Mazeroski's 1960 Series-winning walk-off homer will find a 14 year old kid named Andy Jerpe on the other side of this wall. Andy left the game early to help his mom with supper and was standing among a small grove of cherry trees when the ball came down from its historic ride through the Pittsburgh sky. Jerpe preserved the ball through the winter, then lost it in the weeds of a sandlot game the following spring.
Mark Wernick, a good Houston SABR friend, dropped me a nice note about meeting Bill Mazeroski yesterday at the Tri-Star Collectibles Show at the George R. Brown Convention Center downtown. While signing a book for Mark, Wernick first apologized for asking what he knew was a question that Mazeroski had heard thousands of times – and then he asked it anyway.
“Was it a meatball, or was it a good pitch?” Wernick asked in reference to Ralph Terry’s last pitch of the 1960 World Series.
Mazeroski motioned with his hand and then spoke. “It wasn’t a good pitch. It was right over the plate. About belt high. Straight.”
“Fastball?” Wernick further queried.
“I thought it was,” Mazeroski added. “He (Terry) says it was a slider. But it didn’t slide.”
Referring to himself, of course, Wernick said, “You broke a 12-year old kid’s heart that day.”
Mark says he then noted a brief look of compassion in Mazeroski’s eyes, but that was quickly followed by an engaging laugh and further comment from the great Pirate hero. “I made a lot of them happy too!”
Wernick says he ironically agreed with Mazeroski. What he didn’t tell Mazeroski is that was listening to the game on an unauthorized transistor radio in the hallway at Mark Twain Junior High School in San Antonio at the time as a Yankees fan. The game-winning homer just happened while Wernick was walking from one class to another. Once it did it its stunning deed, Wernick says he had to duck into the boys’ rest room so that no one would see him crying from the pain that home run cased to him that day.
Mark Wernick’s a big boy these days. He’s recovered from the original pain and simply grown in his appreciation for the moment as simply a part of baseball’s magnificent history.
The irony is that another 14 year old Pirates fan named Andy Jerpe was having quite a different experience with that event at the very moment our San Antonio 14 year old was descending into despair. Andy Jerpe had been at the game, but had left a few minutes earlier to get home and help his mom with preparations for supper.
(Had that been me, I would have stayed inside Forbes Field. Dinner would have been late. I’d have to have risked getting in trouble later.)
Because Andy Jerpe was a “good boy,” his progress home had carried him early to a grove of cherry trees, just beyond the left field line. All of a sudden, he heard an enormous roar from the ballpark. Then, from out of the sky, this baseball (THE Mazeroski Ball) drops out of the sky and only a few feet away. – And he’s the only one around the area at the time.
“Someone just homered,” was Jerpe’s conclusion. And once he went back long enough to find out all the particulars, he knew he wanted to keep the ball. He took it home and told the family wha had happened, but there was apparently no big uproar over his possession of a souvenir ball. Fans kept souvenir baseballs all the time.
Andy built a display case for it and things seemed cool about its survival for a while – or until spring came again. And Andy’s friends talked him into using the ball for some sandlot fun. Aside from the dirt spots and scratches that immediately started checking in, the ball was making it until Andy Jerpe himself sliced the ball into some tall festering weeds. The kids looked for the ball, but all say they never found it. And that is supposedly what happened to the Mazeroski.
Andy Jerpe says he has recovered from his regret and forgiven himself for losing the Mazeroski baseball.
Speak for yourself, Andy. You’re from Pittsburgh and should have known better, even at age 14, not to have used that special ball in any kind of sandlot game. There are those of us in Houston from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s who never would have done that – even at 14 frickin’ years of age – and we would have ordinarily killed for a good baseball – as long as it didn’t belong first to history.
Andy Jerpe, You Idiot! (Just Kidding – sort of.)
Here’s a link to a pretty good story of the Andy Jerpe experience with the Mazeroski baseball.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/sports/pirates/s_700262.html
Houston, Baseball, & Other Musings.
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