(1) Attend the Baseball Hall of Fame Induction of Craig Biggio and then spend a month in Cooperstown, soaking up the library, exhibits, workshops, lifestyle, and culture of baseball’s symbolic birthplace.
(2) Attend the College World Series in Omaha, preferably in a year which featured my UH alma mater or my home town kid favorite, Rice, but I will be realistic here. I may be too old to wait for UH to get there, but things do look promising for Cougar baseball out on Cullen Boulevard.
(3) Attend the Little League World Series in Williamsport, PA, hopefully, like this year, at a time which features a team from the Greater Houston area.
(4) Watch all home games of an Astros trip to the World Series in a winning effort against any other team, but I would prefer the opposition to be either the Yankees or Red Sox, if my wish for a return of Houston to the National League would only come true. (Thanks for the reminder oft that rather major technicality, Greg Lucas: If the Astros don’t return to the NL, there can never be a Houston World Series against those two more famous “other” AL clubs). Beating either the storied Yankees or Red Sox would simply make an Astros World Series championship taste even sweeter and, of course, it would also make the victory feel more official to some of us. Amend this wish again. If our foe is Boston or New York as a born again Astros NL club, I’d like to see the away games too!
(5) Visit the “Field of Dreams” site in Iowa. (Stole this one straight from the above featured baseball bucket list illustration.).
(6) Visit the old St. Mary’s School site in Baltimore where Babe Ruth spent quite a few of his later childhood years and really started playing baseball. I saw the Babe’s downtown home site on a brief family wedding guest trip to Baltimore in 2007, but didn’t have time to find a way to se whatever remains of the St. Mary’s site where the Babe lived and went to school.
(7) Find and recover for copying the 78 rpm record album that contained the remarks of all who spoke at the first Houston Buff Banquet that celebrated the 1947 Dixie Series championship that the club had just captured. As far as dinners go, this one was really the first organized dinner in Houston baseball history, although we would have first rule out the possibility of earlier banquets during the Fred Ankenman years as president – or even earlier. In the case of the 1947 album, which included the voice of Solly Hemus, the item somehow ended up in the hands of former Buff pitcher Pete Mazar and his wife Eleanor. Long after Pete Mazar died, Jo Russell and I tried to “borrow” it long enough to make a copy, but we could never earn the trust of the family that we might either break one of the records or simply keep the album or lower its commercial value as an only recording by making a copy. Sadly, the value of this item is more to history than anything else. Now it stands to rot away in storage until someone comes along later and decides its trash and throws it away. This one may be on my bucket list, but my real wish is that someone could find a way to track it down and save it for our local baseball history. That’s what really matters. Eleanor Mazar has also now died, leaving the album, if anywhere, in the possession of their descendants.
(8) Find the survivors and organize a reunion of the remaining “kids” who played on our Houston East End sandlot team, The Pecan Park Eagles, back in the summer of 1950.
(9) Live to see the re-establishment of another annual Houston Baseball Dinner that is tied to the goals of again connecting the average fan to baseball in Houston and also to raising money over time that keeps dinner ticket prices affordable while offering high end dollar items at auction as the money-raising wing of the annual activity for the establishment or support of a Houston Baseball Hall of Honor and History.
((10) To live to see the thriving existence of a Houston Baseball Hall of Honor and History alive and well downtown and done the right way.
That’s my list. If you have one, please leave a comment and share with the rest of us what it contains.
PS: No further developments are available on the temporary research problem we have with acquiring data on the more recent history of Houston baseball dinners, but we shall return to that subject as soon as we are able.
Houston, Baseball, & Other Musings.
The Pecan Park Eagle 