It's fun again!

As a boy growing up between Baltimore and Annapolis in the sixties and seventies, it seems like I had a baseball glove with me everywhere I went. It was far and away my favorite sport, though I never played on an organized team. Somehow I developed a love for it despite my dad's frustration over my lack of athletic talent. Mom later told me how her heart broke for me when he would play with the neighborhood kids in the Sun Valley neighboorhood we lived in - that never happened when we moved to the Mountain Road house, which was more rural than suburban at that point - while I looked on, too small and young to join in. Oddly, I never really felt left out; though I did long to be big enough one day to join them, in those early days I attributed it more to my age than my dad's impatience with me. Now, once I got older I realized how he felt about me, how disappointed he was that I wasn't more of an athlete. But by high school he had permanently removed himself from our lives . . .

I suppose that I picked up my love for baseball from him anyway. It was more, I think, than just wanting to share an interest with him. It was more a matter of wanting to matter, as I felt I didn't, or wanting to be a hero. I fantasized about being a baseball star, of snagging a ball just before it went over the outfield fence, or of hitting the game-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth. I know my dreams were shared by many young boys of that era. Of course, I was an Orioles fan through-and-through. I remember how we rooted for Paul Blair - who was never the same hitter after taking that fastball to his face - and Boog Powell, Mark Belanger - who flirted with the Mendoza line every season, it seemed, but man, that guy could field the shortstop position! I see from his career stats that he did manage a couple of decent years with the bat, too - and Davey Johnson; that array of pitchers: Dave McNally, Miguel Cuellar, Jim Palmer, Pete Richert and Eddie Watt and, later, Doyle Alexander and Pat Dobson; Frank and Brooks Robinson, of course. Brooks was my hero.

I'd go to games at Memorial Stadium sometimes with my dad, who had a Sunday plan season-ticket package. I'd have probably gone to more if mom could have trusted him to stay sober. I remember, in fact, at least one occasion when the first stop we made after leaving the house was the packaged goods store a block away. Dad had the bottle of Old Granddad open before we hit the highway. On another occasion - shoot, I guess it could have been the same one, come to think of it - I asked him why there were crowds of people lining the bridges. He explained that the train carrying Bobby Kennedy's casket was supposed to be passing through. I probably still have pictures somewhere of a photo day that he took me to, when we were allowed down on the field before the game to take pictures of the players.

The team was consistently good back then. I was too young to have much awareness of the '66 world championship, though I do seem to recall an air of excitement about it. I still have a scrapbook that my mom put together that year, and sets of glassware that she ordered after the team won the pennant and the World Series.  By '69 I was more aware, and just knew that the Mets were cheating to beat them in the Series. '70 was magical, and it's funny to hear the local Reds' fans reminisce about it from the opposite perspective. Clemente, Stargell and the rest of the Pirates crew broke my heart in '71, but it seemed like we'd go to the World Series every year by then. It turned out that there were a couple more division championships, but with ALCS losses to the A's.  The final year I really remember well was the '79 loss to the Pirates (again) in the Series. By the time they won it all again in '83 I was living in Mississippi, and didn't feel so connected to them, though my uncle made sure to share a couple of commemorative Coke bottles with me on my next trip home. I finally opened them and drank them at some point, and don't have the bottles anymore.

That '83 team featured a rising star at shortstop who ended up being the team's high point for much of the next two decades. There was the wOful '87 team that lost 109 games, which the Capitol Steps lampooned when I saw them as part of Wright State's Artist Series while I was getting my engineering degree. (I took Christina to her first concert there, too: Dizzy Gillespie.)  The '89 team kept me entertained during my first few months at Shemya, losing the division to the Jays the last weekend of the year. The thing is, it was hard to really follow your team from a distance in those years. In '95 I was in town - and in the stadium - the day before Cal tied Gehrig's consecutive games record. There was pretty much no chance of me getting tickets for the day he tied or broke the record, but I remember seeing him hit a home run in that game, as he did each of the following two nights, too.

That was the end of my life for a while. It was right after we got home from that trip that we learned what "dealing with things" was going to mean for us. During the '96 and '97 playoff runs I was occupied trying to get myself and my life back together, so didn't follow much baseball. After that, there were the fourteen consecutive losing seasons. Fourteen. The Pirates' longer - and still current - streak was no comfort whatsoever.  I'd still go to a game when we were in town, but that was more to enjoy the atmosphere of Oriole Park at Camden Yard, which is still a great place to catch a game.  We also went to a couple of games in other stadiums: one at U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago and another at The Jake in Cleveland.

Last year I had one good chance to take in a game, but my back was killing me after the drive from Ocracoke and I just didn't feel up to driving anymore. It looks like we may go back up to Cleveland on Labor Day, which will be especially fun if they're still in the hunt. And if they make the playoffs again this year, I'm going home for a game.

But it has been so much fun to follow them again! I'm excited for their core of players, and enjoy how they play the game. And it's way easier to keep in touch with the team in the Twenty-teens than it was in the Nineteen-eighties and -nineties!