It was a stunner when he was traded on October 21, 1974 to the San Francisco Giants for Bobby Bonds, Barry’s dad. That was where I entered the story.

The summer of 1975 I was traveling about with the Philadelphia Phillies (The Mets had informed the League Office that they could not host me) writing my first book - A Baseball Century: the First Hundred Years of the National league.

It was a very interesting experience going from city to city and interviewing players, managers, coaches, owners. I used a big boom box tape recorder and an even bigger briefcase to store my tapes, credentials, media guide and notes. I truly was a “beginning author.”

I arrived at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park and interviewed the long-time owner of the Giants Horace Stoneham and his long-time publicist Garry Schumacher and other Giants.

Then I came upon Bobby Murcer. He was not a part of the National League story, not a part of the subject matter of the book I was writing and was so honed in on.

But I decided to talk to him anyway and get some of his thoughts. Affable, smiling, a bit out of uniform in the garb of the Giants, Murcer was a pleasure to be with.

I thanked him for his time and continued on in my relentless pace interviewing in the locker room and on the field. I must have stopped for a snack or something and came back to where I thought I had put my tape recorder and tapes.

They were not around. Weeks of work ­ not around. I started to panic. I asked everyone ­ no one had seen them. I re-traced my interview steps ­ no luck.
I was out on the windy Candlestick Park field and spied Bobby Murcer and explained my plight. He said something about never letting things important to you out of your sight. He suggested we go back into the dressing room to look.

He reached up and into his locker. “Here they are,” he smiled “Someone must have put them there,” he continued in that distinctive Oklahoma drawl. “Let me autograph a baseball for you to make your day a little better.”

I always suspected that Bobby Murcer was the “someone.” He was always the practical joker. I’ll never forgot that day and that moment of panic and the lesson Bobby Murcer taught me.

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Harvey Frommer, now in his 33rd consecutive year of writing sports books, is the author of 39 of them including the classics: “New York City Baseball,1947-1957″ and “Red Sox Vs Yankee: The Great Rivalry.” Frommer’s REMEMBERING YANKEE STADIUM (Abrams, Stewart, Tabori and Chang) an oral/narrative history will be published in September as well as a reprint version of his SHOELESS JOE AND RAGTIME BASEBALL.
Frommer sports books are available direct from the author - discounted and autographed.

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The first one at the Stadium took place on the eleventh of July 1939 before 62,892. The big ballpark in the Bronx was chosen as the site to coincide with the World’s Fair of 1939. As the American League lineups were announced, a fan bellowed: “Make Joe McCarthy play an All-Star American League team. We can beat them, but we can’t beat the Yankees!”

Marse Joe McCarthy paid the fan no heed. Six starters were Yankees: Red Rolfe, Bill Dickey, George Selkirk, Joe Gordon, Red Ruffing and Joe DiMaggio. Other Yankees on the AL squad included Frank Crosetti, Lefty Gomez and Johnny Murphy. In all, counting McCarthy, there were ten Yankees on the All-Star team. The half dozen position starters played the entire game.

Lou Gehrig was there, too, an honorary member of the American League team. It was just a week after his “luckiest man” speech at the Stadium. McCarthy pitched Red Ruffing for three innings, then brought in Tommy Bridges and closed out with rookie, twenty-year-old Bob Feller who was touched for but one hit in his 3 2/3 innings. Later he said: “I was never nervous on a pitching mound. I just reared back and let them go.”

One of the big moments of the game for the home town fans was Joe DiMaggio’s fifth inning dinger highlighting the 3-1 American League triumph. After the All-Star break, the Yanks went on a tear winning 35 of 49 games.

From 1959 to 1962, Major League Baseball conducted two All-Star Games. Yankee Stadium hosted baseball’s second All-Star Game in three days. On July 13th seven Yankees were on the American League squad: starters Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Bill Skowron. The Yankee reserves were Jim Coates and Elston Howard.

The first All-Star game of 1960 had been played two day’s before. Perhaps that was why attendance was just 38,362 for this second one. Whitey Ford started for the American League against Pittsburgh’s Vernon Law. Al Lopez was the AL manager and Walt Alston was the National League pilot. For many New York baseball fans, the special appeal of the game was the return of the great Willie Mays to the city he starred in. The “Say Hey Kid” went three for four - one of his hits was a home run. The National League prevailed, 6-0.

On July 19, 1977, Yankee Stadium was once more the site of the All-Star Game. The teams prepared to square off before 56,683. The managerial match up was Billy Martin of the Yankees against Sparky Anderson of Cincinnati. Joe DiMaggio was the AL Honorary Captain and Willie Mays had that role for the National League.

DAN MARENG0: I had a seat behind home plate in the upper deck. I knew the press always made a big deal about the feud between Munson and Fisk. I looked down and the two guys were around the batting cage enjoying a conversation with each other, smiling. What do you believe?

