Diamonds Are Forever : Goldfield’s Collection of Baseball Gems Is Just One Facet of His Obsession

Mickey Mantle is dead. Hit by a car. And if you’re stunned by that news, wait until you hear this:

Duke Snider and Hank Aaron have been killed by coyotes. Wade Boggs, however, is fine. He wets on trees and can scratch his ear with his foot and sleeps on the cement patio behind Matt Goldfield’s house in Thousand Oaks.

Wade Boggs is a springer spaniel. Mickey Mantle, Duke Snider and Hank Aaron are cats. Well, they were cats. They were preceded by three felines named Tinkers, Evers and Chance. The coyotes that roam the hills of Thousand Oaks showed them a double play a few years ago, snatching two of them from Goldfield’s yard one night. Evers was hit by a car a few months later.

Goldfield, the player-coach of the semipro Conejo Cubs of the Goodman Collegiate League and a former player for Thousand Oaks High, Santa Monica City College and Moorpark College, is a baseball fanatic. He has named all of his pets after baseball legends. He plays as many as 130 games a year. He is one of the few people who watch virtually all--is it 109 or 110?--games a year between the San Diego Padres and Atlanta Braves on the Turner Broadcast System.

He took his wife Linda on a vacation to Palm Springs last year and within hours after their arrival had her shagging fly balls in scorching 120-degree temperatures in the outfield of the California Angels’ spring training facility.

They have three children, Josh, Nicole and Brittany. And no matter what little obstacles fate might throw in their paths, the children should always take comfort in the knowledge that they easily could have been forced to trudge through life named Babe, Honus and Satchel.

“That’s where I drew the line,” Linda said. “Cats and dogs are one thing. . . .”

For her husband, there is only one thing. Baseball. Since he knocked a ball over the fence for a grand slam in his first at-bat ever, as an 11-year-old in the Thousand Oaks Little League, Goldfield has fallen for the game. Fallen hard.

How hard?

“My whole life is engulfed by baseball,” said Goldfield, 31. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and sit up in bed and think about pitches I struck out on three years ago. Pitches I should have hit.”

Big deal, right? All of us have that dream. But just how seriously does Goldfield take the game?

“We were in a tournament in Hawaii last year and were going against a team from Japan,” Goldfield said. “I went to the Pearl Harbor monument before the game just to get psyched up to play those guys.”

Whoa! Some might think there’s a danger here of pressing against that fine line between a good, healthy, fanatical, all-consuming obsession and weirdness.

Another example:

“When I can’t get a game to play in and I have to be home, I watch baseball on TV,” he said. “All the time.”

“And when he’s not home,” said Linda, “he asks me to tape the game so he can watch it when he gets home. That’s all he’ll ever watch. Baseball.”

“Or the Playboy channel,” Goldfield said. “But you know what? I’d much rather watch the Padres and the Braves than the Playboy channel.”

To say that Goldfield likes baseball is to say that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar likes big shoes. Goldfield needs baseball. It is the force that drives him. It is well-known among managers in the Goodman Collegiate League that if you try to embarrass the Conejo Cubs, one of your players will likely be having surgery to remove a baseball from his ear.

“People think it’s just some kind of recreational baseball, but it’s my life,” Goldfield said. “If you’re beating us, 10-0, and you steal a base, you know that your next batter is going down. I’ll have my pitcher throw at your guy. Every time. One of my pitchers hit the first four batters in the first inning of a game against a team we didn’t like. Baseball is nothing to joke about.”

If you need further proof of his obsession, a visit to his home should do. One step through the front door and your eyes are drawn to a stack of baseball gloves in the hall. A glance to the left into the den reveals a shrine to the game, with dozens more gloves, nearly 80, all nearly new and all top-of-the-line equipment. Dozens of bats lean against, hang on or rest at the bottom of the walls.

Among the booty are game jerseys worn by Don Mattingly (home and road jerseys), Harmon Killebrew, Carl Yastrzemski, Mike Schmidt, Steve Carlton, Al Kaline, Tom Seaver and Steve Garvey.

In a trophy case is the last uniform jersey worn by Hank Aaron and the last glove used by Aaron, a badly worn MacGregor with the word “Aaron” and the number 44 written along the thumb in magic marker but fading fast into the deep, dark brown leather.

He bought the jerseys, some from from shadowy sources, men who knew major league trainers or just knew how to bend down quickly and gracefully in hectic locker rooms and scoop up a few pieces of dirty laundry on their way out the door.

And there are many, many bats used by major leaguers ranging from Kirk Gibson to Roberto Clemente.

There are photographs and autographs. Goldfield takes a copy of Willie Mays’ book, “My Secrets of Playing Baseball” from a shelf and talks of one of his major disappointments in a 20-year love affair with the game.

“It was 1968 and I had tried for three straight nights to get Willie’s autograph,” he said. “He always said no or just walked by me. So after the final game of the series between the Giants and the Dodgers, my father parks the car and waits for him to come out. He came out and drove right past us. But my father decides we’re going to chase him.

“Finally, after a 30-minute chase into downtown and around some side streets, we both stop for a light and my mother jumps out with the book and says to Willie, ‘Please sign this for my son.’ And Willie Mays gets out of his car and takes the pen and starts signing it, and the pen runs out of ink. It just stopped. And Willie stuck the pen in the book, handed it back to my mother and drove away.”

On the inside cover of the book, Goldfield runs his thumb over it now, perhaps the only autograph ever obtained from, “Willie May.”

There have been, however, bigger disappointments. Goldfield wanted to play major league baseball. He never came close. He was offered a no-bonus contract out of high school by the Atlanta Braves but turned it down in favor of a few years of maturing in college. The chance never came again.

“Ever since high school, everybody always told me I had the talent to play in the big leagues,” he said. “And that’s all I ever thought about. But things just never worked out. I still think about it. I went to Reno this spring for a tryout with a minor league team and was told I had made it, but things didn’t work out there, either.

“I guess I still think something might happen . . . somebody might give me a call. But I know the dream is over. It’s gone.”

Which is the same way Keith Hernandez of the New York Mets must feel about his 1981 National League Gold Glove award, which he won while with the St. Louis Cardinals. The trophy with the gold-plated glove sits proudly in Goldfield’s den. He said he bought it from a guy who said he was a friend of Hernandez’s who needed some cash.

“Sometimes I’ll be watching a Mets’ game on TV and I’ll hear the announcer say, ‘At first base is Keith Hernandez, who has nine Gold Glove awards,’ and I’ll laugh to myself and think, ‘No, he doesn’t. He has eight Gold Glove awards. I have the other one.”