It’s probably no surprise to you that I’ve always loved baseball. It hasn’t always been in the way I love it now. These days, I read about the sport all day and watch more games than I can count every week. It’s a self-enforcing cycle; the more I like it, the more baseball I get exposed to, which makes me like it more, on and on like that.
That’s not what made me like the sport in the first place, though. I’ve loved baseball for as long as I can remember. Every March, as I anxiously await the start of the season, I find myself reminiscing about how I ended up here. This year, those memories have come on even more strongly, because my dad’s birthday lines up with the start of the season and he’s turning 75 this year. I’m feeling so strongly, in fact, that Meg was kind enough to let me write about what got me hooked on the sport when I was a kid.
I didn’t grow up in a “baseball market.” We didn’t get Cardinals games on TV; for most of my childhood, we didn’t even have cable. But most of my fondest memories of being a kid revolve around the sport anyway. My parents got to work early on me, and they kept it up until I was a lifelong fan.
No baseball on TV? It was no problem, because my uncle taped a St. Louis promotional spot titled “Ozzie, That’s a Winner” and mailed it to us. It was a gas station advertisement, if I’m remembering correctly, with clips of great defensive plays interspersed around The Wizard talking about where he filled up his tank. I didn’t care about that part even a little bit. I watched that video until the tape wore out and tried to mirror Ozzie’s moves in our family room. Credit my mom and dad for sitting there without laughing while a small left-handed child tried to make himself look like the best defensive shortstop of all time, because they never once told me how doomed my dream of being the next Ozzie was.
Our family lore was packed with baseball, too. Most prominent was the time that my parents took me to an Orioles game as a baby and my dad started heckling mean old Jack Clark. At some point, Clark turned and said something back to him, at which point my dad held me up as a shield. “You wouldn’t hurt a baby, would you?” is an effective defense, even against curmudgeons, it seems.
Now, is that story real? I’m skeptical. The timing’s all wrong, for one thing. Jack Clark mostly wasn’t in the AL when we lived near the O’s. And he was a Cardinal before that; why would my dad heckle him? My mom is sure of this story, though, and my dad doesn’t spend much time denying it. I’ve heard it so often that it’s just part of the fabric of my childhood now.
That’s obviously a good story, but stories alone didn’t make me a baseball fan. They just reinforced the baseball-mad upbringing that I had. We might have lived in the MLB wasteland of east Tennessee, but that never seemed to stop my parents from taking me to games. We saw the Braves, the Orioles, and sometimes the Cardinals. We saw the Giants in Candlestick in ’93; Dante Bichette, in town with the visiting Rockies, tossed my sister a baseball for her birthday. Most importantly, though, we saw the K-Jays.
You probably haven’t heard of the K-Jays. That’s because they’ve changed their name to the Smokies – first the Knoxville Smokies, and then the Tennessee Smokies when they departed the city for Sevierville. Back when I was a kid, though, they were a 25-minute drive from where I lived, and we went all the time. My dad taught us how to leave pennies on the train tracks before the game and then pick them up, flattened to a pancake, afterwards. He taught us how to get autographs from our favorite prospects – Carlos Delgado for me, Alex Gonzalez for Louise. He taught us how to sweet-talk the concessions people into giving us the soft serve helmets we didn’t yet have, and we collected all 28 teams with ease.
I don’t know how my parents found the time to take me to so many…
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