Baseball

Baseball was always my favorite sport. That was partly because I could play it. I was too short for basketball. I was fast, but too small for football. Soccer just wasn't popular enough in this country when I was growing up. I did play varsity soccer, but my senior year was the first year our school even had a soccer team. But I also like baseball because I associated it with summer and the wonderful and richly peopled stories I heard out on the radio from the marvelously friendly tenor voice of Vin Scully.

I used to live and die with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Like Tommy Lasorda, I bled Dodger Blue and paid at least ritual obeisance to the Big Dodger in the Sky. My dad would take me or my three sisters and me to the ballpark three or four times a year. This was in the sixties, the heyday of the pitching and speed teams that won four national League pennants and three World Series during that stretch. I took my own kids in the nineties.

In my boyhood I watched Don Drysdale storm around the mound after giving up a hit. The stadium was electric at the prospect of what was going to happen next. Everybody knew the next hitter would be on his back in the dirt to avoid a 98 mile per hour fastball aimed at his ribs. I chanted "Go! Go! Go!" along with 54,000 others when Maury Wills got on first base and the opposing pitcher began the futile ritual of throwing over five or six times before Wills went ahead and picked his pocket anyway. I stood before the first pitch in the first inning for the first ovation as Sandy Koufax walked in from the bullpen and climbed the mound. These weren't wild ovations. The applause was just like at a symphony when the conductor steps to his music stand and bows to the crowd before turning to the orchestra and tapping his baton in readiness for the first note. Seeing Koufax take the mound was like seeing the Grand Canyon or a redwood grove for the first time. You felt the presence of the awesome.

I was spoiled in those days. I didn't appreciate how rare it was to live in Southern California when it was still full of orange groves, to have a father who had made it out of the coal mines thanks to a lot of hard work but also some luck in the face of German artillery and to root for a colorful team that was in contention every year and hear it described by one of the greatest and most engaging of all announcers.

The feeling isn't the same any more. I am still a fan and probably always will be. But I don't live and die with the Blue any more. I'm sure some of is the fallout from the changing game is part of it. Due to free agency a team doesn't keep many of its players around as long. Loyalties don't get built up. The O'Malley family doesn't own the team and it isn't run like a family business any more. Vinny is still around but I only get him for about two innings up here. He's lost a step or two. The other announcers are decent, but how does "decent" sound when you've heard the master? The steroid garbage hasn't helped either.

In spite of all that the game itself remains basically the same and as fascinating as always. It's just that I'm not as emotionally involved. I'm sure part of that is just age. I'm in my fifties, a long time removed from fantasies of playing on the field of dreams. There are grown children to think of and retirement to plan for a during a period when the investments set up for that purpose are taking a beating.

But then that is part of the charm, isn't it? The leisurely pace of baseball makes its characterization as a "pastime" on the mark. It's a time of reconnecting with friends or family, bringing back good memories of Dodger Dogs and frozen malts and a six year old with wide eyes, a blue hat and priceless autographs of Willie D. and Junior Gilliam. Or of sitting down and seeing those same looks on the face of my own six year old thirty years later and now a long time ago.

It's not life and death now, it's more like dusk on a summer day when the light is golden and the heat breaks and all the world is like an impressionist painting. It will do. And I appreciate the winning now. It seemed a matter of course to a kid back then. Now I know if I see one more championship in my life I will be fortunate. It's the journey, seeing the game being played the way it's supposed to be played that is important now, knowing that its traditions will be carried on into the next generations in a seamless thread.

Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Denver, Seattle, Baltimore or L. A. They're anticipating the baseball season in all those places. And even in smaller places like Asheville, Davenport, Pawtucket and right here in Visalia. And as long as they're playing baseball there will be something fundamentally right in America, no matter what else is going on. You don't really get this country if you don't understand baseball. It's like the sun coming up on a late spring day with the smell of roasted peanuts and cotton candy in the air. You gotta love it.