MIAMI — If you were one of the lucky ones who spent your summers with the “Boys of Summer,” you remember Duke Snider. You remember the sweet left-handed swing, and balls that soared over the right-field screen at old Ebbets Field and landed on Bedford Avenue. You remember the way he would chase baseballs to the wall of the oddly-crafted outfield fences.
You remember when Next Year finally arrived, in 1955, the year the Duke of Flatbush had his greatest season, 42 homers and 136 RBIs and 104 walks, a 1.036 OPS before anyone knew enough to calculate OPS, then four more homers and seven more RBIs in the World Series, when the Bums finally beat the Yankees.
“If I live to be 100 years old,” he said in 2002, “I’ll always be able to remember what it felt to be young and a ballplayer in Brooklyn, N.Y., and I’ll always remember what it meant to be a champion of the world there.”
Snider died yesterday at 84 of natural causes, and his passing extinguishes another light from the old Brooklyn landscape, a power that lived for decades after the Dodgers abandoned the borough. He was a high school classmate of late NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle’s, a Californian who found a home in Brooklyn before going back again. And he lives, even this morning, in the memories of the lucky ones who were there.
Terry Cashman was there. Cashman, out of Hillside Avenue in Washington Heights, was a cop’s son who was partial to the neighborhood Giants of the Polo Grounds, but embraced everything about New York City’s role as the capital of baseball in the 1950s.
Cashman played a little minor league ball in the Tigers organization, wound up a big-time music executive, co-wrote the hit “Sunday Will Never Be the Same,” for Spanky and Our Gang, became the producer for Jim Croce. And in 1979 or so, a Mets exec named Thornton Geary rang him up.
“I have a photograph you really need to see,” said Geary, the Mets’ vice president for communication.
It was a beauty, taken at Old-Timer’s Day at Shea Stadium a few years earlier, a picture of New York’s four greatest center fielders taken from the back, so instead of faces you saw Joe DiMaggio’s 5, Mickey Mantle’s 7, Willie Mays’ 24. And Duke Snider’s 4.
“I need that picture,” Cashman told his friend.
“Take it,” Geary told him. “It’s yours.”
“No,” Cashman said. “I need to own it.”
So he did. Cashman was by then just as likely to be found with his nose buried in “The Baseball Encylopedia” as in a stack of sheet music, balancing his two loves. He contacted the photographer, bought the negatives, printed copies for friends, and hung one in his own East Side apartment.
That picture was staring at him the night he came home from work a few years later, looking to scare up a B-side for a baseball song he was producing. It was on his mind as he drifted off to sleep, as the mysteries that allow gifted people to create music out of nothing went to work inside his brain.
In the morning Cashman woke up and grabbed his guitar. Twenty minutes later, “Talkin’ Baseball” was finished. That was 1981. Thirty years later, “Willie, Mickey and the Duke” remains one of the catchiest choruses of any song, played still in every stadium where baseball is, a song that is more than a song, but a slice of an America we still yearn for, even those of us not yet born when Casey was winnin’, when Hank Aaron was beginnin’.
“It was a part of my heart,” Cashman told me not long ago, “but I think it reflected what was in a lot of people’s hearts, too.”
He smiled.
“Our memories,” he said, “don’t die. Thank goodness for that.”