Baseball fan Alyssa Milano is ‘Safe at Home’

Most people know actress Alyssa Milano as the former star of “Who’s the Boss?” and “Charmed” — but not many know that she is a serious baseball fan. Her new book “Safe at Home: Confessions of a Baseball Fanatic,” excerpted here, falls somewhere between a memoir, a manifesto and a love letter to baseball.

Chapter One: The First Pitch

Let the beauty of what you love be what you do. — Rumi

I long for the old days my father talks about. The days when kids stuck baseball cards in the spokes of their bicycles and rode the streets of Brooklyn until they came to a stickball game, at which point they jumped off, put their kickstands down, and jumped in. He actually got weepy about it a few years back when he told me of this time (and mind you, it wasn’t the first time he told me of this time). He told me about how a city of immigrants welcomed a team of immigrants, and how no other place in the world, and no other team, could have done what his team did, which was to hire a black man named Jackie Robinson as its shortstop, and end segregation in baseball.

Was there ever such a Utopia? Were there really streets filled with kids playing games, free, apparently, from Wal-Mart’s Corporate America, and all the other things that are part of modern society, as we now know it? My dad says such a world existed, and that its center was Ebbets Field, a magical place where heroes named Robinson and Reese and Campanella and Snider didn’t just rule the neighborhood, they lived there, walking the streets and shopping at the corner stores with the rest of the locals. Kids snuck into games under the bleachers, and everyone hated the Yankees because they were cocky and affected and didn’t reflect what that era was all about.

“Baseball came of age while our country came of age,” he recalled ever so proudly.

Memory is a tricky thing, and the good old days always look good a few decades later. Revisionist history, especially when it comes from a father who never misses an opportunity to discuss what Brooklyn used to be like. But when my dad talked about those days, he gave me a glimpse into a world where men played like kids, and kids played hooky to cheer the men, bought Tootsie Rolls for a nickel, and drank things called egg creams on a big street called Flatbush. It’s a far cry from where we find ourselves today. But those differences are all part of the fun.

I was born in Bensonhurst. If you look at a map of Brooklyn, Bensonhurst doesn’t seem far away from Flatbush, but apparently, in the seventies, they were worlds apart. My parents were twenty-five years old when I was born, and like most new parents and young couples, they were struggling to make ends meet. In fact, when my parents found out that they were pregnant with me, they had both just lost their jobs.

I never knew of those hardships. The colossal amount of love that they shared for each other and life in general masked those financial struggles well. To this day, forty years after their wedding, their love is the kind that Rumi wrote of. I am, and everything that I’ve achieved is, a direct extension of that love. Every decision they made after I was born was selfless and in my best interest.

When I was four and crime started to rise in Brooklyn, they left the borough they grew up in and moved the family to Staten Island, where they could fulfill their American dreams of better schools and a safer neighborhood for their daughter. It was hard for both of them to leave the place where they had grown up, a place so inextricably linked to their memories of youth. My father in particular wanted nothing more than for me to enjoy the same egg creams that he had; but that Brooklyn, the Brooklyn of his past, had long since faded, passing into New York’s history alongside Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds.

We lived in a simple house in Staten Island. We didn’t have a pool in the backyard or anything extravagant. Our only refuge from the hot humid summers was a fire hydrant on the corner that the locals would open so the kids in the neighborhood could run barefoot through the cascading water and look at the rainbows the water made. (Yes, that idyllic New York City summer image really did happen.) My family didn’t have a dishwasher or a rose garden or any luxuries that defined “success.” What we had was love and each other. My dad’s mom, Nanny Connie, lived downstairs in the apartment that was attached to the humble house. She had plastic slipcovers on her furniture and those thick plastic runners over all the carpet that made funny noises when you dragged your feet on them in that specific way. Nanny Connie would stand me up on a chair and let me knead the dough of whatever Italian pastries she was cooking up from memory, and for dinner she would cook me pastina, which was my favorite food.

My earliest childhood memories are of my mother sketching in her sketchpad (she was a fashion designer at the time) and my father playing the Beatles on the piano or the guitar (he was a musician who gave up his rock-star dream to put food on the table). And there I was, in all of my innocence, donned in a black leotard with pink tights, legwarmers, and ballerina shoes, doing interpretive dance for my audience of Madame Alexander dolls and imaginary friends. I remember the smell of potatoes and eggs on the stove, and when they were ready we would eat them on Wonder bread with ketchup. I remember our brown velvet couch that itched my legs when I sat on it. And ... I remember on those nights, when creativity and interpretive dance ensued, that off in the corner was our old TV with rabbit ears, and on that TV seemed always to be a Yankees game.

