I started life as a New York Giants fan, and at age 9 I had to start following my team from long-distance, because they moved to San Francisco.

We in the New York area could get radio coverage of every SF Giants game ~ it was "recreated" by an announcer in a local NY-area studio, who read some kind of incoming ticker-tape pitch-by-pitch report of the game while making sound effects, such as smacking the table with a ruler to simulate the crack of the bat.

This technique had been common decades earlier, but it was pretty archaic in the late 1950s and early 60s. The announcer (whose name, alas, I have long forgetten) was one of the last practioners of his art. His previous employment had been with the Honolulu team in the Triple-A Pacific Coast League, who needed this kind of semi-fake radio coverage because of their distance from the mainland.

My dad took me to Philadelphia for a couple of Giants-Phillies games. We saw Wille McCovey when he had been in the major leagues for only a week or two ~ opposing pitchers hadn't yet found any weakness in his swing: he was hitting about .600 and averaging a homer every 8 or 9 at-bats. The day we saw him, he didn't homer, but he did go 2-for-4 with two triples!

Within a few years, the New York Mets were founded, so we National League fans in NY (former Giant and Dodger fans) once again had a team of our own. Like so many others, my old man and I discovered that "we had been Mets fans all our lives."

Because I was so young, I had never gone into the city for a Giants game at the Polo Grounds, but I was able to see the Mets a few times in the old Harlem stadium before Shea was built. I'm looking forward to visting New York in a couple of years to watch the Mets in yet another new stadium.

I know it's very unlikely in this age of corporate sponsorship, but I'd sure like to see the Mets' new home named for the one and only Casey Stengel, a baseball immortal with all four New York teams (Dodgers, Giants, Yanks, and finally the Mets).