Automatic Baseball: In Memory of My Father

Myer (“Mike”) Singer, 95th Light Tank Company, Chigasaki, Japan 1946

 

“Don’t ever look up to anyone. And don’t ever look down on anyone.”

“He gets up in the morning just like you. He ties his shoes one foot at time, just like you.”

These are lines my dad repeated during my youth, pounding home the themes of equality and opportunity. He wasn’t political. To this day, I don’t know how (or whether) he voted. He didn’t resent wealth or covet anyone’s possessions. It was merely his pep talk. He was my coach. In baseball and in life.

Perhaps he was worried that I developed an inferiority complex. My parents sent me to a private school that catered to the wealthy families of Fort Worth, and we didn’t exactly fit in. My dad owned a scrap metal business, Singer Metals, in a rough part of town. His company scraped out the metals from dilapidated computers and other junked electronic devices, and sold the metals on the secondary market. The business was dirty in every sense, and he didn’t want me to get anywhere near it. We lived in a modest house in the southwest (i.e., lower-income) part of the city, and when his business needed an injection of cash, he sold the house, and we moved into an apartment complex near my school.

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Myer (“Mike”) Singer was born in Cleveland in 1928, as the nation was heading into an economic collapse. His father was a bootlegger—which for the longest time brought me great shame until I learned of other families who participated in the underground economy—and his mother took care of the home. In his youth, my dad and his siblings served as decoys on the family’s whiskey deliveries, sitting atop of the barrels on the truck. During one pending raid at his home, at his father’s instructions, my dad poured the sweet sauce out the second-story window.

My dad didn’t care much for academics, and spent most of his youth playing tennis on public courts. Upon graduating high school, he left for Japan to serve in the occupation army after World War II. Given his tennis acumen, he easily made the army’s travel team, and he played against Japanese opponents in tournaments across Japan, making his way to the quarter finals (an accomplishment he mentioned often). If you wanted to make peace with a former enemy, you would send my dad.

Upon returning from Japan, he married my mother (then Ina Miller) in Cleveland and started a family. He was a traveling salesman with no real skills other than his charm. He boasted about his marketing skills, claiming that he could “sell snow to the Eskimos.” Apparently he could: He semi retired in his late thirties, taking the family to Miami for extended vacations. When the money ran out, he followed an uncle down to Dallas, where he was introduced to the seedier side of the scrap metal business.

Scrap metal in the 1970s was dominated by “tough Jews,” and his unscrupulous uncle fit the profile. Deliveries of metals from the Dallas site were often deliveries of dirt, with a veneer of metals to throw off the unsuspecting customers, who upon learning of the fraud couldn’t exactly complain. Because he was not a tough Jew, my dad broke away from his uncle’s shop and started his own in Fort Worth, moving my mom, sister and brother down from Cleveland. The family would expand by one in 1972.

In the days before social media, my dad was a social animal. He belonged to the local conservative synagogue and the local JCC. (He was raised in an orthodox home. I remember visiting his parents in Cleveland. We couldn’t operate electronics during the Sabbath, so we walked to the synagogue, where I watched the services alongside my mother from a second-story balcony, as women were not allowed to participate.) He had a breakfast club at the local CoCo’s (which became JoJo’s), and the breakfast club turned into a pool club in the late mornings. I watched him play pool for hours on the weekends—he mastered the game, leaving his opponents with impossible shots on the rare occasions he missed his own—and when his friends left our home, he would play me. He also had a poker club, which met once a week for decades.

My dad was my baseball coach during my formative years. Due in part to his laziness—he was badly overweight in his fifties—but also due to his keen understanding of incentives, he pioneered the technique of Automatic Baseball. Under this system, if a player made an error in the field, the player would automatically take himself out of the game. If a pitcher (and that was often me) surrendered two runs, the pitcher would come off the field. This set of rules took all decision-making out of the hands of the coach. Although it sounds harsh, it was the opposite: He loved his players, they loved him, and we played with focus. He never yelled. Before one game, he placed a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket and told me to earn it. He drove his white Pontiac Firebird to the game and chewed his cigars from the dugout.

In high school, he attended all of my home games, and many of my road games. Sometimes we traveled great distances from Fort Worth to find other prep schools comprised of affluent white kids. At home baseball games, he would sit near tennis legend Martina Navratilova, who became the second mom of one of my teammates (way before that became a thing). He witnessed my one and only touchdown in Dallas. He never missed a play or musical performance, and embarrassingly I dabbled there. One such play was at a community theater; the show ran for two weeks straight, and he, along with my mom, didn’t miss a single performance. (Don’t even bother trying to get the tapes. They are in a sealed vault.) He traveled to Tulane to see my final performance. (Also sealed.)

My dad and I watched hundreds of Texas Rangers games together, some in person but mostly in our apartment. Watching a game with my dad was a magical experience. And not just for me. My friends would ask if they could come over to watch the games with him. He would lay on the couch, belly slightly exposed, and wax eloquently about life and baseball. There was something cathartic about being in his presence. And it was something they couldn’t get in their own homes.

The action in baseball is sufficiently episodic that it permits conversation. When my friends were not around, my dad and I would debate several things, but a recurring sore spot was my career path. He was disappointed that I planned to give up acting to become an economist, which would take nine years of school. Education wasn’t a priority: “Bring me home some damn B’s so I know that you’re normal!” Our fights in the living room would go something like this.

Me: You don’t understand that the vast majority of actors are starving. We only hear about the success stories. The mean income of an actor is below the poverty line!

Him: You are not the mean! You are a star!

Me: I am a star among a couple of hundred kid actors in Forth Worth. That’s not going to translate to success in New York.

Him: You will be a star no matter where you go!

And so it went. He never moved off of his position, and I would reject his career advice to become a lame (in his eyes) economist. Looking back at the debate, I’m not so sure he cared about which path I took. He just wanted to drive home the idea that I was special. That was his job. He was my coach. (There is also a little performance in what I do. So hopefully he would be proud.)

My dad had a triple bypass when I was at college in the early 1990s. He quit the cigars, but he refused to modify his diet or to exercise. He retired in his sixties and remained in the same apartment until he could no longer navigate the stairs leading to the front door. He moved to a retirement home in Fort Worth, and then to a nursing home in Clearwater. My sister and her family visited him weekly, and my brother and I would fly in as much as we could.

My dad lost the ability to speak in his final years. Yet he could still sing, and he remembered the lyrics of several songs. So we would sing together in his room. “I Like New York in June” and “Mister Five” were his favorites. We often sat together in silence.

My dad was slightly embarrassing to take to nice restaurants. He would order his steaks well-done with a side of ketchup. He would send back soups that were not served at sweltering temperatures. He would often say, “I want to go to the places where the stools are high and the prices are low.” I’m not sure they charge prices where he is going. But he is sitting atop the highest stool.

My dad passed away on Monday. He was 91 years old. He leaves behind his wife (Ina), three children (Madelyn, David and me), five grandchildren (Billy, Bobby, Alexis, Kayla, and Jake), and two great-grandchildren (Maddy and Cooper). He will rest in Florida National Cemetery, near the city of Bushnell. And he will be missed dearly.