My Life as a Fan

Wilfrid Sheed arrived in this country as an English kid worried about his house being bombed and his country being invaded. Yet within a year he had become a typical 10-year-old baseball nut, with nothing worse on his mind than Bronx Bombers and Enos Slaughters and Bean-ball wars. Only in America - that year, anyway. His personal Ellis Islands were the ballparks of the 1940s, especially Shibe Park in Philadelphia, Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, and any surface anywhere on which kids his age were trying to get a game together - and he has left his heart in all of them.