BY ALAN GOLDFARB

IN DEFENSE OF BASEBALL

As a kid growing up in New York in the ’50s, baseball was our game. Why wouldn’t it be? We were a three-team town then. We had the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants in the National League, and the Yankees in the American. We had Duke, the Mick, and Willie. We had Jackie. We had Eoisk, the Scoonge, Campy, the Lip, Yogi, the Barber, and Moose. We had the Bronx versus Brooklyn, we had Brooklyn vs. Manhattan, and sometimes we even had the Bronx and Manhattan going head-to-head. Most times, we had the Democrats (the Dodgers, who were the People’s team) against the pinstripe-suited Yanks (the Republicans). Almost every October through the 1950s, we could count on one of the New York teams being in the World Series.. Beginning in 1947, it was the Dodgers vs. the Yankees. Same for ’49, ’52, ’53, ’55, ’56, and ’57. In ’50, the Yanks were in the Series. In ’51 it was the Giants turn to go up against the mighty Yanks. In ’54 we had the Giants, who played the Indians.

Newspaper cartoonist Willard Mullin portrayed a gargantuan Giant — with a nailed bat-as-club in a meaty, hairy, band-aide patched hand, coming down upon a fat and sloppy, cigar-chompin’ Dodger “Bum.”

We had fights in the stands whenever the Dodgers and Giants went up against one another, which was fairly often because after all, there were only eight teams in the NL in those days. We even had fans run on the field, challenging players and/or the umpires. Leo “The Lip” Durocher, first as the Giants’ manager and then as the Dodger skipper, was always kicking dirt at the umps. Pitcher Sal Maglie, he with the perpetual 5 o’clock shadow, always used to throw at the heads of hitters. Like Durocher, Maglie did it first as a Giant and then as a Dodger.

Growing up in the city, where there was a paucity of trees and grass and parks and fields, walking up the ramp at Ebbets Field and first seeing on the horizon, the greenest green field a 9-year-old Brooklyn boy had ever seen, took the breath away. Screenwriter and director Ron Shelton captured the moment precisely, when in his 1988 film “Bull Durham,” he depicted the green swath of the field as Susan Sarandon first enters the ballpark. Splayed out in front of her, we see through her eyes, the green baseball field of America.

Then there were the colors of the uniforms — from the whitest whites and the bluest blues of the Brooklyn team, to the vivid reds of Cincinnati and St. Louis and the brightest oranges and blacks of the Pirates and of the Giants. Even the deep grays of the visitors, was captivating.

It was so delicious, I wanted to eat it all and drink it all in. I never could get enough.

What a time it was. As a Dodgers fan, we were proud to have Jackie Robinson — the first black man in baseball — on our team. Some of us went to church to say a novena for Gil Hodges when the Dodger first baseman was going through one of the worst slumps in Worlds Series history. After all, Gil, like so many New York players in those days, lived amongst us, in the neighborhoods, on our block. Willie Mays played stickball — the city game — in the streets of Manhattan. Yogi Berra kept us in stitches with his unintentional witticisms. And we cried along with Ralph Branca, on the clubhouse steps on that dark day in October ’51, when he gave up the Shot Heard ‘Round the World’ to Bobby Thomson.

When Roy Campanella, the beloved Brooklyn catcher was paralyzed after crashing his car on n icy road on Long Island one cold winter night, we knew it was the beginning of the end. After the next season, the Dodgers and the Giants left town and our boyhood dreams and naiveté left with them.

Why did they leave, a 14-year-old in Brooklyn asked. We love them, Ebbets is filled every game. What happened to loyalty? What’s happening to the world?

You mean, they left for money! You mean, they could make more money on “The Coast?” You mean Walter (He Should Rot in His Grave) O’Malley sold a bill of goods to Horace Stoneham? He convinced the Giant owner to go to California, where O’Malley would flourish in southern California, while Stoneham was duped into thinking San Francisco could support a major league team?

It was enough to politicize a teenage boy, who heretofore, knew nothing of capitalism.

Now, almost a half-century later, you really can’t tell the players without a scorecard, no different from mercenaries have they become, moving from team-to-team. Television dictates when the game should be played, sometimes so late on the East Coast that a young boy or girl can’t stay up to watch.

Baseball’s commissioner is embarrassingly inept; and the owners, like O’Malley before them, hold city’s hostage if new stadiums aren’t built.

Violent sports such as football, and wrestling, have captured the country’s psyche, pushing baseball to the background to be tolerated only by those purists who, for some inexplicable reason, still love the game — no matter how crass or how commercial it’s become.

I’m one of those purists. And if you’re reading this, you’re probably one, too. Doesn’t it just tick you off when the first thing someone might say upon watching a baseball game, “Baseball is so boring.”

We know, then and there don’t we, that that individual hasn’t a clue. Hasn’t a clue about baseball and hasn’t a clue about life.

After all, someone once cleverly opined, “Baseball is Life.”