Willie Randolph recalled: “I was a young kid in that All-Star Game, in front of my hometown fans, my family, playing in the game with guys I had grown up idolizing like Reggie Jackson and Rod Carew.”

ROD CAREW: To play in the All-Star Game with my mom there in the stands was a thrill. Just being in Yankee Stadium was an incentive to do well. The fans are special.

They’ll root for you if they like you. I think they knew I was from New York so they gave me a good ovation that day and every time I played in the Stadium. Pitcher Jim Palmer took the mound for the AL. He lasted two innings, gave up five runs on five hits, walked one and was the losing pitcher. Joe Morgan led off the game with a home run.

DENNIS ECKERSLEY: I was like 22 years old. Before the game, Billy Martin — who was a nut but I loved him — told me I was going to pitch the fourth through sixth innings. Well, our starter Jim Palmer couldn’t get out of the third. They lit him up. I came in a little earlier and pitched two scoreless innings. The National League prevailed in 1977, 7-5, and the 48th All-Star game was a matter of record.

Now Yankee Stadium, the place of mystique and memories, awaits its fourth and final All Star Game. All kinds of history will be made and millions will be watching.

Harvey Frommer is his 33rd consecutive year of writing sports books His REMEMBERING YANKEE STADIUM, an oral/narrative history (Abrams, Stewart, Tabori and Chang) will be published in September.

My “BOOK TOUR” for REMEMBERING YANKEE STADIUM (as of July 7)
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September 3, 7:30 PM Barnes & Noble, 396 Ave. Americas NY (8th St.) Ph. 212-674-8780
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September 4, 7:45 PM Varsity Letters, 302 Broome St., NY Ph. 212-334-9676
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September 5, 7:00 PM Book Revue, 313 New York Avenue, Huntington, NY 11743 Ph. 631-271-1442
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September 20, 7 PM Northshire Bookstore, 4869 Main Street, Manchester Center, VT 05255 Ph. 802-362-3565
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September 26, afternoon Fall for the Book Festival, George Mason University Fairfax, VA 22030 Ph. 703-993-3986
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October 11, afternoon Dartmouth Bookstore, Hanover, NH
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October 25, 11:30 AM Books & Greetings, 271 Livingston Street, Northvale, NJ 07647 Ph. 201-784-2665
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December 4, 7 PM RJ JULIA, Madison, CT Ph. 800-747-3247
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Suddenly, I felt a tug from behind and a soothing voice:” Stay away from him, he’s a nut job. Interview me instead.”

I did. That was my first of several meetings with terrific and affable Tom Lasorda.

We flash forward to 2007. I contacted his agent requesting access to the man who forever “bleeds Dodger blue.” I wanted to interview him for my then work in progress -REMEMBERING YANKEE STADIUM, knowing full well of Lasorda’s many battles at “the House That Ruth Built.” It seemed a simple enough request on my part.

However, I was denied access by his publisher Houghton Mifflin. It seemed that he was writing his own book and they were fearful that the few paragraphs of memories he might yield up to me would diminish his tome.

Oh, well. I’ve been there before and probably will again having to deal with silliness. My book was completed with almost a hundred unique voices telling their stories. His was also completed.

Tommy Lasorda’s book “I Live for This!: Baseball’s Last True Believer,” with the LA Times sports writer Bill Plaschke (Houghton Mifflin) is an outspoken and at the same time nostalgic romp through his considerable baseball years. His unhappiness that it took so long to get voted into the Hall of Fame, his unhappiness being relegated to the sidelines after his managing career for the Dodgers ended, his old school ranting about the lack of manners he sees as part of the culture, are just several pieces of subject matter.

There are hits runs and errors in this book. There is also Tom Lasorda coming to life - warts and all.

Also from Houghton comes “The Cubs” with text by Glenn Stout ($40.00, 460 pages) a mother lode of facts, factoids, insights and anecdotes about all things Chicago Cubs baseball.

“The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2008” ($19.95, 356 pages) contains all one probably would ever want to know about the 2007 baseball season including post-season playoffs and World Series action. Especially interesting are the detailed team statistics and graphs.

“The Ball is Round” by David Goldblatt (Riverhead Books, $24.00, 974 pages) is a Niagara of info on the world’s greatest game, the one multi-millions watch. Goldblatt has truly served up a treat and a treatise on the “beautiful game.”

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Harvey Frommer is his 33rd consecutive year of writing sports books. The author of 39 of them including the classics: “New York City Baseball: The Last Golden Age, 1947-1957” and “Shoeless Joe and Ragtime Baseball,” his REMEMBERING YANKEE STADIUM, an oral/narrative history (Abrams, Stewart, Tabori and Chang) will be published in 2008 as well as a reprint version of his “Shoeless Joe and Ragtime Baseball.”

