DB~ works with a guy who let her bring home a piece of cool memorabilia to show her two biggest Pirate fans -- her dad and me. It's a commemorative bat from the 1979 World Series winning Pirates.
On the bat were all the usual suspects -- Stargell, Parker, Madlock, Candelaria, and Tekulve -- but there was also one other name prominently featured. A young, 22-year old shortstop, still four years away from his prime drug-abusing peak, named Dale Berra signed his name.
It's got to be tough to be the son of one of the most famous players in baseball history, especially one that had such a well-known personality off the field, but Dale Berra never amounted to anything in his career. Drugs ruined it, but he was never going to be a star in his own right.
It was a young 8-year old nerd that was first captivated by the 1984 Pirates and saw Dale Berra. Imagine being an impressionable little kid rooting for your first Pirate team and the 1984 Pirates were your first team. Yikes. To hear people tell it now, the streets of Pittsburgh were paved with cocaine back then.
I started this blog as a way to memorialize events and thoughts for DB~ and I. The fact that it is so widely (un)read only adds to it for me. I selected Dale Berra's Stash for the triple meaning:
1. A reference to his fantastic mustache
2. A reference to his fantastic drug supply
3. A reference to my stash of thoughts
I would've assumed a physical manifestation the blog's namesake would have been a mound of cocaine, served on the maple-ash barrell of one of Dale's gamers(did he even have a gamer? He had to have had, right? I guess....maybe. Not like he ever hit.)
ReplyDeleteA giant mountain of cocaine would be a pretty funny graphic. It would lead to some confusion, that's for sure.
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