The Greatest Baseball Player Who Ever Lived was born on June 16, 1964 in Torrance, California. Billy Boswell was brought in to this world to play the game.
The first six years of his life, Billy was in all ways a normal kid. His surroundings were anything but normal. He hung out at Dodger Stadium, where his father was one of baseball’s great stars. He made a pest of himself in the clubhouse.
Torrance was a whole new world for the Boswells. Geographically, it is not far from the gritty urban landscape of the L.A. ‘hood that Al and Nanette had grown up in, but for a black family that makes the move there, it is a different world.
Billy did not notice much of anything. He was a happy child. He recognized that he looked different from his white pals, but thought little of it. It was not until the family moved a few miles away, and “up the hill” to Palos Verdes Estates that he began to discern that he was, indeed, different.
The Palos Verdes move shook the Boswells up. It was the realization of a dream on Al’s part, but he was frustrated that it did not produce the kind of inner satisfaction he thought he would achieve. Al was a searcher, and he had not found what he was searching for.
This sense of longing filtered down to the family. Nanette kept things together. She was the rock. Billy and his sister, Tabitha, sensed that unease in their father. Billy saw his performance on the field slack off from his spectacular first six years in the league. He saw that Al was bitter about something, but was too young to put his finger on it. Billy began to recognize that since he was black, he was different from the other kids.
In Torrance, he had played and gone to school with white kids, too, but he was young and had not really formulated an opinion. In Palos Verdes, the opulence of life there contrasted from the more-pedestrian landscape of Torrance.
The biggest impact on young Billy, however, was when he went to visit his grandparents, on both his father’s and mother’s side, in Los Angeles. They were inner city black folks, living in neighborhoods that, year after year, were beset by the woes of drugs and crime.
Billy was young and impressionable. He could not, and perhaps never in his life would, put his finger on what these impressions meant to him. In the early 1970s, he became a “problem child.” He did okay in school and was no trouble for teachers, but he became a moody kid. He got in fights. He made friends and then lost them, usually because he would piss them off in some manner. He had “attitude,” and held himself above the others. He was confused.