Frommer sports books are available direct from the author - discounted and autographed.

FROMMER SPORTSNET (syndicated) reaches a readership in excess of one million and appears on Internet search engines for extended periods of time.

AN ORAL AND NARRATIVE HISTORY OF THE HOUSE THAT RUTH BUILT BY HARVEY FROMMER

The definitive work on YANKEE STADIUM, my newest book (and eighth one with Yankee content), will be published by (Stewart, Tabori, Chang/Abrams) 2008.

Now booking speaking appearances, book store signings, interviews, displays, museum exhibits, excerpts, internet postings, pod casts, reviews, publicity and marketing ops for the book.

This is the only book with a foreword by Bob Sheppard, Yankee legendary public address announcer.

It mixes and matches voices from as far back as the 1920s to today providing the perspective of the rank and file who give the nitty gritty that the you won’t find from heavier names, those who will say over and over again: “When I stepped out onto the Stadium . . .”

Instead, nearly one hundred voices give the book a sense of place and time and people. There are Hall of Famers, bat boys, fans, vendors, famed broadcasters and authors, Yankee players and managers as well as their rivals, and long-time observers of the Stadium scene. There are game calls from legends like Mel Allen, Frank Messer, Phil Rizzuto, Michael Kay.

There is the smell of mustard and the smell of jockstraps, the feel of being crushed, eight deep on the downtown D train after a game. And a sense of place you won’t find in any “official” history enhanced by more than 200 images, many of them archival and many never before published in a book. There are ticket stubs, baseball cards, program covers, scorecards. And there is a large “Stadiumology” section with stats and facts, first and lasts.

I learned many things about Yankee Stadium through writing this book. Here are 23 of them:

1. Some wanted the brand new Yankee Stadium in 1923 to be called “Ruth Stadium.” They settled for the nick-name “the House That Ruth Built.”

2. It took 500 workers 185 days to build the original Yankee Stadium.

3. At the start, names of Yankee players were imprinted in white chalk near the top of their lockers.

4. The practice of selling more tickets than existing seats endured until a 1929 stampede in the right field bleachers left two dead, 62 injured.

5. Negro League teams who played at the Stadium when the Yanks were on the road were not allowed to use the Yankee dressing rooms. Instead they were obliged to use the visitors’ dressing room.

6. “Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day” was staged before 61,808 on July 4, 1939 and his uniform number 4 was the first in baseball history to be retired.

7. In 1941, Yankee president Ed Barrow offered Civil Defense the use of Yankee Stadium as a bomb shelter in case of attack. He thought the area under the stands could provide a safe haven.

8. On August 16, 1948, Babe Ruth died of throat cancer at age 53. His body lay in state at Yankee Stadium and was viewed by more than 100,000 fans.

9. The last home run at the original Yankee Stadium on September 30, 1973 was hit by Duke Sims in his seventh day as a Yankee. A coin toss that day tabbed him to play. It was not until much later that Sims realized the significance of his home run shot.

10. The film “61″ was filmed in Detroit, not at Yankee Stadium. Billy Crystal explained the Motor City ballpark architecture was better able to be made to resemble that of the Yankee Stadium of 1961.

11. Sal Durante, the guy who caught the ball Roger MarisYankee Stadium.

12. Mickey Mantle originally wore Number 6, but equipment manager Pete Sheehy switched him to Number 7 after Mantle was recalled from Kansas City.

13. Twenty thousand letters that Mickey Mantle never answered were not bid on in the old Yankee Stadium fire sale in 1974.

14. There was widespread and indiscriminate disposal of valuable items during demolition of much of the Stadium in the mid 1970s.

15. Among the items sold in the refurbishment “fire sale” at Yankee Stadium were player jockstraps which had names on them for identification when they came back from the laundry. The selling was stopped because of sanitary reasons.

16. In 1976, a homer by Chris Chambliss gave the Yankees the American League pennant. Such a mob crowded the plate that Chambliss was taken back a few minutes after hitting the homer, and he finally touched home plate.

17. All kinds of crazy things went on in the bullpens - some of them outlandish and some of them sexy and lots having to do with food.

18. In 1988, behind a wall that was closed off for decades, a scorecard, a program and what was supposedly the bases for the 1936 team were unearthed.

19. The 1990 Yankees had but one starting pitcher who won more than seven games, nine-game winner Tim Leary. But he also lost 19.

20. On September 11, 2001 within 90 minutes of the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center, Yankee Stadium was evacuated.

21. Ron Guidry, a good drummer, once kept a trap set at Yankee Stadium and also played in a post-game concert with the Beach Boys.

22. Joe Torre was witness to all three perfect games in Yankee Stadium history: He saw Don Larsen’s beauty as a 16-year-old fan, and the gems spun by David Wells and David Cone from the dugout as Yankee manager.

