It was the summer of 1960 and baseball was 11-year-old Mike Gesker's world.

The young Catonsville resident's bike had baseball cards in its spokes and an Orioles' sticker on its front.

He played organized ball in St. Mark's Little League, endless pick-up games with other neighborhood kids in a dirt field behind the old St. Mark's church, and catch with buddies along North Beechwood Avenue.

One day, he and two friends took a public bus to Memorial Stadium to watch the Baltimore Orioles play the Kansas City Athletics.

When the game ended, the three boys ran to the parking lot where the home team's players parked their cars.

Out walked Clint Courtney, the Orioles' catcher known as "Scrap Iron" whom Satchel Paige once called "the meanest man I've ever met."

Gesker and his buddies casually walked up to Courtney and said, "Hey, Mr. Courtney! Can we get a ride home?"

They knew Courtney lived on Midvale Avenue, in Catonsville, in a house previously owned by Hall of Fame knuckleball pitcher Hoyt Wilhelm.

They also knew that was just around the corner from Gesker's home on North Beechwood.

Courtney responded, "Yeah, come on. Get in the car," and the three had their ride home.

For Gesker, now 60, it was "really a memorable moment," he said.

"When you're a kid, you never think those days are going to end," Gesker said.

But they have. That care-free summer is almost 50 years in the past and Gesker's days of running bases are indeed over.

But his love of the game of baseball is still as strong as ever -- as is evident in his just-published book, "The Orioles Encyclopedia: A Half Century of History and Highlights."

The Catonsville native, who now lives in Reisterstown, said he spent the last six and a half years writing the two-inch tome which chronicles the Orioles franchise and its players from 1954 to the present in its 821 pages.

Its 40-page bibliography includes a slew of baseball periodicals and resources.

There are also 425 rarely seen photographs and nearly 400 player profiles, written in a style Gesker developed over a long career of professional and freelance writing.

After graduating from Cardinal Gibbons High School in 1967 and the University of Dayton in 1971, Gesker served a few years in the Army before leaving the service and landing a job with Maryland Public Television in 1974.

He wrote there for 17 years, earning a local Emmy Award in 1991 for his writing on a comedy sketch show called "Crabs."

That same year, he also produced, directed and wrote "Baseball, The Birds on 33rd," a program about the Orioles.

Three days before it aired, he said, position cuts at the station left him without a job.

For a few years, he worked at a baseball card shop.

But kids' obsession with the value of cards was in stark contrast to his own days collecting cards, he said.

"We would flip them and trade them and put them on our bikes and put rubber bands on them, with no thought to whether they would be worth anything," he said. "It's a whole different mindset with kids these days."

He also did free lance writing for the Orioles program between 1992 and 2002.

At the end of that year, the editor of the program, Jessica Fisher, asked Gesker to put together a timeline of the Orioles.

That inspired him to call a publishing company and pitch the idea of writing an encyclopedia -- the type that existed for the Yankees, but had never been written about the Orioles, he said.

Gesker signed a contract with the company and began working.

In 2005, he called to update the publisher on his progress.

Someone there called back and told him, "It seems to us that you're under the impression we're still publishing your book," he said.

They had shuttered the project, he was told, because only books about the Yankees and Notre Dame sell.

For a while, he thought his years of work on the project would go down the drain.

Then a friend told him to call The Johns Hopkins University Press, which subsequently agreed to publish his finished project, he said.

So he went back to writing the encyclopedia in his small office in his Reisterstown home at night, after working at his day job writing for Catholic Relief Services.

The office, which only has one small light, is filled from floor to ceiling -- literally -- with books about baseball, a testimony to Gesker's love of the game.

The finished encyclopedia -- which starts with a foreword by Brooks Robinson and has an orange jacket featuring photos of Jim Palmer, Don Buford and Eric Davis -- is now part of that collection.

It is dedicated to Gesker's parents, Mitchell and Josephine Gesker, and his brother, Joe Gesker.

It also has a few small references to Gesker's hometown -- Catonsville.

In the book's preface, Gesker gives a self-deprecating, but genuine "special salute to my wonderful boyhood friend, Tim Codd, for the warm memories of the countless, blissful summer days he spent playing catch in the middle of Beechwood Avenue with a kid slower of foot and mind."

Among a collection, Gesker also thanks Joseph Krolicki and John Bowling, two teachers at the Cardinal Gibbons, for being "patient and inspiring influences."

And at the end of the book's profile of Courtney, Gesker writes, "This writer fondly remembers playing catch with Courtney in his backyard in Catonsville many years ago. Clint always had time to share with the neighborhood kids and it was quite a thrill.

"Thanks, Mr. Courtney."

Gesker's "Orioles Encyclopedia: A Half Century of History and Highlights," is available from JHU Press for $55.

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user comments (1)

user vincespence says...

If you had graduated from Mt. St. Joe in 1967 like your buddy Tim Codd, instead of Cardinal Gibbons, you could have written the book in four years, not six.

Posted 10:12 PM, 06.26.09

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