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Dave could always turn to baseball when stationed at Clark Air Base. (via US Military Aircraft)

Dave could always turn to baseball when stationed at Clark Air Base. (via US Military Aircraft)

One of my anxieties when I enlisted the U.S. Air Force after high school graduation was that my daily contact with baseball, a significant part of the rural life that I lived, would diminish. In mature adult life, I came to understand that choosing to become an adult did more to change my time and energy toward baseball than did affirming to defend the Constitution of the United States. My present days as a civilian public high school teacher, husband, and father of two teenage daughters have pulled me away from baseball more than did the lifestyle restrictions of military service.

In 1985, I graduated from high school in New Mexico, spent the summer around the family farm bringing in the pecans and onions, turned 18, completed the recruiting/military application process, watched the Royals break my teenaged-heart by beating my beloved Cardinals in October (the Royals beat the NL Champs; no Denkinger-flavored sour grapes from me). I finished out 1985 with Thanksgiving with my family and then shipped off to San Antonioto begin my military years just as the major league winter meetings were getting started in early December.

With December and January being the baseball offseason, I didn’t miss much baseball during this introduction to military service. During basic training, the only times I thought about baseball were when my training flight wore the Air Force blue dress uniform. It reminded me of the Royals’ powder-blue. Most of basic training was spent modeling the since-deceased “janitor green” fatigue uniform, seemingly left over from the Vietnam war movies. The Air Force did not authorize the woodland camouflage a.k.a. battle dress uniform until 1987. I suppose if the Rays had been around then or had the Athletics appeared on the NBC Game of the Week more often, I might have thought about those teams at times.

So I met expectations and completed basic training in seven weeks and in late January was ordered to Biloxi, Miss., for five months of training as an electronic maintenance technician. The 1986 major league season got under way and I was my usual baseball-excited self. After a day of classroom and military training, I had evening hours for such leisure activities as academic studies, ironing uniforms,   tedious maintenance of quarters and guard duty, but dormitory life also gave me a big perk. The day room was equipped with enough cable channels for access to ESPN. For the first time in my fandom, I could watch “SportsCenter” baseball highlights every day (to this very day, I still iron my clothes while watching baseball on TV or on DVDs). Couple (triple?) that with my daily box-score reading habit and my weekly Sporting News digestion and the 1986 season had moments of watching baseball in a new way.

In July of 1986, I finished the Biloxi business and took a month of leave. This I divided between my mother’s home in Houston, where I saw the eventual ’86 NL West champion Astros beat the Expos in the AstroDome, and my dad’s cable-TV-less farm where I helped with the onion harvest. On leave at the farm, it was back to box scores and the local coverage of the minor league El Paso Diablos and the Albuquerque Dukes, with some fuzzy games of the Texas Rangers coming out of a weak UHF station from over the mountains in El Paso.

When my leave ended in mid-July, I traveled over the mountains to the El Paso International Airport and then over the Pacific Ocean, off for two years of duty at Clark Air Base on Luzon, Republic of the Philippines. I brought my combat-fit body, my military-trained mind and my subscriptions to Baseball America and The Sporting News. My 19-year old, farm-raised self thought I was going to be without baseball ingestion for the whole two years. Like Rick Blaine when told there were no beaches in Casablanca, I was misinformed on this matter.

Clark AB has been described as the most urbanized military base of its time. One of the benefits of such an assignment was the fine television and radio services of the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service and its Philippine affiliate, the Far East Network (FEN). It provided live sports like TBS Braves and WGN Cubs games on a regular basis, the NBC Game of the Week.  There was no “SportsCenter” but its acceptable equivalent was “CNN Sports Tonight with Nick Charles and Fred Hickman”—“The Play of the Day” selection was a sure conversation topic the following day.  And we got NFL Sunday games and Monday Night Football, though we called it “Tuesday Morning Football” as we were 14 hours ahead of Central Time.

These being live sporting events, we, like viewers everywhere, had to endure station breaks. We did not get airings of Bob Uecker and Miller Beer like we did in the States; we sat through military-produced spots advising us to be security and safety conscious in all that we did and to beware and vigilant against fraud, waste and abuse of military resources. A spot that lingers in me nearly 30 years later is a tale of the abuse of the old black “U.S. Government” pen and its propensity to be used as a punch-tool, a coffee-stirrer, an object of theft and other acts of quilled malfeasance. As bumper programming, the 600th Air Force band provided cover tunes and videos of pop songs—their version of “Smokin” from Boston’s 1976 debut album still sings in my head at any appearance of a “No Smoking” sign.

I got the 1986 and 1987 playoffs and World Series live on TV, though they were usually morning events. I have gentle memories of being in crowded dormitory day rooms and/or the Airmen’s Club with other off-duty, homesick sports fans passionately living with each play of each sporting event we were allowed to view. Some  in those crowds had never learned the nuances of baseball; some did not know a full count from the Count on Sesame Street or the one finishing his pitching career with the Yankees at that time. Novice on-lookers were amused by a grown man named Mookie.

We were all lonely and bored and far from home thus wanted to be part of the community of Americans celebrating a cultural event. Now, when some trivia whiz asks me when the last the World Series day game was, I reply that it was Game Five of the 1984 Fall Classic, but my private answer is Game Seven of the 1987 World Series, my last World Series game viewed overseas.