23. Bob Sheppard holds the record for seeing the most games at Yankee Stadium.

Please check out my home page.

“Harvey Frommer brings a vast amount of experience in the art of the oral history, one of the many tools at the disposal of the historian. From his Shoeless Joe and Ragtime Baseball to Red Sox-Yankees The Great Rivalry, Frommer shows that he is a baseball writer and historian of repute.” -SABR executive director John Zajc.

“First among equals is Harvey Frommer, with his wife Myrna Katz Frommer, a great expert on all things baseball and New York (and that city within a city,) Brooklyn” - John Thorn, Baseball Historian

Toronto - Matt Stairs, St. John, New Brunswick’s version of the Energizer Bunny, just keeps going and going and going.

Tonight, assuming John Gibbons pencils him into the line-up versus the Boston Red Sox at Rogers Centre, Stairs will hike his career games played to 1532, one more than Melville, Saskatchewan’s Terry Puhl. Stairs will only trail Maple Ridge, BC’s Larry Walker in Major League games played by a Canadian, as Walker appeared in 1988 games over his 17-year career.

Stairs, in his 15th year in the bigs, isn’t just clinging on to notch milestones. A case can be made for him as the Blue Jays MVP of this season, as evidenced by his team leading .301 batting average and .571 slugging percentage, including 19 homeruns and 59 RBI in just 115 game appearances. He is hitting at a .319 clip in September, and is .333 over the last 30 days. Stairs has had numerous clutch hits for the Blue Jays throughout the season, and has contributed on the defensive side of the ball as well, playing in the outfield as well as a stellar first base, having made just six errors all season. He’s even stolen a pair of bases.

Rounding out the top ten Canucks in career games played are Jack Graney (St. Thomas, ON) with 1402, Jeff Heath (Fort William, ON) 1383, Moonie Gibson (London, ON) 1213, Frank O’Rourke (Hamilton, ON) 1131, Pop Smith (Digby, NS) 1112, Tip O’Neill (Woodstock, ON) 1054, and Bill Phillips (St. John, NB) with 1038.

Stairs holds the record for the most consecutive seasons with 100 or more games played by a Canadian with 11 (from 1997-2007), and is second in homeruns, third in RBI, doubles, triples, total bases and walks. He is fifth in career hits, at bats and runs.

Source: Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum.

Celebrity Nominations

1. Joe Castiglione
2. Hazel Mae
3. Sam Horn
4. Mike Barnicle
5. Peter Gammons
6. Bill Simmons
7. Dennis Drinkwater
8. Cindy Brown
9. Rob “Just A Regular Rob” Crawford
10. Rick Swanson, “The Fan’s Commish”
11. Doris Kearns Goodwin

Then Boston Dirt Dogs ran this story about me, “The Fan who would be President”

Here is my Platform Statement to be President of Red Sox Nation:

Rick Swanson, born in New Britain, resides in Glastonbury, CT. Married since 1985 with 3 children.   P.E. teacher. I  went to my first Red Sox game in 1957, when TW hit a tying home run in the ninth against NY. Lucky enough to be there for Longborg, Fisk, and Papi, faithful enough to be there for Bucky, Buckner and Boone.

Wrote the following to the owner, president, and GM of the team after game 2 in 2004.  ”I’m going to say something now that probably no other Red Sox fan would even say, or even think. I hope they lose game three and fall behind 3 games to zero. Then I want to see the greatest comeback ever in the history of baseball. The 2004 Boston Red Sox will be the first team in baseball history to come back from the grave, and win a 7 game series after losing the first 3 games. Then on top of that they will then go on to win the World Series in four straight, over the Cardinals.”

The number one priority of my platform, is to influence the leaders to make the best trades, and play the right people at the right time, and to assist in leading the Red Sox to a World Championship every year. Well at least 2 in a row.

2. To put a team on the field that the fans love. Every effort will be made to bring back Orlando Cabrera, and Dave Roberts.

3. Johnny Pesky will be back in the dugout before October 1, if I am elected on September 29.

4. Red Sox Nation will be a free nation for all who want to participate. Any Red Sox fan with passion will be in. Pink hats too.

5. To create Red Sox World and hotel with 200 rooms with a view over the monster looking down on Fenway built over the Mass Pike. Better than Disneyland for all Red Sox fans. Machinima avatars will recreate every great game in Red Sox history. 

6. Retire number 25.   

7. Eliminate Standing from Standing Room Only, with a Walkstool for all.  

8. Have an Okajima titanium necklace day, where all fans receive the same red and white necklace, with the same magical powers. 

9. Put a new statistic to measure defense into baseball. Reaction and Range.  

10. Replay games by editing each game so you only see the last pitch of every at bat. A complete game will be shown in 30 minutes.

Rick Swanson

For now I call myself The Fan’s Commish soon I hope I can call myself President of RSN.