"My Father's Game,' by Rick Wilber

The man who hit three homers in a game
(and was subsequently comped for life)

ROBERT ZALLER

Del Wilber was a backup catcher who caught for eight seasons with the Cardinals, the Phillies and the Red Sox. He got into 299 Major League games and hit .242 lifetime. He caught Robin Roberts and hit against Bob Feller and was befriended by Ted Williams.

Wilber signed out of high school with the St. Louis Browns in the late ’30s, but didn’t reach the Majors until 1946 because of the war. He was tall and rangy for a catcher, had a spot of power, and on the memorable afternoon of August 27, 1951 he hit three home runs while catching for the Phillies. In the process he became the permanent answer to a trivia question, because his three homers were the only runs scored in a 3-0 game, and that is something that hadn’t happened before and hasn’t happened since.

Older Philadelphians may remember Wilber. He was a popular player and went on to a career as a minor league manager, a major league coach and scout, and, for a single game, as interim manager of the Texas Rangers (the Rangers won, 10-8). He retired in 1986 after a professional career of nearly 50 years.

He was, in short, the quintessential baseball lifer, eating up the miles and years on mostly minor league buses, but with his points of glory, most shiningly that three-homer game. In baseball’s extended fraternity, he was a member in good standing. He was comped at any game, welcome on any diamond. People liked and remembered him. A breakfast crowd in Kirkwood, Missouri, listened appreciatively to his oft-told tales, burnished with the years. He’d been a big leaguer and always would be.

A son’s moment of glory

Wilber had five children, and one of them, Rick, went on to become a college professor and a writer. Rick was born while Del was catching for the Cardinals, and grew up on baseball fields. He once threw a curveball past the great Rod Carew in practice (his own moment of glory), but his athletic ability was subprofessional. No doubt that was disappointing, but at least he was spared the agony of a Pete Rose Jr. Rick enjoyed pickup basketball games, learned about life with a Down’s Syndrome son, and carved out what appears to have been a satisfying career of his own. But Dad, of course, was always something special. He’d been in the bigs, and one day he’d hit as many home runs in a game as Babe Ruth ever did.

My Father’s Game: Life, Death, Baseball is Rick Wilber’s memoir of his father, his family and himself. It’s also a book about the mythology of baseball, and, despite the hyperbolic subtitle, it’s written with fine observation and wry understatement, and may well become a classic in the literature. For the Whiz Kid generation of Philadelphia sports fans, it will bring many memories back.

Irrelevant, and also important

Nostalgia, though, is not the point of this book. Most of it is devoted to the more familiar and decidedly unglamorous story of how Rick Wilber became the primary caregiver to both his aging parents, and saw his father to the grave. That the octogenarian Del Wilber, now a man on a walker in the Florida sun, had once been a ballplayer was at once irrelevant and of surpassing importance. It was irrelevant because he was dying the death of thousands of others, but important because Del Wilber never lost the aura of entitlement that America accords a big league ballplayer, however modestly gifted. In a sense, his son suggests, he was comped through life, because even in the hardscrabble minor league years that actually comprised most of his professional life he could still walk into a ballpark anywhere and be greeted as royalty: a man who’d played our defining sport at its highest level. And when he no longer walked much anywhere, he demanded that deference and those services from his son.

Compounding the story is the parallel decline of Rick’s mother, Taffy, whose Alzheimer’s made her physically abusive toward her husband, now too feeble to cope with her blows. It’s a story that will resonate with many— a perfectly ordinary story about 21st-Century America— but one given special pathos by the sense of a hero fallen.

The painful price of heroism

Rick Wilber wants us to know that his father, in many ways a generous and gregarious man, was really not a hero except in the special and largely specious terms we accord professional athletes. He wants us to know that the mythology we attach to baseball in particular exacted a painful price at the end, one that even brought him to the verge of suicide on an especially desperate day. And he wants us to know that end-of-life care can be a harrowing, overwhelming and profoundly embittering experience, for which almost no family member can be adequately prepared, and which can wreak havoc not only on filial but sibling relationships.

Rick Wilber loved his father, and this memoir proves it. At the same time, he came to be enormously resentful and even confessedly hostile toward him. Something in Rick needed his father to be a hero too, even if one with feet of clay; but finally the hero was gone and only the clay remained.

This, too, is a story many of us share. The difference, though, is that others also acknowledged Del Wilber as a hero, a minor god, and that is something Rick Wilber cannot quite shake and at bottom perhaps cannot want to do because his own ego is inextricably involved in it. The adult son is wise enough to realize this as a consequential flaw, but the abiding child still feeds on it.

It couldn’t have been easy to write this book. It isn’t particularly easy to read it. But whether you care about baseball or not, it speaks valuably to the experience many of us will have on one side of the life cycle or the other, and ultimately perhaps both.