PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — How much does Elliott Cooper love baseball?
He loves baseball so much that he was willing to risk losing his hand for it.
On a sunny Florida day in the mid-1990s, Cooper had his shot to play against a former Phillies closer, Al Holland, who recorded the last out of the 1983 NLCS to send the Phils to the World Series.
Cooper was in his 60’s at the time, and he was participating in Phillies Phantasy Camp, an annual getaway for diehard baseball fans to play and learn the sport they adore from their heroes of yesteryear.
According to Cooper’s son-in-law, Ken Goldberg, while Cooper was playing second base, a ground ball hit him, and his thumb became infected. Pat Corrales, a former Phils manager and player, advised Cooper to put his infected finger in a lemon. Cooper is a diabetic.
Dedicated to the fullest, Cooper toughed out the week to make it to the last day of camp, when he got to play the game against Holland. Cooper’s thumb was still badly infected. We don’t recommend anyone do this at home.
When Cooper got back home, his wife Gloria took him to the hospital, where he spent three days hooked up to an IV with his hand in the air.
“When we get to the hospital, we’re like: ‘What’s going on?’ … All [he] can complain about is that, if his hand was right, he would have gotten a hit off of Al Holland,” Goldberg said.
“He’s not worried about losing his finger. He’s not worried about losing a hand. All he’s worried about is this one at bat against Al Holland — and that’s dedication to the game.”
It’s a game Cooper loves. Adores.
“I walk around thinking baseball,” said Cooper, now 86. “Some people think about other things, but my hobby and my life has been baseball. … It has made me, should I say, a relaxed person. I do not get involved with things that will make me unhappy, and baseball makes me happy.”
‘He was the original Joey Chestnut’
How much does Elliott Cooper love watching baseball?
He loves watching baseball so much, he endured endless hot dog dinners to score Phillies tickets.
Back in the day, baseball fans could find free tickets to games inside hot dog packages. Elliott took his son Adam, daughter Elissa, and Goldberg to many a game thanks to these hot dogs, earning the nickname “Ticket Man” — because he ate the dogs just to get the tickets.
“How many hot dogs was he eating so we could sit in the nosebleed sections of these games,” Goldberg reminisces. “And he loved it. We went to these games, and I’m like: He’s killing himself — but we’re going to these ball games for free with the ballpark franks.”
Adam jokes, “He’s the original Joey Chestnut” — Chestnut is a competitive eater. His dad modestly explains he didn’t eat as many hot dogs as it may sound like — but he does confess he would never get a hot dog at the ballpark — “because I ate so many of them before I got there.”
A hobby handed down from his father
Elliott’s admiration of baseball started with his father, Lewis, who grew up in Philadelphia and, like his son, always listened to the Phillies or Philadelphia Athletics on the radio.
“I grew up in a house where baseball was on all the time,” Elliott said.
Elliott developed an appreciation for the minor league, growing up in Wilkes-Barre, which was the home of the Barons of the Eastern League for much of his childhood and teen years. He moved to Philadelphia in 1953.
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When the Athletics relocated to Kansas City (and then Oakland) shortly after he arrived, Elliott was heartbroken. But he always admired legendary A’s manager Connie Mack, and enjoyed going to Shibe Park (later renamed Connie Mack Stadium).
“No other team in Philadelphia, to this day, has won five [championships like the A’s],” Elliott pointed out.
Elliott’s memory of Philadelphia baseball is vast — from Phillies icon Richie Ashburn throwing out the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Cal Abrams to make the 1950 World Series all the way to Bryce Harper’s epic NLCS home run from just last October.
“I always feel like he has such a vivid memory of the older teams,” said Adam. “He has such details and memory of where he was, when the game happened, time of the day. Really, really specific details.”
When Elliott was a librarian and high school teacher in Philadelphia, he used to read baseball books in the library. Reminiscing about baseball would ease him then, as it still does today.
“I sit sometimes downstairs in my basement and I think about some of the plays that I’ve seen and … makes my mind mentally happy,” he said.
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Elliott is also a memorabilia collector, and Adam says his father has a story for every item he has.
“We’d have season tickets; we’d go to the games together,” said Adam. “The game was always on. We would always have a catch. Just everything was sports related. We had a common interest, a bond. It really stands out. It was a big part of my life. It still is. And we still talk about it.”
‘He was crying on the phone, and I was crying too’
The Yankees swept the Phillies in the 1950 World Series. It wasn’t until 1980, nearly a century since their founding, to finally go all the way.
At that time, Lewis was living in Florida with a bad heart, taking nitroglycerin pills during Game 6 of the World Series against the Kansas City Royals.
After Tug McGraw struck out Willie Wilson at Veterans Stadium to capture the world championship, Elliott called Lewis.
“He was crying on the phone, and I was crying too,” he remembers.
Lewis died a couple of years after that, but at least he got to see his Phils finally win it all. And his unyielding enthusiasm for the Phillies lives on in his son.
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