Take Me Out

This essay was originally published in the September 2007 edition of LEAP magazine (R.I.P.). The recent start of the Major League Baseball season reminded me of this piece and I dug it out to give it another read. Parts of it make me cringe, but overall I am still pleased with this exploration of nostalgia and baseball during my childhood growing up in West Lafayette.

The gnat floating in the iced tea doesn’t know that it’s a part of something more.

It’s just drowning in the crushed ice and my Dad’s proprietary blend of powdered tea and lemonade.

But the tea, the bug, the sawdust coating my jeans and boots, the muggy afternoon, that lazy breeze and those Labs trying to coax us toward the swimming pool are all part of it.

Baseball, to us, was an afternoon of leisury labor with the Cubs game on the radio as our timekeeper. That pile of logs won’t last the first inning. What did Harry just say? We can have everything done and on the stack by the vegetable garden before three are in the books.

After that, we break for lunch. Lunch means thick slices of ham on hearty bread with corn chips on the side, another round of tea and the game on TV. We usually took the tea out to the pool. Those dogs are persuasive. And there is a radio in the shed, so we can hear the end of the game while Nick fetches the boat bumper and shakes out his coat on us.

Sometimes we listened to the game while we drove to the hardware store. Baseball on the radio is a must for a trip to town, and there’s always a reason to go to the hardware store.

That felt natural. Because, for us, baseball was a road trip; a transient experience spent looking out the back of a station wagon.

We went to the arch in St. Louis before we sat out a long rain delay to see Jerome Walton extend his hitting streak during his rookie season.

We went to County Stadium for a Brewers game and a swarm of bugs showered down all night as they died in the lights. It was so bad, we moved up to the cheaper seats to take cover. That was the same year Grandma died and our house burned.

One time, my Mom took me — without my Dad or older brother — to Comiskey Park. I couldn’t have been 10. We sat in left center. Home plate looked 100 miles away.

Dad didn’t go when we saw our first game at Wrigley Field — in fact, he didn’t cross Addison and Clark until this year. He missed seeing Hawk belt two home runs against the Astros. That was the first curtain call I’d seen in person.

In Cincinnati, we saw the Hit King at Riverfront, and a legendary rollercoaster and miniature Eiffel Tower.

Other than Wrigley, those ballparks exist only in our memories now. The Cardinals, Brewers, White Sox and Reds all have new digs. Even the Triple-A team in Indy has a new stadium downtown.

Stadiums are turned into parking lots all the time now. The Indians’ old one — Busch Stadium — was turned into a 1/4 mile dirt track and renamed 16th Street Speedway.

You didn’t always have to do a lot of driving to catch a game. There was one at Loeb about every day of the spring and summer between the high schools, American Legion, the Colt World Series and the Leopards (for a few years).

It was all played there next to the zoo with the monkeys, the giant slide, the putt-putt, the custard stand and the pizza place that promises a free pie for a player who hits a homer over the sign in left field.

Baseball, to me, recently was walking into this store that mainly sells T-shirts with catchy slogans, but also hawks trinkets and bottle openers with your favorite team logo, as well as other clothes. (I got a pair of Dickie’s for five bones from this discount bin.)

It had been years since I bought cads, since after the house fire. I bought three wax packs from 1991. It was like picking up where I left off half a life ago.

I was surprised that the packs were 50 cents each. I’m pretty sure they cost that in 1990, or at least that much. I started peeling them open on the walk to this tapas spot on Sheffield. Two of the first three cards out of the Donruss pack were Detroit Tigers — Lou Whitaker and a 50 home run club card of Cecil Fielder.

In 1990, Royals rookie Kevin Appier won 12 games and almost threw a no-hitter. You know who had the only hit?

Lou Whitaker. Why do I know that? It’s on the back of Appier’s card I got in the Score pack.

It’s not just nostalgia. Baseball, to me, is also the present. It’s walking into the visitor’s dugout at Wrigley Field, and seeing a friend from high school. Since the last time we saw each other — in a similar setting a few thousand miles to the West — he played in the World Series.

We didn’t talk about that though. It didn’t even come up.

We were too busy discussing his four-month old daughter, who arrived — with a sense of timing — on the eve of spring  training.

When I sat in the left-center bleachers for a Sox game a few weeks later, I didn’t notice the play on the field as much as the questions parents kept fielding from little boys and girls who couldn’t have been happier.

Baseball, on this day, is the story of love between a parent and a child on a sweltering afternoon on the South Side.

Baseball is for kids, even when we grow up. Because the crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd and the call of the hot dog vendor all can provide a timeless feeling.

And that feeling is well worth the price of admission.

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