Talkin' Jimmy and Baseball: PA Reporter Honored By Red Sox

It was late on a bright blue April afternoon with the scent of new grass and baseball essence seeming to ride on streaks of sunshine through the slits of the blinds into the hospice room. The sun lit on motes of dust seemed like the incarnation of all that was being culled forth in the speech of the undaunted man supine on the room’s bed: people, places, events, newspapers, Mayors, barfights, gypsies, wars of morals and guts, Shakespearean tragedy and comedy in micro. Behind him, around him, from the gesticulations of the thinning hands of the dying man, wraiths were summoned into gruff, fitful life. And, as each new story had its phantasms borne anew, the ghosts of a lifetime seemed to turn back through the smoky cigar-haze of time to look upon their ailing ombudsman.

He spoke of these events, huskily whispered through throat cancer, with undoubtable pride but too with a certain gravity, the tariff demanded by so many of the memories - some of alcohol, some of lost family - perhaps more than a man was built to handle.

And then his brother-in-law Wayne changed the subject and mentioned Alex Rodriguez.

Suddenly the man on the bed’s voice seemed stripped of some of its weight, however revelrous had been its reminiscences. Something almost childish, eager, hysterical with pure delight entered his coarse hush: “That idiot, that son of a...that New York filth....I swear right now on my own grave that nothing would better ease the passing of this fan from this world than if that incubus, that despicable, that devil incarnate A-Rod failed utterly this year and baseball was wiped clean of his stench.”

On the table near the dresser, looking over the room, the man, the wires snaking in and out of his body, the wraiths, the visitors, sat a hat with a red B stitched against a dark blue background.

***

Jim Callahan wore a different Red Sox cap atop a thicker swath of combed-over reddish hair when he first met his brother-in-law Wayne. The year was 1984, and it was not just a meeting, it was a collision of poles, of the representatives of opposing cosmic forces: the Red Sox and the Yankees.

“Bahh, the Yankees,” Jimmy, then writing for a paper in Bridgeport, Connecticut would say. “Williams was greater than DiMaggio.”

“Ya know,” Wayne retorted with a bemused smirk, “We Yankee fans have a lot to thank the Red Sox for. You had that great starting pitcher, Tracy Stallard. He gave Roger Maris his 61st home run.”

Thus was born a friendship of poles. An eloquent, visionary pessimist and an eloquent, visionary optimist. Boston and New York. The Red Sox and the Yankees. A friendship based on an ancient rivalry but a more ancient past-time, each harboring all the hate of the other’s team inspired by the love of their own team, by the crushed or fulfilled dreams, by the memories, lived-in and passed-down by older generations, of foreshortened Octobers and never-to-be Novembers. But springtime is the mischief in all, and each April with renewed furor Pinstripes would meet Bo Sox in that ceaseless re-execution of eternal theater. And so too with each passing family gathering would Jim and Wayne meet and re-enact the clash, discussing whatever hopes lurked in their organizations with that joy and relish that all baseball fans take in speaking of their team out loud. It gives the speaker a truer sense of the team, the players, to speak of them, nourishing that unspoken belief that the force of their words holds some karmic power: advocate enough for (Red Sox second baseman) Dustin Pedroia’s batting average or (Yankees center fielder) Brett Gardner’s power and eventually it will happen. This is the essence of fandom, of every cheer ever let out on a summer’s night at the ballpark full of promise and desperation, of rally caps, of barstool analyses, and, most of all, of the conversations of two brothers-in-law at family gatherings.

***

When Wayne was hospitalized throughout 2013 and 2014 with complications related to his bone marrow transplant, Jimmy, now an editor at West Chester’s Daily Local News, was a consistent visitor. He brought his fellow fan countless books, more often than not about baseball. One was a history of the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry. Jimmy knew that baseball was the great palliative, the steadfast renewal of each new season as elemental as the change of winter to spring. For a time, even, the rivalry itself vanished, and gave way to subjects which Wayne saw as the leather and yellow dust heart of it all. Topics like Moonlight Graham, the journeyman minor leaguer and one-day doctor who battled his entire career for the chance to get one big league at bat. It was the unspoken dream at the very source of their book tradings, their conversations, their fierce love of their teams, and it was the essence of the dream that both men looked to in bed-ridden hours.

We may each bleed our own shade of Phillie red or Yankee pinstripe or Red Sox blue. A true fan of the sport comes to color his personhood with the soul of his team. But even to men for whom evil incarnate is either DiMaggio or Williams, Jeter or Ortiz, the larger entity of baseball itself is not lost. Beyond the rivalry lurks the soul of the thing itself, a neverending springtime, a soaring white sky and the dust moiling from the leather of a punched mitt.

Atop Wayne’s head as he lay in the hospital bed sat a bright blue cap, the white letters NYY stitched into its front.

***

When Wayne had visited Jimmy in the hospital several years earlier, he brought him a Phillies beanie. But as the final hour of his longtime counterpart drew near, he searched himself for something more fitting. So on Tuesday, April 14, thanks to a donation to the Red Sox Foundation, he helped plan a message to appear on the right field scoreboard. In the middle of the second inning, “In Honor of James P. Callahan” appeared on the board that soars over Fenway Park. The Red Sox played the Nationals that day, and in a way, Jimmy, like Moonlight Graham, finally got his chance to be a part of a big league game.

Unfortunately, no one from the family was at the game to take a picture to show Jimmy, and no photos from the event were posted online. Wayne emailed the Red Sox Foundation:

Thank you for getting back to me. I understand how these things can occur. Unfortunately, the message I had posted on the board “In Honor of James P. Callahan”, won’t mean as much if I do it in May. Jim, my brother-in-law and friend, is in a hospice in West Chester Pennsylvania, dying from multiple cancers. And his time is now measured in hours and days, not weeks.

He is a long time Red Sox fan from his days as a newspaperman in Connecticut, and remained so for his entire career, which took him to California, Pennsylvania, and finally in recent months back to Connecticut as part of Bridgeport online. It was fitting that the next to last gift I gave him was a message on the scoreboard of his beloved Fenway Park. The last gift had hopefully been a photo of that message, a copy of which he would have taken to his grave, along with his Red Sox cap.

I am sorry to have to put this in an email, but I am saddened by the way things turned out. I guess life is like that I suppose. Anyway, if by some miracle you learn of anyone who might have snapped a photo that night of Jim’s message, please feel free to give them my contact info. All Sox fans believe in miracles, no?

Someone, somewhere found a photo, and the Red Sox Foundation forwarded it along. 

Jimmy would have never asked for his legacy to be panoplied with so much fanfare. In the time since he entered hospice care, Congressional addresses, editorials, and countless shared memories have honored the man and his work. He demured. “I’m just an old grump who believes in good journalism,” he said. “Bah,” he coughed when Wayne told him of the plan. “You shoulda given the money to the poor.”

“The irony,” said Wayne, “Is that that’s exactly where it’s going.”

***

Wayne was among the last visitors to leave Jimmy on that April afternoon. Jimmy spoke of his own funeral arrangements, of his final resting place, without a hint of gloom. He knew his end was near, but on that spring day, where the light coming through the window spoke of a spring night at Fenway, no wraiths clouded his grin or weighed his words. Perched on the top of the dresser was a dark blue hat with a red B sketched upon it.

Editor’s note: James P. Callahan passed away on April 26. His obituary can be found here.

Image courtesy the Red Sox Foundation