"There is no joy in Mudville"

I hate sports. I just wanna make that perfectly clear right from the start. I do not like sports. Don't take me to a football game. As Bob Seeger once sang about discos, "In ten minutes I'll be late for the door." I find basketball, soccer, hockey - all of them boring. Golf and tennis make me catatonic. The Olympics are a two-week yawn fest. I repeat, I hate all sports. All except one. It seems I can get suckered in by a baseball game every time. Don't know why. Guess it's probably because of all the hours I spent playing baseball as a kid.

Back in the day, before kids went to sport camps in the summer and played on organized teams, we all played baseball all summer long. Sandlot baseball. Pickup games. You'd all congregate at the open field, a couple of kids had bats, EVERYONE had a glove and a ball. You'd choose captains. They'd choose teams - there were seldom enough players to cover all of the positions, so short stop and first base were often omitted. Bases consisted of a rock, a stick, a patch of weeds. The diamond was rough. And we'd play. And we'd play. And we'd play. It wasn't a nine-inning game, it went until your mother called you home for dinner. Or until it got too dark to see the ball anymore. And we were all good sports about it. You always gave the other team the benefit of the doubt. No one was trying to one up anyone else. If anyone tried to do that, they wouldn't be invited back the next time. Of course, there were no parents standing on the sidelines screaming at us to kill the other team. It was just us kids and we were playing for the shear joy of playing, and it didn't matter if you were a good player or a bad one. You were just playing baseball. (BTW, that's not me in the picture. I'm not that old. I found this at the Southeast Missourian website.)

Of course, that's all gone now. I never see or hear of kids playing sandlot ball. Now it's all gotta be organized and run by adults, and every game is played to win, and the joy has faded. Still, baseball is in my blood. If I'm fiddling with my old radios, and I come across a game, I'll stop and listen. It reminds me of when I was a kid at my uncle's house in western New York. Every time we'd stop at the Shell station to buy a root beer and fill the air in our bike tires, a game would be playing on the old radio in the shop, the voice of the announcer wafting out into the hot summer air. We'd pause to listen. Who was playing? What inning? Who was up? How many outs? Then off we'd go to form up our own game.

I've only been to one professional athletic event in my life, and I look back on it as one of the highlights of my life. In 2003, my boss took the entire office to watch the Cubs lose a game at Wrigley Field. We sat right behind home plate, about ten rows up. Wrigley is unlike any other ball park in America, with the possible exception of Fenway Park. They're the only two old parks left, all of the others having been replaced by massive stadiums named after some faceless corporation. But Wrigley is small, intimate. You're closer to the action there. You feel like you're almost sitting on the field. You can actually see the players sweat. I sat on old style wooden seats, my butt going numb, munching on steamed hotdogs and peanuts, and I loved every minute of it. It was a lot like going to a minor league game. It reminded me of what baseball was all about before multimillion dollar salaries and strikes and corporate sponsorship and steroids and all of the other detritus that goes along with baseball today. I could almost image, if I closed my eyes, that some kid was sitting somewhere listening to the game on a scratchy radio, oiling his glove and wondering if he can find enough friends for a pickup game. Almost, I say. But my imagination's not quite that good.