Of course, military service, even in the low-hype, final years of the Cold War, did involve doing actual soldier-type work. Our main military preoccupation was securing the base and area from insurrectionists following the ouster of the country’s long-time strongman, President Ferdinand Marcos. My military specialty was communication maintenance work, which had me pinned down in a secured, air-conditioned communication center near 13th Air Force Headquarters. This work allowed me to listen to games on radio; for communication security and productivity reasons we had no TV in my work center, but we could put the FEN radio feed, which ran through the facility, on a speaker monitor.

It was there and then that I followed much of the 1987 World Series, since my duty cycle had me working there during broadcast time. I gained an appreciation for Jack Buck’s radio announcer work during that series. During the 2014 season, when I saw interim Astros manager Tom Lawless on the screen, I didn’t really focus on his mustachioed face; I heard Buck calling Lawless’ improbable 1987 World Series Game Four three-run homer off Twins ace Frank Viola Buck—stretching out each syllable of  “…it’s a three-run home run for Tom Lawless” as if emphasizing that such an unlikely event had happened.

(Lawless in 1987: two hits in 25 at-bats; one in the ninth inning with the Cards down 11-0 to the Pirates; the other in the final inning of the final game of the regular season after the Cards had clinched the NL East). Later, when I got back to the dorm and caught the video on CNN Sports, I saw his saucy bat flip; an event I recalled recently thanks to Jose Bautista’s 2015 Game Five ALDS bat-crobatics.

I had Jack Buck and Bill White and the CBS Radio feed talk me through another vainglorious Cardinals World Series loss. Though it went a full seven games, it did not feel like seven-game World Series. It lacked the suspense and intensity of the other seven-game World Series of my life to that point—the 1975, 1979, 1982 and 1985 editions. At first, I blamed that on my ear and that I mostly absorbed that series with my hearing and not my discriminating eyes. Later in life, though, I watched that World Series video on ESPN Classic and studied the play-by-play on Baseball-Reference box scores. There were no lead changes after the fifth innings of four of the games, no late-inning scoring of note in any game. I concluded that in addition to my disappointment over another Cards World Series loss to an AL West team, it was just a below-standard World Series with the misfortune of following the scintillating 1986 Fall Classic.

A Hardball Times Update
Goodbye for now.

For most of the 1986 World Series, I worked the graveyard shift and thus had the joy of watching most of the games finish and then drifting off for daytime sleep. When Mookie Wilson drove in the winning run in the 10th inning in Game Six, I was so drowsy that I was sure that I had dreamed Bill Buckner’s error. A later viewing of CNN, which was frequent FEN fare, confirmed that the Mets had won that game in the manner that I remembered. The ad nauseum airings of that play since have removed any doubt of the veracity of my recall.

I finished my overseas tour in July of 1988, repeated the Mom/Astros/Dad/onion harvest leave sequence of 1986 and reported to my final military assignment, a tactical communication unit in Oklahoma City. My working hours and World Series digestion became about the same as every other stateside citizen’s then—off the ABC/NBC network feed from the local affiliate without the FEN touches and early-morning game times.

A moment of panic came after that year-and-a-half assignment, was before Game One of the Dodgers/A’s World Series. My TV, shipped from Asia with my other personal gear, had gotten me through both League Championship Series but an hour before the first pitch of the World Series, it, like the Oakland A’s of that Series, failed to energize.

I did not want to miss the game, but it was a Saturday,  so the bars and Airmen’s Club were airing college football. I scrambled to borrow a TV from another airman in our dormitory who had other plans that night  and from that equipment I watched Kirk Gibson’s improbable homer off Dennis Eckersley. I ended up trading some thick, beautiful blankets  I had shipped back from Asia for ownership of that TV and used it for several years. I sometimes looked at that box of solid-state electronics and thought about the 1988 Series, not resolving how the Dodgers cooled off the A’s until the internet and all its ideas and data came into my house in the late 20th  century.

As the 1989 major league season ended, foot injures accumulated during my enlistment began to nag my motivation and lessened my tactical availability. I was honorably discharged right after the final regular-season weekend. I made it back to the farm in New Mexico just in time to watch Game One of the Blue Jays and A’s in the ALCS. My dad had died a few months before; my grandfather, who came to the U.S. from Italy when he was 13, was a good baseball fan and Hall of Fame farmer.  He housed me until I could start the next college term at New Mexico State University. Together, we watched the star-crossed 1989 postseason and mourned recent losses in our lives; for him, his son and for me, my dad and military career.

I put on the USAF uniform for nearly four years and the Air Force rightfully demanded first use of my time and energy. But, the day’s duty done in a swift, proficient military manner, the USAF enabled my baseball fandom. I offer salutes of thanks to my commanders who ordered baseball be available to Philippines-based military personnel of my era and to the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, which put baseball in my military duty spots so I could lift my morale with a little hardball escape to Shea Stadium and Fenway Park and Busch Stadium and (grudgingly) the MetroDome.


Dave Vocale lives in San Antonio, Texas.
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hopbitters
8 years ago

Interesting account, Dave. Thanks. Bill White was a third of my favorite broadcasting team, along with Messer and Rizzuto.

Ty
8 years ago

Great article. I’m still traumatized by AFN commercials, after being out of the Army for four years now.

Ryan
8 years ago

AFN helped me through 3 years in Germany and 1 year in Iraq. I remember getting up four times at 3 AM and walking a cold mile in Iraq to the camp’s MRW center and watching the Red Sox cream the Rockies. Good times.

Dave Vocale
8 years ago
Reply to  Ryan

Ryan: Thank you for your service and may your never have a cold walk to the Word Series again.