Comments on: Uncle Eddie

By: Penny Lane

Penny Lane — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 19:21:21 +0000

Funny how the ones who knew how to “make it work” are the ones we remember…
Characters made of kindness, reality + ingenuity
back when that didn’t mean gouging little people or pretending to be grand

Your uncle sounds like quite the guy
then again, so’s the man writing this
& i don’t even know him to shake his hand!

By: TJ

TJ — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 06:28:37 +0000

My Uncle Eddie was an older gal who house-sat when my parents took a trip, no relation but we called her Aunt Alice. This was in the late 1940s and early in the next decade. My sister and I loved Aunt Alice: she cooked the best burgers, she let us stay up later than usual, and she ragaled us with Cleveland baseball stories from the “Lajaway” era. (She saw Nap play dozens of times.) Her favorite all-time Indian was Addie Joss. Aunt Alice told us over and over of her attending the greatest pitched game of all time, around Oct. 1,1908, when the “Naps”, Tigers and White Sox were all within one game of each other going into the final 4 or 5 games of the season. Chicago was visiting old League Park when Addie Joss hooked up against Big Ed Walsh. Joss pitched a perfect game, Walsh gave up one hit and one unearned run, and the Tribe won 1-0. (The Naps eventually ended up 1/2 game behind Ty Cobb’s Tigers in the pennant race due to a rained out game that in those days was not made up!) For Aunt Alice, no player quite measured up to Joss and thus he also remains my favorite Cleveland player to this day. She told me that the day when Joss died so unexpectedly of an illness in April, 1911, just a wee bit over a century ago, was the saddest day in her life until Black Tuesday (there was a reason she house-sat at her advanced age). Like your Uncle Eddie, my Aunt Alice instilled in me a love of the history of the Tribe that makes me enjoy each season all the more. Here’s to you, Aunt Alice (and Addie Joss).
R.I.P.

By: Wyatt

Wyatt — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 04:31:06 +0000

Ah, yes! The old Cleveland Municipal Stadium was a trip in itself. There were no snooty lounges where people paid a lot of money to watch a game they came to see live on a TV set, no picnic areas where you couldn’t see the game you were attending at all, no cushy, pricey seats- as a matter of fact, there were pretty much no good seats period. Somehow the architects had managed to work it so that 80,000 seats were all located behind steel and concrete pillars. And it was cold. It could be 97 degrees in the middle of a classic, Cleveland July, but the in the Stadium it was about 23.

HOWEVER… all this meant that only REAL fans made the trek part of their summer ritual. Fans who didn’t need gourmet nachos to eat and iced something-or-the-other to drink. They were happy with a mustard-slathered hot dog that had seen better days and a cheap, warm beer- because they were actually there to watch the GAME.

My hat is off to Uncle Eddie! He obviously knew what truly makes summertime in Middle America the memorable thing it is, and he took it upon himself to pass it onto the next generation. Ya can’t ask for much more than that.

By: SeattleStu

SeattleStu — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 03:23:20 +0000

LOVED the uncle eddie stories, almost as much as the DH sweep…go tribe!