Baseball Doesn't Love Me Back

When I was ten-years-old, just after the dinosaurs had disappeared, it was still a normal thing in the summer for neighborhood kids to get together and play baseball.  The neighbors directly across the street from my boyhood home had two sons around my age, and, more importantly, a large enough flat grassy area, where boys (we never saw girls our age outside) from surrounding streets were allowed to play.

I wasn’t very good at baseball at that age, although I was probably better than I remember.  I was pretty hard on myself at the time thanks to a father who taught me how.  I might not have been the neighborhood Pete Rose, but, because of my Great Uncle Coy Smith, I was pretty popular when the games would start each year.  Coy was a foreman at the Louisville Slugger bat company in Kentucky and he would call his sister, my grandmother, every year before coming down for a visit.  Knowing I was becoming a baseball fanatic, he would ask her which player’s bats I wanted, and he would bring them to me, meaning the neighborhood had new bats every year for our games.

My love affair with baseball had begun unexpectedly.  I loved all sports as a boy, except ice hockey.  Hockey was weird and I didn’t know anyone who liked it or even talked about it.  But during the World Series of 1971, I caught a game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Pittsburgh Pirates.  I had no connection to either team, or any team for that matter,  but when I saw Baltimore first baseman Boog Powell, I liked him immediately.  He always had a mischievous smile on his face and looked like he was having a great time.  He was big by baseball standards at the time and was also pretty darn good at the game.  He became my first sports hero, and one I hold dear to this day.

At the time I had no idea the Orioles had defeated the Reds in the previous season’s fall classic or that they had lost the Series the year before that to the Miracle Mets. All that knowledge came later as I slowly educated myself on baseball.  I was a pretty good student, but baseball had become my passion. I amassed a decent baseball card collection, and at  one time I had studied them to the point that I could tell you every player’s middle name.

Starting with the 1972 season I would rush to the daily paper to see how Boog did in the latest game by turning to the sports pages and finding the box scores.  I learned to pay attention to the league leaders in all the statistical categories and started to learn dozens of other player’s names, not just the Orioles’.  In a few years time I also became a fan of the Big Red Machine from Cincinnati, primarily their diminutive all-star second baseman Joe Morgan.

I begged my mother to sign me up for Dixie Youth baseball and when I was twelve I became a proud member of the Reds, albeit not of Cincinnati.  I was horrible, the quintessential bench warmer only put into right field when the game was already decided.  In retrospect, it wasn’t that I was a bad player…I was just too terrified to swing the bat.  But one of the stars of our team, which won the championship my one year, was a guy a couple grades above me who lived a block away from me.  Because of the age difference he had never played in our neighborhood games, or maybe he was just that much better than us already.  Either way, he and I became “we live close to each other” friends, and that was good enough.  He was an Atlanta Braves fan and by this time the Cincinnati Reds were dominant so he and I would play games in my big front yard where he would be the Braves and I would be the Reds.  Mind you, we would not only act like we were the actual players, we would imitate their batting stances.  We were hardcore.   Several baseball games aired on free tv every week (no such thing as cable at the time — no such thing as free tv now), and it made it easier to learn about other players, even if the televised games were mostly chosen for their regional appeal or big name matchups. 

My father hated sports, except for some boxing matches.  He absolutely loved it when he could watch two black men beat on each other, especially if the one with the especially loud mouth was losing.  But baseball meant nothing to him; nothing at all.  He never once threw a baseball with me, or taught me anything about the game.  And, as an adult it occurred to me that while it would have been pretty easy for him to take me to a game in Atlanta or even Cincinnati, he never did.  It never occurred to me as a child, but it should have occurred to him.

In 1974, Boog Powell was traded to the Cleveland Indians and my loyalty followed him to Ohio.  I was now an Indians fan because the traitorous Orioles had the nerve to trade the great John Wesley Boog Powell away, and to a division rival!  One night I discovered that I could listen to Indians games on Cleveland station WWWE on my portable radio, and so I did.  The signal was sometimes strong but often spotty and I wasn’t always able to clearly hear the games.  But listening to those games was when I learned Indians fans in the home stadium would yell “Booooooooooooooog” when he came to bat and it took me a little while to understand they weren’t booing him.  Boog had a terrific first year with the Indians, winning Comeback Player of the Year.  It was the second time he had earned the award (the bad news being you had to have a crappy season the year before to qualify), but the first time he won was before I was a fan.  A few years later the Indians released Boog, and the Dodgers picked him up, changing my allegiance once again to his new team.  Boog retired partway into the season with the Dodgers and I only had Joe Morgan left to root for….

As I got older my parents divorced, girls suddenly appeared, and baseball fell off my list of priorities for over a decade.   In the interim,  NFL football had become my new favorite sport.  After a stint in the Navy, I joined the working class and made new friends.  One such friend introduced me to fantasy baseball and talked me into joining his league.  Preparing for my first draft I realized the only names I recognized were those of the big stars I would hear about in passing during the sports portion of the tv news.  Competitive by nature, if I was going to play fantasy sports I wanted to do it as well as I could.  Once again I had a reason to pay attention to the player’s statistics while discovering the new frustration of your batter hitting against your pitcher and vice versa.  I played fantasy baseball for a few years, long enough to go from worst to first in my second year, but life and work eventually got in the way again.

Now that I am retired and have more time I want to fall in love with baseball again, but baseball fights me at every turn.  Many rules have changed and that is to be expected, and really doesn’t bother me for the most part.  Analytics slowly took over the front offices of the sport and intricate details of every batter and their performance against every pitcher is well-known to players, manager, and fans alike. Again, not a problem for me…in fact I kind of like it. Kind of.

But now if I turn on a baseball game I have to mute the sound.  Sportscasters with embarrassingly-fake excited voices, spout weird stats like launch angle, exit velocity, spin rate, blocks above average and more, and this annoys me to the point of preferring silence.  I can still watch the game, but I sure can’t listen to it.  

I do a bit of traveling and found myself in Arizona during spring training a couple years ago.  One day when my lazy brain realized I could go to a game, I got excited.  I checked the game schedule and decided to go to see the Dodgers play (my loyalty has stayed with L.A., for no other reason than they were the last team Boog played for).  After more than an hour's drive, I found parking, walked to the box office, and asked the man there for the best price on a general admission ticket, hopefully with a veteran’s discount.  When the answer came back that the best price for a GENERAL ADMISSION ticket to an EXHIBITION GAME was $80, I nearly stroked out. 

After gathering myself, I asked, as calmly as I could manage, why an exhibition game cost so much.  He said, “Ohtani.”  I blinked.  Twice.  Then, still in shock, I calmly replied that it was an exhibition game and IF Ohtani played it probably wouldn’t be for the entire game.  The nice ticket seller threw up the universal “what do you want me to do about it” hand gesture and I thought about telling him exactly what he could do, but decided against it, said thanks, and walked back to my car, shaking my head in disgust.

Just a few months ago, on my third visit to Los Angeles, I went to my first Dodgers game.  A friend since elementary school lives out there and was kind enough to get us tickets.  

It was glorious.

We beat the Mets in comeback fashion, which made it better.  The food was fine, if overpriced.  The Dodger fans were friendly along with the stadium workers.  Even the Mets fans were tolerable, especially after their “Let’s Go Mets” chant was killed by the Dodger comeback.

But…

Now, you have to have an act of Congress to get a game on free tv.  Now, the announcers are talking about stats which mean nothing to a guy my age.  Now, you have to be a Silicon Valley tech oligarch to afford to go to the games.

Baseball has left me behind.  It doesn’t care about me anymore.