San Francisco's Joltin' Joe
Bonding with Gramps Through Baseball
👋 Hello, I’m Kevin Ferguson and welcome to 🍷 Rain on the Monte Bello Ridge,🍷 a memoir about health, aging and winemaking. (Book summary in 50 words)
Below is an early chapter. Hope you enjoy it!
Bonding with Gramps Through Baseball
It was a big day. At least in the eyes of any seven-year-old. I punched the palm of my Little League mitt three times, anxiously awaiting my Gramps to pick me up.
It was a Saturday in September, 1979. Almost noon. Warm and sunny on the San Francisco peninsula. We were going to the Giants’ doubleheader against the Pittsburgh Pirates at Candlestick Park.
The Giants were atrocious that year. Close to last place and about 20 games behind the division-leading Reds. But that didn’t matter to me. I was spending the day at the ballpark with my Gramps. Little did I know, it would be a pinnacle moment of my youthful sports-rooting days.
My loyalty to the hometown Giants hadn’t been solidified. My allegiance was challenged at home. My dad grew up in Los Angeles and rooted for the Dodgers. But most Bay Area school-age kids knew that was blasphemy.
That was confirmed at another Giants game a year earlier with my dad and my older brother, Mike. Trying to exit the parking lot, we were spooked by a rowdy Candlestick hoodlum who pounded on the hood of our car.
“Take that fucking Dodger hat off!” The hoodlum yelled at my dad.
“Windows up, boys!” My dad honked his horn, revved his engine and high-tailed out of there.
1978: Mario Gemello crushes grapes with his grandchildren, Gina, 4, and Kevin, 6.
Things were less chaotic that September day with Gramps. By the eighth inning of the first game, I was getting familiar with Pittsburgh’s cleanup hitter. A big muscular guy named Willie Stargell, who homered in his earlier at bat. What was distinct about him - besides his enormous size - was his warmup swings. He’d rock-and-pump his arms in large circles with every practice swing. Even if you were sitting in the top deck, as we were, you knew it was him before you heard his name on the loudspeaker.
As he took his practice cuts, I turned to gramps and had to ask, “Who is this guy?”
“STARRRRRRRRR-gell,” Gramps said. He clearly knew this was an MVP candidate.
BAM!
Stargell crushed the pitch, sending the ball over the right field fence. The homer extended the Pirates lead: 5-3.
“It’s like déjà vu aaaaaall over again,” Gramps said, quoting the late great Yogi Berra. Grandpa loved Yogi-isms, the witty observations and perhaps the longer lasting legacy of the Hall of Fame Yankees catcher of the baby boomers generation.
Stargell’s performance left a lasting impact on me. Post-game homework: sift through my baseball cards to see if I had Willie Stargell.
Modeling my Christmas gift - 1979
That day at Candlestick Park was a great memory of spending time with my late grandfather, who of course, let me eat all the junk food I wanted.
“We’re going to get something different to eat every inning,” Gramps said that day. A few innings in, he caught the attention of the ice cream guy climbing our aisle.
Chocolate malts here! Get your ice cream here!
“How many would you like?” the guy said to Gramps.
“We’ll take one chocolate malt,” Grandpa said, passing the malt to me. “And we’ll take an ice cream, too!”
“No, no, sir. I’m using those words interchangeably. They’re the same thing.”
With a twinge of disappointment, Grandpa said, “All right. We’ll take one more.”
The ice cream guy handed Gramps two sporks. He looked at the teeth at the end of the funny-looking plastic spoons and noticed an opportunity to make his grandson laugh with another Yogi-ism: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it!”
When I came home and told my mom that eating was half the game experience for Grandpa, she laughed. “That’s because he can’t do that with Grandma. She keeps a lid on his eating.”
By October, Stargell’s Pirates were in the thick of the playoffs. Therefore, on TV a lot. I started to imitate Stargell’s rock-and-pump practice swings with my imaginary bat, as I watched the playoffs in my bedroom. When you’re an impressionable seven-year-old and watch a superstar shine in person, it does something to you. Especially when he continued to elevate his game in the biggest moments of the playoffs.
In late October, the Pirate were on the verge of losing the World Series, down three games to one to the Baltimore Orioles. But they battled back to tie the series. Stargell then hit a towering two-run homer to win Game 7 and emerge World Series champions.
