Recently I picked up an envelope that awaited me at the Napa Valley Register’s office.

It came from Bruce C. Lederer, a man I met only once before by chance on one of my “cake runs” to Butter Cream Bakery.

Talk about small worlds.

Bruce, now living at the beautiful Willowbrook off Big Ranch Road, had once been an attorney on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn, New York.

He had shared a suite with my late brother-in-law Tom Burnett, a fellow barrister. What are the odds of something like that happening?

Bruce, it turns out, is also an old baseball fan, and enclosed in his mailing was an article he’d written for his community newsletter, the “Willowbrook Times.”

The story was filled with memories of his once-beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, and how from his home — not far from Ebbets Field — he could hear the roars of over 30,000 fans of “Dem Bums.”

His story brought back memories of a team that dominated the National League for a decade (1947-1956) before owner Walter O’Malley turned his back on Brooklyn for California gold — the saddest chapter in the history of a remarkable town.

But before O’Malley swung his ax, Bruce took readers back to the Dodgers of manager Leo Durocher, a powerhouse team led by Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson and ably supported by Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella, Carl Furillo and a California kid named Duke Snider.

Bruce also remembered Gladys Gooding — the organist at Ebbets Field who would strike up “Three Blind Mice” whenever the umpires walked onto the field — and the Brooklyn “SYM-PHONY,” an amateur on a horn, several Kazoo players and a guy with a big bass drum who would do their best (or worst) to rattle visiting teams, including my beloved New York Giants.

In my book, Gladys and that band were Bush League, but I must admit they made life hell for my Jints.

There was another surprise in Bruce’s mailing, and it was one that made my day. It was a single sheet of paper, official New York Giants stationery, and it contained the autographs of every 1939 Giants player, all of them my heroes.

Bruce didn’t recall how it came into his possession, but because I had corresponded with guys like Harry Danning, Jo Jo Moore and Billy Jurges after my retirement in the early 1990s, I knew those signatures were authentic.

I had only filed that treasure away when I got a call from a loyal reader who always wishes to remain anonymous and I respect her wishes.

This time she had a baseball question that she thought was right up my alley.

She said her 10-year-old grandson had seen a game at the Giants’ AT&T Park, and a visiting player had hit a home run that had hit the foul pole in left field.

The boy’s question was, “Why is a ball hitting a foul pole a fair ball?”

I laughed and immediately recalled a game at the old Polo Grounds in New York that my older brothers Bill and Georgie took me to.

That was the day foul poles were born, and three of those 1939 Giants on Bruce Lederer’s autograph sheet played major roles in getting those poles erected.

My Giants were playing the Cincinnati Reds on a hot and sticky July 15th afternoon (I looked it up).

The Reds, who would win the National League a few months later, would gain the honor of being swept by the New York Yankees in the 1939 World Series, the same fate the Chicago Cubs experienced in 1938.

But, the World Series was months away.

In the sixth inning of the game the Parker boys were watching, a Cincinnati batter named Harry Craft hit a curving line drive into the lower left field stands that everyone in the ballpark — including the Reds players themselves — thought was foul by at least three or four feet.

But the home plate umpire called it a fair ball! By the way, foul poles rising up to the upper tiers of baseball parks did not exist in those days.

The Giants, all 25 of them, were on the field trying to get the call reversed, but the three umpires working the game in those days would not do much.

Mild-mannered Giants catcher Harry Danning, who became my “pen pal” and friend many years later, actually pushed the home plate ump.

Harry got “the thumb.”

The Giants’ quiet left fielder, Jo Jo Moore, who was closest to the ball on the play, went wild. He followed Harry Danning by also getting thumbed off the field.

But the worse was yet to come. The Giants’ fiery shortstop, Billy Jurges, got into an in-your-face spitting match with burly first base umpire George Majerkurth, and Billy had to be dragged off the diamond by teammates before fans joined the combatants on the playing field.

That evening, National League President Ford Frick did two things. First, he suspended Jurges and Majerkurth for 10 days each and levied additional fines on both men in those times when a buck was hard to come by.

The second thing he did was to order all National League teams to immediately erect foul poles with screens attached to continue the foul lines from the ground up. They were to be not less than 10 feet above the upper tiers of each ballfield in the league.

The American League quickly followed suit and in 1940, foul poles were in the rule book.

My friend, the reader and grandma, then said, “Why call them foul poles and foul lines if a ball hitting them is fair? Why not call them fair poles and fair lines?”

She had a point!

To her sound reasoning I said, ‘Ma’am, you’d have to go back to the 1700s in New England.’

That’s when a form of British cricket — with its servers (pitchers) and its strikers (batters) combined with rounders (bases) became known as “American Town Ball.”

American Town Ball later changed to “baseball” and was played within foul lines — and 100 years later, Hall of Famer Alexander Cartwright in New York devised the concept of fair or foul territory and never thought of changing foul lines to fair.

Ace Parker can be reached at evjenpar@mailbug.com or 224-9956.