dodgersinfieldListening to Soundgarden’s final album today got me thinking about baseball.*

I grew up with an All-American boy’s passion for the American game. The players whose faces festooned my collection of baseball cards were like idols to me. Steve Garvey, Pete Rose, Willie Stargell, the Niekros – Phil and Joe – Ron Guidry, Don Sutton, George Brett, Dale Murphy – they were demigods battling with bat and pitched ball in the pantheon of Major League Baseball.

I loved everything about the game – the slow pace and the Byzantine rules and scorekeeping. I loved hearing the crack of the bat and the thump of a blazing fastball in the catchers mitt. I loved the national anthem and the organ music in the ball park and the seventh inning stretch.

My Dad is a baseball fan and he passed that on to me. He’s a Dodgers fan, so I was a Dodgers fan growing up. My favorite color was Dodger blue. I can still name the legendary infield of the 1981 World Series winners (Cey, Russell, Lopes and Garvey), can still picture Fernando Valenzuela’s bizarre windup and Tommy Lasorda’s waddling gait when he went out to the mound.

At some point,  I got to the age when you start to disagree with your Dad and then I became a Braves fan – probably just to annoy him. I loved the Braves when they sucked, in the 80’s when they wore powder blue and averaged 65 wins per season. When Dale (The Stormin’ Mormon) Murphy was their sole All-Star. There’s something pure about a team that bad, something simple and something loveable. The best thing was that bpmurphydevery single game could be seen on “The Superstation” sandwiched between reruns of “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “Dallas”. That glorious 1995 series win over Cleveland made it all worth while, even if they’ve never won since. I love the Braves for Chipper Jones, who is in his 17th season with the club, a true rarity in modern baseball and Bobby Cox, who holds the major league record for being tossed as a manager, that my friends is a record!

My blind love for baseball started to fade during the 1981 strike, even at 10 years old I recognized that something was rotten in the game that I loved. Slightly wounded, I kept up my adoration for the game – you don’t throw out a true love for one little indiscretion. Or two. Or three. But finally, sometime in the last decade, I tired of being a cuckold. Sure, I hung around for a while. Kept my eye on the standings, watched a game on TV if the Braves were playing, even made it to the ballpark once in a while – but the passion was gone. And when I left the country and keeping up with American sports became a bit tougher, baseball was one of the first to slip away. As I write this post today, I couldn’t tell you where my beloved Braves are in the NL East.

It was a lot of things that made me finally give up - the strikes, the money, interleague play, epidemic free agency – but the final straw was the cheating. The steroids. The first cases hurt a bit, but were forgivable. But as player after player came up dirty, in ‘98 when Sosa and McGwire were chasing Maris’s record while juiced, when Bonds broke Aaron’s record – each of those incidents . Ironically, it was Alex Rodriguez this year who made me just stop caring, a player I don’t really care about. But I remember seeing A.Rod playing for the Mariners in the Kingdome back in 1995. This was the year that the Mariners made the playoffs for the first time in ages and featured such stars as Ken Griffey, Jr. and Randy Johnson and A.Rod. All of whom jumped ship for greener pastures shortly after that season and certainly before they tore down the Kingdome for whatever insurance company sponsored field they put up on the south side of Seattle.

baseball_playerAnd now, the skinny kid who was playing backup to Luis Sojo is getting paid $50,000 an at bat to play for the evil Yankees and he’s juiced. I don’t care what he or any of them do off the field, but the cheating – I just can’t deal with the cheating. So, baseball? It’s over. It’s not you, it’s me. I just think it’s time to move on. Sure, we can stay friends.

My love affair with Major League Baseball is over, but not my love of the game. There are other places to find baseball in a purer form – on dusty little league fields, college campuses and small minor league parks all over the U.S. One of my favorite movies, and the best baseball movie ever, is “Bull Durham”. This film paints a romantic and hilarious picture of minor league baseball and is probably the only Kevin Costner movie that is ever worth seeing. There are 246 minor league teams spread all over the country, thus you are probably not far from a minor league club. Admission is dirt cheap, parking is not usually a problem and in most parks you can sit close enough to smell the players sweat if that’s your kind of things. A lot of these guys make it to the bigs, so you may get a chance to see a player before he becomes a greedy, drug ridden freak.

When I go to visit my parents in Florida, my Dad and I usually catch a  game. The Daytona Cubs are a Class A affiliate of Chicago playing in the Florida State League against such perennial powerhouses as the Brevard County Manatees and the Lakeland Flying Tigers. The Cubs play at Jackie Robinson Ballpark which sits on the Intercoastal Waterway. It’s so named because, according to the club website in 1946, Robinson came to town for spring training with the Montreal Royals. He was banned from playing in Jacksonville and Sanford, but not in Daytona.. His first plate appearance came in an exhibition game against their parent club, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Robinson then became the first African-American player in the Major Leagues.

baseballDad and I go to to watch the Cubs, fill up on bad hot dogs and pretzels, I keep score, we try to catch foul balls and usually come away with some kind of free promotion. We enjoy the Florida summer twilight and do the things that fathers’ and sons’ have been doing in America for over a century.

During my last trip to see my parents we got to take Boy Z to a game and I’m grateful for that. He’s not likely to grow up a baseball fan here in Oz (though there’s talk of establishing a professional league Down Under) and will be more like to be a fan of the Adelaide Crows or South Australia Redbacks than the Braves or the Dodgers.  But when we visit the States, I want him to get a glimpse of the joy I got from the American pasttime when I was a kid. I want us to enjoy a game of baseball and the best place for us to do that is not going to be at Turner Field or Dodger Stadium or, god forbid, Tropicana Field but at Jackie Robinson Ballpark or one of the hundreds of minor league parks scattered around my homeland. Those are the places where real baseball gets played today.

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I’ve dumped MLB, however I do still love music about the game. Here, in no particular order, are my five favorite songs about baseball:

“San Francisco’s calling us, the Giants and Mets will play
Piazza, New York catcher, are you straight or are you gay?”

…is awesome. From “Dear Catastrophe Waitress” (Buy from Belle and Sebastian - Dear Catastrophe Waitress)

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*If anyone can tell me why, there’s a prize in it. How about a copy of that unreleased Whiskeytown album for the first person who leaves a comment explaining the Soundgarden/baseball link.

** I’m plagiarizing myself a bit here. Some of the words and the sentiment in this post comes from one that I wrote when I first started blogging. But most of y’all haven’t read it, so I figured it is as good as new.

Image credits:

81 Dodgers

The Stormin’ Mormon

Basball player

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