It was a special moment, reminding me of that day at Candlestick Park with my grandfather.
1980: Kevin, 8, in his grandparents' drivewayGramps took me to countless games over the years. All the while, I assumed he was a Giants fan, as I later became, shortly after Stargell retired in 1982. The Giants began trading for or developing exciting new players, like Will Clark and Kevin Mitchell. Then one day, in 2002 or ’03, Gramps dropped a bomb - proclaiming he was a Yankee fan.
“Wait! What?” I asked.
“Always have been!” he said, now age 85 or 86. “Mariano Rivera’s amazing,” he added, referring to the Yankees dominant closer during its World Series title runs in the 1990s.
That sounded like a fair weather fan, out of character for my Gramps. Even my uncles, John and Mark, said that was confusing. We knew he loved Yogi Berra, but we all assumed it was because Berra’s witty one-liners were part of Gramps’ comedy routine. He loved an audience.
A couple years later, following my grandfather’s passing in 2005, the family joked about Grandpa’s late-life Yankee fandom revelation. Sad that we could no longer question him further. The signs were not very apparent, until he said it that one day. He wasn’t the type to hang pennants at the winery or in his home office. He’d wear random hats, simply to keep the sun out of his eyes.
But Uncle John did recall that Gramps used to talk about his youthful admiration of the Yankee Clipper, Joe DiMaggio. Joltin’ Joe was a San Francisco native and grew up in the North Beach neighborhood.
Grandma Kay confirmed that as well. “Grandpa and my brother Pete were Yankee fans as kids.”
It’s hard to imagine how Bay Area high school kids could follow a New York sports team in the early 1930s. There was no TV. Baseball games weren’t widely on the radio until the mid thirties.
But DiMaggio broke into professional baseball with the San Francisco Seals, of the Pacific Coast League (PCL), a step below the Majors. That year, my grandfather was a 17-year-old junior at Mountain View Union High School.
Joe DiMaggio (right), age 20, Joe Marty & Seals manager Lefty O'Doul (AP Images)DiMaggio was a man of streaks. His first year with the Seals, he took the PCL by storm, getting a hit in 61 straight games. This led to a remarkable .340 batting average for the season.1 This would be a precursor to what he’d do in 1941 on the biggest stage as a New York Yankee: shattering Willie Keeler’s 45-game-hit streak. DiMaggio’s hit streak of 56 straight games still stands today.
In the 1930s, Gramps and Uncle Pete would drive up to San Francisco to catch a Seals game whenever they had a chance.
This was in the heart of the Great Depression, so it wasn’t common for families, let alone teenagers, to have access to wheels. But Mario’s father, my great grandfather, made a wise pivot from vineyards to truck farms during Prohibition. Throughout the 1920s and early ‘30s, great grandpa and his partners peddled vegetables door-to-door throughout the Santa Clara Valley. Trucks were used to carry the allotment of vegetables house-to-house as properties were spaced far apart between orchards. This was a much needed service during the Great Depression as the Gemello Winery was getting off the ground, starting in 1934.
During that time, DiMaggio was the “golden boy of San Francisco,” long before Willie Mays and the Giants moved to town in 1958, said the late Hall of Famer and Bay Area native Joe Morgan.2
The Seals sold DiMaggio to the Yankees following the 1934 season, but a knee injury kept him from reporting to New York. Instead, DiMaggio continued to dazzle San Francisco fans for another season, smacking 34 home runs, 154 RBIs and a .389 batting average.3
DiMaggio’s move to New York in 1936 meant Bay Area sports fans, like my grandfather, would have to read about DiMaggio’s feats in the sports pages. That is, except for the World Series, since Major League Baseball struck a deal a year earlier to broadcast the World Series nationally on the radio.4
DiMaggio’s Yankees would make the World Series seven out of the next eight years.
Joe Morgan’s quote from the book, 24: Life Stories and Lessons From the Say Hey Kid, co-authored by Willie Mays and John Shea. It was published in 2020, the same year as Morgan’s unfortunate death.
DiMaggio Fun Fact: Seals Owner Charlie Graham sold DiMaggio to the Yankees after the 1934 season for $25,000 and five players.