My Life In Baseball

Visits: 4

I walked through the vast concrete concourse underneath the stands of the largest stadium I had ever seen in my life. I noticed the 20-foot-long banners of all my favorite players in color hung from the slanted ceiling. Each player was depicted in an action stance with an orange and black background. Oh, how I would’ve liked to have a couple of those hanging in my bedroom! There was the stocky figure of Boog Powell, his bare arms extended, holding his bat just at the moment it met the ball. Over there was Bobby Grich, stooping over gracefully at the waist with both hands slightly raised above the infield dirt to field a ball. Across the way was the greatest third baseman who ever lived. A larger-than-life Brooks Robinson was in the middle of unleashing one of his patented pegs to first base while with one knee on the ground. Others passed by as I kept my gaze upward, searching for my god. What if we got to our seats before I saw him? I would’ve had to ask my father if we could continue our circular path until I saw him. But just when I was working on how I might phrase that request, there he was. The long, lean, graceful pitching motion of Jim Palmer, his left leg lifted high parallel to the ground, loomed above me. My boyhood idol. I was walking in a veritable pantheon—a display of gods bestowing their immortal skills on the ordinary people below. Thus began my life in baseball.

But not as a player, coach, or broadcaster. As a fan. I was walking through Memorial Stadium in Baltimore in 1973 with my father, mother, and brother. It was my first ever major league game. We had taken a family trip to Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. While driving back, my father had surprised me by telling us he had tickets for the Orioles-Yankees game in Baltimore. I’m sure my father appreciated the excited look I had on my face, but really, he had no idea. He thought I was just excited because he was taking me to my first major league game. But what he didn’t know was that it was even better than that. What he didn’t know was that Jim Palmer was pitching that night! I was not only going to my first major league game, but I was also going to see my boyhood hero in person! I looked over at my brother when I announced this momentous news, only to see a look of indifference. My parents knew what it meant to me, though, and I bet it was one of the best moments they ever had also. 

Every time we passed by a tunnel entrance to the field, the smell of packaged meat and freshly-cut grass lofted to us amid the constant buzz of fans bustling to their seating entrance or food line. I tried to sneak a peek at the field as we passed each tunnel entrance, but I couldn’t. All I could see through a haze of blue smoke was the opposite upper deck where the small dots of fans were getting to their seats. When it seemed like this circular odyssey would never end, my father glanced at the tickets and told us we were here. We climbed the steep incline to the end of the tunnel. That smell became even more robust. I paused for what was then only a moment but what now seems like a lifetime. I had never seen a green such as this! A green that didn’t exist anywhere else in the world. The stadium lights illuminated every Oriole uniform to a bright white that made an almost unnatural contrast to the rich green. Every player I followed sprung to life below me as they warmed up before the game. I picked out every player and announced their presence to everyone as we made our way to our seats. Playing catch in the outfield was number 25 Don Baylor and number 6 Paul Blair. But this wasn’t just an ordinary game of catch. They each stood in opposite corners of the outfield and threw the ball directly to one another with, shockingly, hardly any effort at all. Just at the infield outskirts stood the skinny figure of number 7 Mark Belanger as he fielded ground balls hit to him from a coach at home plate. My father seemed disappointed in me when I told him I didn’t know who the coach was.

By the time we got to our seats, I had experienced another unforgettable moment. My father had bought a program. My first program at my first ballgame! What a treasure find! A biography of every player. A roster of both teams with every player’s statistics up to that game. Stories about what a player did in the offseason and what he ate before and after a game. Even the advertisements were fascinating because they described stores and services that didn’t exist where we lived. And, of course, a score sheet. That exquisite grid where you wrote down the lineups and scored each play in the appropriate box with symbols you both learned and morphed into your own. I scored every game I listened to on the radio and each of the two or three games that were on TV every week. But now I was going to do it in person. I didn’t know it then, but that thinly bound tattered magazine – that I would still have 48 years later – became something I would never part with for any amount of money.

After we settled into our seats and tasted my first giant ballpark pretzel, a padded door in the outfield opened, and a god entered the arena. Jim Palmer was sauntering with long strides from the bullpen to the dugout over the rich green background. His golden right arm was completely wrapped in a towel from his upper arm to his wrist. I didn’t tell anyone, and I wasn’t sure if I believed it myself, but I swore Jim Palmer looked up into the stands right at me right before he ducked into the dugout. Irrelevant is the fact that the Yankees knocked Palmer out of the game in the 4^th and beat the Orioles 8-3. None of that mattered. It was my first major league game. It was a moment in time that has been frozen in my mind ever since. It was the beginning of my life in baseball.

Ever since then, I have kept track of time by what happened in baseball that year. I know I took the first plane ride of my life in 1976 because we flew to Baltimore to see a game. I graduated from high school the summer the Red Sox blew their 14-game lead over the Yankees in the American League East. My first day of college was the day after the Bucky Dent home run in the one-game playoff that officially ended the Red Sox’ long misery that year. I know when I skipped class in college for the first and only time because it was the day after the Orioles lost the 1979 World Series. I know the year I started to work at the law firm because that was the year the Orioles started the season 0-21. I know when I went to the Baseball Hall of Fame for the first time because that was the year Jim Palmer was inducted. What I didn’t know was while we were there, my parents entered a raffle to win a baseball autographed by Palmer. That Christmas my parents gave me that ball because they had won the raffle! In 2014 I included a picture of that autographed ball in my very first tweet after joining Twitter announcing that he was my first follow. I have a folder corresponding to each year between 1978 and 2002 containing a scoresheet of every game I scored that year, either on TV or in person. I can pick any year and look at any scoresheet and try to remember what was going on in my life on that day because I dated each scoresheet. 

It has only been such a life in baseball that led me to own fantasy baseball teams today and write articles about fantasy baseball. Don’t underestimate the power of the smell of freshly-cut grass, the anticipation of climbing a steep tunnel entrance, the taste of an oversized pretzel, or the nostalgia of a baseball scoresheet.