Double Play: Baseball Classic & Pop Psychology

I do not usually take kindly to blog sites that fill their pages with a virtually unlimited quantity of really large photos. Those sites take seemingly forever to load, so I almost always bypass them. However, I am departing from my usual practice of no photos for this one singular exception.

I stumbled on this marvelous rare photo of a young Henry Aaron at bat in an empty stadium. It is exceptional not only because of the subject (my favorite athlete of all time, along with Sandy Koufax) but because it is an electronic color image rare for that era (the late 1950s or early 1960s) and because the original image is large enough (4117 x 4077 pixels) to crop for an exact fit to any possible computer screen dimension. I have collected over 1,200 baseball wallpaper images and over 19,000 wallpaper images overall, but this became my instant favorite. That is why I chose to post it — that, and because I was looking for an excuse to see how both Wordpress and Blogger handle imported images.

By the way, those of you who know our family history might think that I became a fan of both the Milwaukee Braves/Milwaukee Brewers and the Green Bay Packers because we lived in Madison, Wisconsin for over three years when I was a youngster. Well, you would be wrong.

The real reason is much simpler. Soon after we moved to our first apartment in Wilmington, Delaware, I walked into the living room one day to discover my father watching a baseball game on television. Now, my father almost never watched baseball on TV, so I asked him who was playing. It so happened that he was watching either the 1957 or 1958 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Milwaukee Braves. I then asked for whom he was rooting, and he — a native New Yorker born in the Bronx — naturally answered, The Yankees. Contrarian that I was, even at that young age (and, of course, still am today), I became an instant fan of the Milwaukee Braves. I shudder to think what would have happened had the Yankees been playing, say, the Chicago Cubs!

Fittingly enough, the same thing happened three or four years later. I again walked through the living room one day when lo and behold: I encountered my father watching a football game on TV. I was even more surprised this time because my father watched football even less often than he watched baseball. On this occasion, he was watching the 1961 NFL championship game between the New York Giants and the Green Bay Packers. I again asked for whom he was rooting, and he naturally replied, The Giants. Voilà! I instantly became a Green Bay Packers fan. Once again, the possibility that under different circumstances I might have become a Chicago Bears fan makes be nauseous even to contemplate.

So, for all of you amateur psychologists out there, have fun with this one...