Tampa Bay History Volume 23 Issue 1 Article 5 1-1-2009 Baseball Was My Life: The Stories of West Tampa Mary Jo Melone Art Keeble Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/tampabayhistory Recommended Citation Melone, Mary Jo and Keeble, Art (2009) "Baseball Was My Life: The Stories of West Tampa," Tampa Bay History: Vol. 23 : Iss. 1 , Article 5. Available at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/tampabayhistory/vol23/iss1/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Open Access Journals at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Tampa Bay History by an authorized editor of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Melone and Keeble: Baseball Was My Life: The Stories of West Tampa Baseball 45 Baseball Was My Life: The Stories of West Tampa By Mary Jo Melone and Art Keeble TAMPA, A BASEBALL MECCA You can stand where they stood. You can see what they saw. You can picture the old man who sold deviled crabs at the gate, the gamblers who shouted from the stands that they had ten dollars at stake on your next play. If you stand still long enough on some of Tampa’s baseball fields, you can hear the crowds cheering, or, because nobody is all that polite in the ball field, booing. And if you try, you can reach back to the days of El Señor, Al Lopez, the city’s first Hall of Famer, and imagine the fantasies he fired in young men who wanted to do what he did, some of whom succeeded beyond what they ever dreamed.