editor’s letter
OLD PASTIME THRIVES ON NEW BLOOD A Panama City kid makes it to baseball’s big leagues
16
February-March 2021
get by me retreated, and the typically expressionless pitcher favored me with a nod. My status had risen. For the first time as a member of the Italian Inn team, I had something to lose. I thought back to that catch — my personal equivalent of Willie Mays robbing Vic Wertz — after interviewing Nick Nelson, who graduated Rutherford High School and Gulf Coast State College and last year made 11 appearances as a rookie pitching in relief for the New York Yankees. By how many times would you have to multiply the intensity associated with trying to win over the Italian Inn to get to that of striving to take a place among the New York Yankees? But Nelson seems to have done so with relative aplomb. His is a disarming nature, and he got along well with Yankee veterans, including Gerrit Cole, the ace of the pitching staff. He picked up a win and struck out 18 hitters in 20⅔ innings. Nelson is 25. At that age, Mickey Mantle, a player who so enthralled me as a boy that I became a lifelong Yankees fan, was the American League MVP and a Toots Shor’s nightclub habitué, along with running buddies including Whitey Ford and Billy Martin. Nelson is devoted to his girlfriend and daughter, has an abiding respect for the grandparents who raised him and the coaches who groomed him for success, and looks forward to visiting museums in the city when the pandemic lifts. His coach at Gulf Coast, Mike Kandler, was pleased to learn in November that Nelson was driving the same truck that he had before making it to the big leagues. “That’s smart,” said Kandler, true to
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his conservative, Midwestern, Packerfan, wisdom-dispensing nature. “Save your money.” Baseball writer Roger Kahn, in his classic work about aging onetime Brooklyn Dodgers players, The Boys of Summer, quoted the writer Ed Linn, who observed, “Sooner or later, society beats down the man of muscle and sweat.” Kahn wrote, however, that he was not saddened by his meetings with Dodgers long retired from a boy’s game played by men. Rather, he was renewed by their dignity and hope. I did not come away from my meeting with Nelson saddened by my own advancing age. I was instead renewed by a young man and his resolve and his optimism and by the vitality of a national pastime whose rhythms stir me every spring. Play ball,
STEVE BORNHOFT EXECUTIVE EDITOR sbornhoft@rowlandpublishing.com
PHOTO BY MICHAEL BOOINI
I was new to the Italian Inn softball team, which was captained and sponsored by a future mayor of Panama City and to which I was introduced by a future Bay County commissioner. Of the two, one had the bearing of a public official and was capable, certainly, of mastering the calculus of elective politics. The other was an intelligent but loquacious sort and was helped out because he looked good enough to be mistaken from time to time for the actor David Duchovny. To all of the other members of the team, I was an unknown and unproven interloper to whom it was made clear that acceptance would have to be earned. Especially distant was the pitcher, a dark and mysterious paper mill worker who said little and arrived at games toting a large, stuffed duffle bag from which he never produced anything other than a glove and a favorite bat. You were left to wonder what else the bag contained. If someone were to tell you about the pitcher that he was a pool shark and a bookie who once did 10 years for manslaughter, you would believe it. A shortage of players one night resulted in my getting a start in right center field. I am sure that after taking my position, I looked about in a way that betrayed my nervousness. Here was my chance to make a good impression on the established players who surrounded me. The ball left home plate on a rope, but my jump on it was good and I streaked to my right, stuck out my Mag Plus, Chinese-made glove and, in one of those moments where the game slows down, made the catch. Baserunners who were convinced that the ball would
