By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
The start of spring training always reminds me that I was not a very good baseball player. In one season as a little league shortstop, balls skittered though my legs as often as they landed in my mitt. As a result, my athletic achievements were vicarious, not personal. I basked in whatever reflected glory I could get.
Because I grew up without a father, mine was not around to regale and enthrall me with stories about family sports legends. My mother was bright, but didn’t follow baseball (or football or basketball). So I turned to a second string lineup of family and friends for athletic bonding moments.
My older sister Karen sometimes filled in for the parents when it came to the national pastime. Together we watched the first World Series that I remember—in 1969, when the New York Miracle Mets won the championship.
A few years later, Karen and I fanatically followed the Pittsburgh Pirates on their 1971 championship run. We both liked all-star Roberto Clemente, a devout Catholic. A year after his World Series win, he died in a 1972 plane crash bringing earthquake relief supplies to the people of Nicaragua.
Karen also took me to see several of our hometown Ogden (Utah) Dodgers minor league baseball games. The Ogden rookie team, once coached by LA Hall of Fame manager Tommy Lasorda, produced MLB all stars like Steve Yeager, Bill Buckner, and Steve Garvey.
The Northern Utah Trappist monks I knew as a boy (see Monastery Mornings, Paraclete Press 2021) helped me appreciate sports too. The last thing my friend Father Patrick Boyle did in 1950—right before joining the old Huntsville abbey— was to watch Stan Musial hit a home run for his beloved hometown St. Louis Cardinals.
Bronx native and Trappist monk Brother Boniface Ptasienski—a child of the 1920s and 30s—watched the greatest of the New York Yankees play ball. Yet, he did not choose Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, or Joe DiMaggio as his boyhood hero.
Instead, Boniface picked the steady, low-key, all-star Yankee catcher Bill Dickey. Dickey was so good that he was cast to play himself in the 1942 film The Pride of the Yankees, starring Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig.
These early vicarious sports thrills whetted my appetite for more. Years later, I found some in genealogy research. I’ve pumped my fist in the air many times while sitting at my laptop after discovering a unique family connection to the world of sports.
Perhaps due to ancestral geography, our family athletic connections primarily involve baseball, particularly the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees. Here are some of my favorite anecdotes.
In 1909, Walter E. Trum, owner of a paper box manufacturing company, married Mary Louise Duffy, the older sister of my grandmother (Florence Duffy). Trum, my uncle by marriage, was deeply enmeshed in the Brooklyn Catholic and business communities, which often overlapped.
As an officer of the Brooklyn Club, Uncle Trum joined in several annual celebrations paying tribute to deceased Dodgers owner Charles Ebbets, for whom Brooklyn’s legendary Ebbets Field was named. A bequest in Ebbets’ 1925 will funded the annual celebrations in his honor.
The infamous Walter O’Malley attended one of these dinners with Trum. I can imagine the ghost of Ebbets—Brooklyn’s “grand old man” of baseball—frantically circling the room that night. With his gift of afterlife foresight, surely Ebbets tried to warn everyone that O’Malley would move the beloved Dodgers to Los Angeles a few years later.
O’Malley, who started as the team’s legal counsel before joining the ownership ranks, was hated in Brooklyn after the move west. A friend of mine born in the New York area once told me he grew up thinking O’Malley’s real name was “F__king O’Malley,” because that is what his father called the Dodgers owner all the time.
Before O’Malley could make that momentous decision, however, he needed to gain controlling interest in the team. Co-owner Branch Rickey, famous for bringing Jackie Robinson into pro ball, demanded a huge sum for a possible buyout in 1950. How did O’Malley pay it?
My family is involved in that moment of Dodger history too, but in an innocent way. Years earlier, my great grandfather Charles Duffy and his relatives started the J.P. Duffy Company, which sold building materials throughout the metro area. O’Malley was a co-owner in that family company. He sold that Duffy equity to buy out Rickey.
The Duffys may not have been too troubled about how O’Malley eventually used that money to move the team to Los Angeles. Why? I suspect that at least some of them were Yankees fans.
My grandmother Florence’s younger sister—Kathryn Duffy—married a man named Paul Carey in 1921. Carey, my great uncle, was best friends with a certain well known Yankee named George Herman “Babe” Ruth.
Carey was a dashing naval officer and his family owned the fleet of Cadillacs that served New York City’s Grand Central Station. Perhaps while learning the family business as a chauffeur, Carey met and befriended Ruth.
They grew so close that Carey sat by Ruth’s deathbed in August 1948. Carey also administered the Babe’s will and served as a trustee of the Babe Ruth Foundation. Ruth gave 10% of his estate to help underprivileged youth.
While still alive, the Bambino often visited local orphanages while traveling. The Babe explained why in a touching letter published in Norman Vincent Peale’s Guideposts magazine just after Ruth’s death from cancer seventy-five years ago. Uncle Carey helped Ruth write that letter.
According to the letter, right before one serious surgery to treat the disease, Carey told the Yankee slugger, “They’re going to operate in the morning, Babe. Don’t you think you ought to put your house in order?” Ruth called for a Catholic priest, and later penned the poignant letter first published after his death.
Among other things, the letter described Ruth’s “harum scarum” childhood, which ended in a Baltimore reform school run by a Catholic religious order. Ruth wrote, “I was listed as an incorrigible. I guess I was. Perhaps I would always have been but for Brother Matthias, the greatest man I have ever known.”
Brother Matthias, a Catholic brother and teacher at the school, gave Ruth the love and attention that helped him turn his life around. And my uncle Paul Carey helped Ruth tell that lovely story to the rest of the world.
My own baseball acumen is somewhat akin to that of former MLB player and comedian Bob Uecker, who said he knew his playing career was over when “my baseball card came out with no picture.” The sports trading card of my athletic life does not have my picture on it either. Happily, however, my memory can paint many other vibrant images on it instead.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
Sent this to my seven baseball-loving brothers. I find baseball lovers are a dying breed in my family.
Meaning my kids and grandkids. Sad.