America. Along that sliver of beach beyond the outfield walls, young Jewish guys from Brighton Beach once trudged across the sands, bound for Oceantide at Bay 22, in hope of finding Irish girls burning with carnal desire. Just about here, the Irish guys were passing them, heading for Brighton Beach, in search of Jewish girls in the same ripe condition. All were giddy with hope. All were doomed to humiliating failure. The shiny new ballpark by the sea evoked other ghosts. They were named Skoonj and Oisk, Peewee and Gil, Newk and Campy and above all, Jackie. Outside the park, I saw men my age, gray with years, wearing old Brooklyn Dodger caps and T-shirts with the Dodger logos, and that special look in the eyes. The look is borne by people whose hearts were splintered when they were young, and who have lived long enough now to accept the small consolations of time. The Brooklyn Cyclones are one of those small consolations. "Hey, how are ya?" one of them said. "You ever think you'd live long enough to see this?" New Place to Play He meant the lovely little ballpark. He meant the presence of professional baseball on the soil of Brooklyn. It wasn't Ebbets Field. It wasn't major league baseball. The Brooklyn Cyclones were a single-A team in the New York-Penn League, on this night playing the Staten Island Yankees. The borough was not trembling over the arrival of the feared Cardinals, with Musial and Slaughter and the rest, playing for the pennant. But it was baseball, for money, in Brooklyn. If Ebbets Field was our lost cathedral, this was an elegant new chapel. The religion, of course, was baseball. "Hey, Charlie, who's pitchin'?" one 11-year-old shouted at a friend. And they were gone before an answer was given, joining hundreds of kids filing into the park, mercifully free of the past and its treacherous nostalgias. The kids were there for the baseball, played in the present tense, and for the hot dogs and the laughter and the cheering. To them, the year 1957, when the Dodgers and the Giants lammed to California, was part of an unimaginable past, as remote from their lives as World War I was from ours. But those of us who shared that remote past were there, too. We saw one another on the ramps, or at the souvenir stands, or scattered among the 6,000 fans in the stands, and we knew. We recognized one another with nods or handshakes, unspoken emotions or small ironical smiles. And the bond wasn't simply to baseball. We could look down past right field and see the iron skeleton of the Steeplechase parachute ride, our Eiffel Tower, rising 262 feet above the Boardwalk. For almost 40 years, it has been a rusting hulk. But gazing at it, we were flipped into a lost evening at the end of the war (yes, that war), when girls with big hair and bobbysocks squealed in the arms of sailors, and music blared, and the parachutes rose higher and higher, up above the Boardwalk, up above Steeplechase — the Funny Place, up above the world. We could see the Half Moon Hotel, where a Murder Inc. informer named Abe Reles was hurled to his death and into stool pigeon legend. We could see young Junior Persico, or his brother, Allie Boy, and all their friends from South Brooklyn, walking the Boardwalk in T-shirts and pegged pants and thick-soled shoes from Flagg Bros., serving their apprenticeships as gangsters. We could see people we had loved for one long summer and remember the aching melancholy of Labor Day weekends. Some Things Have Vanished Nathan's Famous was still on Surf Ave., a few blocks from KeySpan Park, sending the odor of hot dogs into the air. The novelist Joseph Heller grew up on that avenue, before life revealed its Catch-22, and so did Ken Auletta, the journalist from The New Yorker. But where were the German musicians who played waltzes at Feltman's? Where was Jo-Jo the Horse-Faced Boy? From behind home plate, we could see the Cyclone itself, the roller coaster that gave the team its name, its lights a curving beacon. At its base, they sold watermelon and buttered corn and cold beer to people from all over Brooklyn and the city beyond its borders. Now ballplayers lolled before us on the sidelines, looking out at the bright green grass. The left field foul pole was 315 feet from home, center field was 415, right field 324. Nobody could call the park a bandbox. The flags were blowing to left, driven by an ocean wind. A singer valiantly gave us "The Star-Spangled Banner," most unsingable of national anthems, and almost nobody joined her in a chorus except those who had grown up with Gladys Gooding. The most important words of our anthem are, of course, at the end: "Play ball!" And then the young Cyclones took the field. The crowd roared for players named Caligiuri and Jiannetti and Pagan, while some surely cheered, in a defiant way, for Robinson and Reese, Hodges and Campanella, Furillo and Erskine. The rains came in the fourth inning, with the game tied at 1-1. Groundskeepers hauled out a shiny plastic covering for the infield. Flags swirled in the wind. Kids mobbed the hot dog stands. A young Dominican pitcher named Orlando Roman stood outside the Cyclones' dugout, flipping autographed baseballs to young boys and girls. He was having a dreadful year, with an earned run average of 7.94, but you had to root for him to make it to the majors. If he did, then a half-century from now, a man gray with life could show this signed trophy to still another boy. And then talk about baseball in Brooklyn when ghosts and sea gulls careened above the outfield grass and the whole wide world was young.