Imagine growing up with the roar of the crowd as your lullaby, the scent of fresh-cut grass your everyday perfume, and the very ground you played on graced by the cleats of baseball legends. This wasn’t a dream for Jerry Schwab; it was his childhood. His home? A small apartment built directly beneath the left-field stands of the iconic Polo Grounds, courtesy of Giants owner Horace Stoneham.
In 1945, Stoneham had an ingenious, albeit unconventional, idea. To ensure the immaculate condition of his beloved ballpark, he offered longtime groundskeeper Matt Schwab and his family a unique residency. The goal was simple: round-the-clock care for the field. What unfolded, however, was a childhood unlike any other in sports history.
The Ultimate Backyard: A Ballpark for a Playground
For Jerry Schwab, the son of Matt, the Polo Grounds wasn’t just a stadium; it was his backyard, his playground, and an extension of his living room. He didn’t just attend games; he lived them. His earliest memories are steeped in the rhythm of the baseball season, a perpetual backdrop to his formative years.
“Baseball was just there,” Jerry recalled, a sentiment that perfectly encapsulates the sheer omnipresence of the sport in his life. “For me, it was like a God-given right. It was just part of my life. I didn’t realize how fortunate I was at the time.”
3 AM Field Covers and Outfield Camping Trips
The Schwab family’s life at the Polo Grounds was far from glamorous idleness. It was a life of dedication and spontaneous action. Jerry vividly remembers those late-night storms, when the entire family, often alongside the stadium’s night watchmen, would spring into action. At 3 AM, roused from sleep, they would rush onto the field to meticulously cover it, protecting it from the elements before an impending game. This wasn’t just a job for his father; it was a family affair, a shared responsibility born out of their unique living arrangement.
But it wasn’t all work. The Polo Grounds offered unparalleled adventures for a young boy. Imagine camping out in the vast expanse of the outfield with your friends—some of whom were the sons of players or other stadium workers. These weren’t just any sleepovers; they were held on the hallowed ground where legends battled.
More Than Just a Home, It Was a Legacy
The Schwab family’s story is more than just a charming anecdote; it’s a testament to a bygone era of baseball, a time when the lines between personal life and professional dedication were often blurred in the most fascinating ways. It speaks to the commitment required to maintain these grand old ballparks and the profound, often unseen, connections forged within the ecosystem of professional sports.
While the Polo Grounds is long gone, replaced by memories and photographs, the story of the Schwab family’s apartment beneath the stands remains a powerful reminder of the human stories woven into the fabric of baseball history. It’s a tale of a boy who grew up in the shadow of giants, literally and figuratively, experiencing a slice of Americana that will likely never be replicated. It was, indeed, a childhood like no other.
Gloomy Tunes: Frank Sinatra, “There Used To Be A Ballpark”
It’s Opening Day, where every team is tied for first, and—in theory—has an equal shot at the pennant. That first “play ball!” is as much a sign that spring is here as Daylight Savings Time and cherry blossoms in Washington, DC.
beginnings; it’s endings that interest us, and Frank Sinatra’s elegiac “There Used To Be A Ballpark” certainly fits that bill. From his 1973 “comeback” album, “Ol’ Blue Eyes is Back,” the song, to use a baseball phrase is right in in wheelhouse, and he knocks it out of the park. Then again, there’s probably not a singer who did elegiac better than Sinatra, who despite the swinging “ring-a-ding-ding” good times of the Rat Pack and songs such as “Come Fly With Me.” “The Lady Is A Tramp,” “New York, New York,” excelled at the melancholy, closing time tunes he called “saloon songs”: “”In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning,” “September Of My Years,” “It Was A Very Good Year,” and “Summer Wind” (the latter guaranteed to get tables of 4AM stragglers at an old man bar weeping after just a few bars are heard on the jukebox).
“There Used To Be A Ballpark,” written by Joe Raposo (the man behind “I Ain’t Easy Bein’ Green” and the theme music to WABC-TV’s 4:30 afternoon movie) is generally thought to be about Ebbets Field and the Dodgers, but Raposo says the inspiration was the Polo Gounds, the oddly shaped, mostly unloved, ball park by Coogan’s Bluff in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood, on 155th Street across the Harlem River from Yankee Stadium that was the home of the New York Giants through the 1957 season and the New York Mets their first two, hapless, seasons (hence the lyric “cause the old team just isn’t playing And the new team hardly tries”).
Whatever ballpark he’s singing about, Sinatra voice is filled with wistful nostalgia, remembering the good times, the 4th of July fireworks, the cheering good times, but no longer. “Now the children try to find it/and they can’t believe their eyes,” and noting that without it, the “summer goes so quickly.” The Polo Grounds were demolished in 1961, replaced by the Polo Grounds Housing Project towers, and Shea Stadium, the Queens, NY park the Mets moved into in 1964, and where they won their only two championships, was demolished in 2008. No one wrote songs about that.
