The Long Seasons

Baseball was truly the national pastime when eleven-year-old John Drebinger saw his first big-league game. In that half-forgotten summer of 1902, baseball meant two-bit bleacher seats in the sun and no night games. There was no TV either, to tempt pitchers and managers into time-wasting histrionics. The players were public heroes, and fan's wore their hearts on their sleeves.

For Drebinger it was the beginning of a lifelong devotion. And since he did not have the athletic talent to become a big-league player, it was perhaps inevitable that he became a big-league reporter, one of that curious breed of semi-participant sportsmen known as sportswriters.

Never Bored. In 41 years on the New York Times, and before that for eleven years on the Staten Island Advance, Drebinger's first love has been put to the test. He has watched some 6,800 big-league games in just about every ballpark in the land. From 1929 through 1963, he took in every World Series game--203 in all. The American League Yankees invested this procession with a certain sameness by playing in 22 of the 35 series and by winning 17. Drebinger did not mind. He loves the Yankees best of all.

"I was never bored," he says, and he never tired of reporting the varied and intricate moves of the game for which He lived. The sense of repetition, year after year, which is stifling to so many sportswriters, bothered Drebinger not at all. He scarcely felt a need to dress up his straightforward stories. For him there was enough emotion in the action he reported.

The years have brought changes to the game and the way it is covered. Drebinger regrets most of them, but philosophically. "When I first broke in," he says, "writers like Hughie Fullerton, Bill McGeehan and Will Wedge wrote much closer to the game than writers do now. They told the fans what was happening and why. They were full of the inside stuff. Now the young writers try to be sophisticated, blase. 'Hell,' they say, 'everybody knows what the hit-and-run is.''

Collision. For Drebinger, who not only knows what the hit-and-run is but feels a need to explain it, the seasons are now officially over. He was on the job down in Florida watching his Yankees warm up for opening day when the word arrived. "The Times put in a mandatory retirement age of 75 a couple of years ago, with the idea of reducing it one year each year," he said. "Now it's 73, and that's what I am. We just happened to collide--the limit on the way down and me on the way up."

It is probably too late for enforced retirement to make much difference to the old sportswriter's habits. The new season is about to start, and though John Drebinger will not be going to the ballpark for the New York Times, he intends to be there.

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