Stan Musial at the Polo Grounds.

I don't remember the New York Giants or the Brooklyn Dodgers. I was three when they left for California. When my dad was growing up, New York had three ballclubs, and you were allowed to like only one; you had to hate the other two. Those were the rules. My dad’s team was the Giants. When they were gone, his heart was broken. He blamed everything on Mean Old Walter O'Malley. It wasn't bad enough that Mean Old Walter O'Malley had convinced Poor Old Horace Stoneham to go west with him; Mean Old Walter O'Malley had talked Poor Old Horace Stoneham into moving my dad's beloved Giants to cold, rainy San Francisco, while Mean Old Walter O'Malley took the hated Dodgers to sunny Los Angeles. It was too much to bear.

My dad was, and is, a National League fan. He may have hated the Dodgers, but at least they were a National League team. So, with the Dodgers and Giants (sorry, Dad, the Giants and the Dodgers) gone, as far as my dad was concerned, there was no Major League Baseball in New York. He refused to take us to see the minor league team in the Bronx. My brother and I knew all about Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris and Bobby Richardson and Tommy Tresh and Tony Kubek and Clete Boyer and Moose Skowron and Yogi Berra and Elston Howard and Whitey Ford from our friends. We had trouble understanding how the team in the Bronx, who beat the holy crap out of everybody year after year, could be the minor league team, but that's just how it was. My dad said we would understand when we were older.

It wasn't until the Mets started playing in 1962, and there was National League baseball in New York once more, that my dad took us to a ballgame. We went up to the Polo Grounds on Sunday, 8 July 1962, to see the Mets play the St Louis Cardinals, who, nearing the end of a long dry spell, were about to start beating the holy crap out of everybody, too.

The Polo Grounds was huge. (For years, my brother and I thought that every ballpark was huge. It wasn't until we went to Shibe Park in Philadelphia in 1968, by that time gloriously renamed Connie Mack Stadium, that we learned that most ballparks were not huge, and looked nothing like the Polo Grounds.) The foul lines were short, but the centerfield wall was 483 feet from home plate. The team clubhouses were beyond centerfield, up a flight of stairs that were on the field. The resulting niche pushed the dead centerfield wall back to 505 feet. Vic Wertz' shot in the 1954 World Series that Willie Mays caught over his shoulder would have been a home run anywhere else, by 50 feet. There were vertical iron girders throughout the stadium that managed to block the view of anything important, without fail.

The Mets lost, 15-1. I was only eight, and even I could tell they weren't very good. The Mets committed four errors; Frank Thomas, their best hitter but something of a defensive liability, had two of them. They only managed three hits. I really didn't understand how this could be the major league team in New York.

But my dad was in heaven. He was finally sitting in a National League ballpark with his sons, the same ballpark he had sat in with his father (more often his grandfather, actually; my grandfather didn't care too much for baseball), watching guys he remembered from what were already being called the Old New York Giants; the Old Brooklyn Dodgers, too.

The Mets scored their one run in the bottom of the ninth, on Felix Mantilla’s triple and a groundout. Even the Cardinals' pitcher, Bob Gibson, hit a home run. But the Cardinals' left-fielder, Stan Musial, forty-one years old, hit three mammoth home runs and was removed in the eighth inning. My dad said he must be tired. When Stan Musial left the game, he had to walk across the outfield to get to the clubhouse and the crowd cheered, so he walked a little slower.

My brother and I had finally seen our first baseball game. Now that we had seen a National League game, my dad relented and took us to see the minor league team in the Bronx, so we got to see all the guys that our friends had been telling us about. They even beat the Red Sox that day, in the bottom of the ninth.

The Mets moved to Shea Stadium in 1964, practically walking distance from our house in Corona. We got to see a lot of games in the next few years (particularly when the Mets played the San Francisco Giants), but I wasn't present at a game that the Mets won until 1967.

The Polo Grounds was torn down in April 1964, right around Opening Day. We moved to Jersey in 1968.

The night before our first game, Stan Musial hit a home run in his last at-bat. Combined with the three he hit at our first game, he hit four home runs in four consecutive at-bats, which tied a major league record. Monday's Times dedicated half a page to the game, and Musial's feat. Thanks to Stan Musial, I was able, years later, to find out the exact date of my first baseball game, complete with a big spread in the Times.

Stan Musial died yesterday, at the age of 92. Thanks, Stan.

(...& special thanks to William Austin Campbell, Sr., whose photograph of Stan Musial I cribbed.)