A Career’s Worth Of Stories For Baseball Lifer
Aug 16, 2013Posted by james
Doc Edwards is a baseball lifer. He has spent 57 years in the game, and his bench is deep with stories.
Look at your baseball card collection, if mom didn’t toss it, to find a Doc Edwards card. He played with the Indians (managed them, too), Kansas City Athletics, the Yankees and the Phillies. Before and after that, he has played and managed (and traveled on the bus) with the Wichita Aeros, the Charleston Charlies, the Sioux Falls Canaries and teams in North Platte, Nebraska, and Burlington, North Carolina. He is famous in Rochester, New York, where he served as manager of the Red Wings when the team, during 1981, lost to the Pawtucket Red Sox in the longest professional baseball game (33 innings).
His stories feature just about everyone he has met in baseball from Mickey Mantle to the kid playing second base for him today—and whose name keeps slipping from memory. Doc once hit a home run in Fenway Park that barely scraped the top part of the fence while The Mick, as Doc tells it, “then…hit one to center field. One handed. More than 420 feet.”
Since his last day in the big leagues, Doc has become dedicated to teaching young players about the game, and he just loves when they are determined to pursue the nearly unachievable to become the next Mantle. Realistically, each player has a greater chance to become the next Doc Edwards. But, he prays for them and encourages them to never give up their dreams to play in the big leagues.
The rewards for all Doc’s years in baseball mostly come when one of his players successfully battles through a tough time on the field and then improves his game. But, once in a while, kudos have come his way. Doc remembered one game, in upstate New York, when hundreds of Orthodox Jews greeted him as he stepped on the field. This puzzled him, because he was never that good a ballplayer. He soon learned that when the rabbi was a kid, Doc talked to him from the Yankee Stadium bullpen, and now this was the rabbi’s way to show his gratitude.
Doc Edwards was good enough to play and manage in the major leagues. But for most of his baseball life, his role has included bumpy bus rides, cheap motels and little fanfare. Along for the ride has been the daily opportunity for Doc to guide many young players as each tries to find his position in the business of baseball.
Jim
by james on Aug 16, 2013 |
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