PPh’s Baseball Club was born in the year 2000 by a group of dedicated resident baseball fanatics along with our President and CEO, Anthony Manzo. Having identified a popular common interest amongst them, this group started gathering on the last Wednesday of each month to talk about matters of Baseball both past and present.
Ed Rudzinski and the late Ernie Miller
The club currently averages about 30 attendees a session, all of whom enjoy light snacks, cola and talking shop. Each member fills out a prediction card for division and pennant winners at the start of each season. The group tends to be pretty evenly split among male and female most of which are fans of either the Philadelphia Phillies or the Oakland Athletics (who were actually in Philadelphia from 1901-1955 as the Philadelphia Athletics). They even attend a Phillies game each season, and many of them attend a few other games as well.
One popular topic of discussion is to relive some of their favorite memories of the game. For Edward Rudzinski, a resident of PPh for the past 20 years, his favorite baseball memory is simple. As a child living in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, Ed used to make extra spending money by helping to clean up the Baker Bowl (home of the Philadelphia Phillies from 1887-1938 and host of the 1915 World Series) after practices and home games. On one such occasion, he caught a glimpse of his all-time favorite baseball player, Joe Medwick of the St. Louis Cardinals. In the days before television and internet, catching a glimpse of someone that you would normally only read about in the newspaper or hear about on the radio was a big deal. For Ed, the experience was unreal. It is memories such as this that really brought the Baseball Club at The Philadelphia Protestant Home together.
Now that we know Ed’s favorite baseball memory, we ask you the reader: What is yours?