The game on TV was never intrusive. Periodically the reception would hiss and the static would infiltrate the screen. While the game wasn’t always the focus of the night, its presence was constant. Our family coming together with the sounds of umpires, crowd roars, and base hits — not to mention the unforgettably excitable voice of Phil Rizzuto screaming “Holy cow!” like he was sitting on the couch next to you. Little did I know how much those early days would shape the woman I eventually became. The creativity I was surrounded with back then became the foundation of a career that’s now twenty-nine years old. Meanwhile the sport, which started as background noise, grew into a member of the Milano family and became a love of baseball that’s now twenty-seven years or so young.

****

I got my first professional acting job when I was seven. I don’t know how it happened. I mean, I know the story of how it happened, but I don’t remember much of the specifics. The story goes like this: My sweet aunt Sissy took me to see the Broadway musical “Peter Pan” for my seventh birthday, and I looked at her all wide-eyed and said, “Aunt Sissy, I can do that.” Before anyone knew what happened I was at an open audition for the play “Annie.” Fifteen hundred kids auditioned, and four were picked. I was one of the four. I didn’t choose to be an actress. It chose me. I still don’t know why it chose me, but I feel blessed for it and this powerful thing called destiny.

My mom and I blissfully toured with the second national touring company of the play, hitting twelve cities in eighteen months. I remember loving it even though it was very hard for me to be away from my father. He would come to visit us. I hated it when he left. My mother, bless her, did the best she could. She tried to make my life as normal as possible. She enrolled me in the Girl Scouts in every city and helped me do my homework; we would read Shel Silverstein’s “Where the Sidewalk Ends” out loud, and play jacks on the floor of whatever place we parked the trunk and called home. When the run was coming to an end, my parents asked me what I wanted for a wrap present. “A flute and a brother,” I replied.

I got both.

Shortly after I got off the road, my brother, Cory, was born, and it was the best day of my life. Everything was back to normal. We were all together. The Yankees on TV, the sauce cooking on the stove, me creating some fairy tale in my head, and my baby brother screaming his head off in his playpen. The only way Cory could fall asleep was if my mom had the vacuum cleaner on. True story. This led to a lot of vacuuming, and while our house went from clean to immaculate pretty quickly, it became a lot harder to hear the Yankees games on TV.

Video   Alyssa Milano on her love of baseball March 30: TODAY’s Natalie Morales talks to actress Alyssa Milano about her new memoir, “Safe at Home,” which combines baseball history with stories of her life. Today show

It was the early eighties, and the Dodgers were long in Los Angeles by then, and every so often Dad would say what a terrible man Walter O’Malley was for stealing the Dodgers and moving them out west. My father’s sadness and anger were part of the magic. So was his telling me what a great player Reggie Jackson was, and how if anyone ever tried to boss me around like Yankees manager Billy Martin tried to boss Reggie around, I should do what Reggie did, and tell him no one bossed me, and then go out and hit some more home runs, or something.

I learned how to love and follow the game by watching with my father every night as he propped himself in front of the television set and debated whether Thurman Munson was a better catcher than Yogi Berra. (Tough call.) I was Daddy’s little girl, and that meant that he and I could admire Reggie’s spirit for the Yankees and feel sad for the loss of the Brooklyn Dodgers together.

It was only years later that I figured out that my dad was all of ten years old when the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, and that he wasn’t even born when Jackie Robinson took the field as a Dodger and broke the color barrier. It was only later that I puzzled at how his onetime hatred of the Yankees seemed to coexist so very peaceably with his love of all things Reggie. It was only later that I realized that his hatred of the Yankees turned into love when the Dodgers abandoned him, and a community of people just like him, to move to Los Angeles. But that’s baseball. That’s memory. That’s life.

As far as my budding career was concerned, I continued to do theater in New York, pursuing a lot of off-Broadway, small productions in small houses with bigger-than-life people. I learned what it meant to have a strong work ethic, be professional, and say tongue twisters like “The sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick” to warm up my mouth before a live performance. I loved every minute of the creative escape that acting gave me, and also the pride it brought my family. I was an actress because it was a game that I played, and like baseball, it was one I happened to love. I was in the minor leagues and mastering the fundamentals of my sport. Well, as much as any nine-year-old could master anything.

In between jobs, I went to normal public school and continued to audition for roles. My dad used to bring me into work with him in Manhattan when I had auditions. We would take the ferry from Staten Island into the city. He was working as an insurance adjuster at the time and would let me play on the typewriter in the reception area. I would write stories that of course began, “Once upon a time, there was a little girl ....” Isn’t that how all fairy tales begin? We would walk to my auditions from the office, because people actually walk in New York, and I would point out everyone in a Yankees cap along the way, kind of like punch buggy, only without the buggy. And the punch.

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