Something different than the high-stakes times we are living in.
Last night was Game One of the World Series. As a kid and for all my mates, this was appointment viewing.
This year? Los Angeles vs. Yankees. I have already written about my feelings regarding LA and the Yankees are well, New York; normally I would wish a pox on the both of them. Unfortunately this year there doesn’t seem to be any proper villains on either team, they all seem likable guys. Darn.
However I will confess that my two best World Series memories both involve the Yankees. The first was when the D-backs beat them in 2001 on a miracle Luis Gonzalez walk-off hit in Game 7. I call it a miracle because if you know anything about Arizona sports, you had the sense at the time that we were destined to blow the game and the series after taking a 3-1 lead.
The other memory? I happened to be in New York in 1996 when the Yanks beat the Braves to win their first World Series in 18 years. The sheer joy of the city coming alive after the win was mesmerizing. My friend said, half-jokingly I assume, that now he knew what Paris was like when the day it was liberated from the Germans.
Of course these days, football is America’s game. However does it matter? First, the best baseball over the past 20 years was not played in MLB but rather in the World Baseball Classic. The atmosphere during last year’s WBC was like nothing I had ever seen since the great Canada Cup series of the 1980s. It was a reminder that America’s game has gone forth into the world and returned home to its origins in the form of the great baseball nations of Asia and Latin America, America’s cultural influence at its finest. The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Japan…
My other baseball memories are tied to the more mundane. Alot of ink has been spilled by George Will and others about the “spirituality of baseball.” I don’t know about that and I stopped reading Will and his ilk years ago. However baseball does seem to be the sport best aligned to the seasons; it starts slowly with spring training which seems more of a national celebration of the end of winter, plays its 162- game season primarily during the long and lazy summer days, and then builds to a crescendo with the onset of autumn.
Of course living in Arizona means the spring training experience. I once had an office around the corner from the Angels’ spring training facility and I would go out to the various practice fields. Sometimes I would recognize a coach from his days as a player and I would try my networking skills to start up a conversation, getting his take on a past play or their recollection of a past teammate or manager. Like spring training itself, low-stakes stuff and I think they enjoyed the conversation as much as I did.
My kids caught the baseball bug. Starting when they were three and six, we would take them to D-back games on Sunday afternoons, sit in the cheap seats so that they had room to get the wiggles out, and bless their hearts they always made it to the end of the game. To them, and for us, the game was about family and memories.
Baseball is a game made for radio. The sport itself is played to a rhythm that lends itself to stories each with their distinctive arc; the batter facing the pitcher ending in the climax of either an out or reaching base, a ball hit to the field brings the possibility of adventure. Unlike TV, with radio you are forced to interact with the game solely through the announcers and your imagination. Given that games are played nearly every night, the radio announcers became your nightly story-tellers. A friend of mine told me, “Football is an event, baseball is just part of the everyday.”
To this day whenever we are in the car during an afternoon or evening, no mater what part of the country, we will try and find a game and for a few innings we are transported into a different world, a different story-line. Better than any audiobook.