OPINION:
I grew up in a baseball family, enjoying Daddy’s season tickets on the third-base line at Griffith Stadium. Washington’s team then was the Senators — “Washington, first in war, first in peace and last in the American League.” Now Washington has a championship-caliber team, never last, and I rooted passionately this year for a Nationals-Astros World Series, and for a very personal reason.
So this column is an indulgence. My late father, Bo Bregman, was a sportsman of a certain prominence in Washington in his prime. My brother, Stanley Bregman, was the lawyer for the Senators before they moved to Minnesota and became the Twins. If “Bregman” sounds familiar, it should. Bo Bregman’s great-grandson and Stanley’s grandson, Alex Bregman, plays third base for the Houston Astros. His father, Sam, played baseball at the University of New Mexico. The family is having a great Series. Alex hit the stunning single to left field in the bottom of the 10th inning to drive in the winning run in the fifth game that put the Astros on the cusp of a championship.
My father was a standout catcher in the Washington amateur leagues early in the last century. My brother Stan thought he might have made it to the middle minor leagues. He didn’t, but he organized a sandlot team when I was a little girl. Daddy supplied bats, balls, gloves and shirts for the Bregman Wildcats, emblazoned with a ferocious wildcat. My girlfriends and I got T-shirts identifying us as the Bregman Kittens. We purred, contented.
Bo’s great-grandson was a natural from the time he was a little boy, already special at 4, and in high school he won an award as the national high-school player of the year. He played three years at Louisiana State University, and the Astros picked him in the first round of the 2015 Major League draft.
My father didn’t live long enough to know Alex, but he would have popped his vest buttons if he had seen Alex step up to the plate for his first World Series at-bat. Alex’s extended family of great- and grand- cousins, aunts and uncles (and friends) have kept a steady traffic of emails, texts and telephone calls, sometimes referring to him as a chip off the old block of his great-grandfather. Bo grew up in a different America. He earned his advanced degree at the unforgiving School of Hard Knocks. His was the immigrant Jewish experience which you don’t hear much about anymore.
He dropped out of school in the sixth grade when his parents, who arrived in America as poor as synagogue mice, told him one day there was no money for a pair of shoes and he would have to wear his sister’s shoes to school. “How could I wear girls’ shoes and play ball?” he asked me many years later when he sat down to tell me about his life for my book, “Like Father, Like Daughter.”
Bo was the fifth of seven children born in Pinsk, that small, doomed city on the Russian-Polish border whose many Jews had been ravaged over the centuries by czars, Nazis, pogroms, hunger, political repressions and, always, hard times. (An eighth was born in America, land of the free.) Bo arrived with his family in 1911, when he was 4, and spoke two languages. Neither of them was English. My grandfather was a carpenter, who earned a hardscrabble living with his hands. “He probably wasn’t the smartest man who ever left Russia,” my father told me, “but you should be forever grateful he was smart enough not to miss the boat to America.”
He insisted that my brother and I get an education, but quitting school in the sixth grade for him meant spending more time playing baseball on the Mall, between the Capitol and the Washington Monument, which in those days was more a place for sandlot games than a place to look for a museum or a monument. He was recruited as catcher for St. Dominick’s in the Parochial League, and his pals winked at each other when his name was entered on the roster as Bregmanio, not Bregman. St. Dominic’s won the city championship.
When opposing coaches started making pointed inquiries about the catcher who looked more Jewish than Italian, the priest asked questions and when he learned who Daddy was, returned the trophy. His teammates didn’t speak to him for a week, but he became so popular that his pals gave him the ultimate accolade, a nickname, after Bo McMillan, the hero of poor boys on sandlots everywhere after he quarterbacked the Praying Colonels of tiny Centre College in Kentucky to an upset of mighty Harvard, the national champions.
Alex Bregman lives a different life in a different time, but he dreamed a familiar dream. He might be on his way to Cooperstown. Alex described his winning walk-off single in the fifth game of the World Series as “something you dream about as a little kid.” Here’s to you, Alex, and, if I may, I like to think you’re fulfilling Bo’s dream, too.
• Suzanne Fields is a columnist for The Washington Times and is nationally syndicated.
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