"For the love of the game"

Last night my pal Travis and I went to a Salt Lake Stingers game. The Stingers are the local AAA farm team for baseball’s Anaheim Angels. Attending these games isn’t exactly a tradition for us, but we’ve been to five or six games this season.

“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again.”

I love baseball. I love it like I love this country, to me, you just couldn’t have one without the other. But the more I watch baseball, the more I realize that I don’t love just any baseball, I love MY baseball. I love watching my team.

“I try to learn your ways, understand your obsessions. But this baseball, it's so bleedin' boring, isn't it?”

Last night’s game started at seven o’clock and didn’t get over til after ten. There were over 20 runs scored, but it wasn’t even exciting for me. I didn’t know the players, I didn’t care who one, and I didn’t even pay attention to pitch counts or outs per inning. In fact, I was so unentertained by the game, that I had more fun laughing about the mismatched couple of the skinny guy and the fat girl sitting out beyond the leftfield wall (Travis had me rolling though, when he called the guy Jack Spratt, because it was obvious that he “could eat no fat; his wife could eat no lean”).

Sitting there, I was wondering if I’ve lost my love for the game. I mean, even the Mariners are sucking these days. Was I just a baseball band wagon jumper during their days of plenty?

“Man, this is baseball. You gotta stop thinking. Just have fun.”

There’s no way. I really do love this game. I love walking into a park just before a game, that moment when I should be finding my seat but instead I’m mesmerized by the harmony of the red of the dirt and the green of the grass. The feeling that you’ll pay or do whatever it takes to enjoy a mustard covered hot dog from your seat and the perpetual hope that the next foul ball will find its way into your glove.

“I'd wake up at night with the smell of the ball park in my nose, the cool of the grass on my feet: The thrill of the grass… It was the game... The sounds, the smells. Did you ever hold a ball or a glove to your face? …It was the crowd, rising to their feet when the ball was hit deep. Shoot, I'd play for nothing!”

That was the last home stand of the season for the Stingers. And now, the baseball season gives way to fall football. As we sat in the bleachers last night, and the sunlight surrendered to the voltage of the over head flood lamps I could I got the same chill down my spine that I would at those first few games of the season on French Field. The sun didn’t go down until right around half time, and that’s when the chill of the wind crept in. There, under the “friday night lights, I lived out my dreams, covered in my own sweat, sprinkles of my teammates’ blood, and splatters of snot bubbles from the running back my defense and I just devoured.

“Do you fear the force of the wind, the slash of the rain? Go face them and fight them. Be savage again.”

A change in seasons isn’t only the falling of leaves and the frosting of air; it’s the shifting of passions from the beauty of baseball to the brawn of the gridiron. I’m excited to watch, I’m excited to play. I’m glad there is change, I’m glad there is progress. I’m glad we’re given memories so we can relive the past and I’m glad we have freedom to make the most of the future.

Sports aren’t about scoreboards and stats, they’re about life and about friends. Maybe what I love best about these games isn’t the foulposts and goalposts or the stadium organs and marching bands, its the friends that I meet and the times that we share. And to those guys who I played with, just know that no matter where life takes us, we’ll always be a band of brothers and that our bond will never break because we’ve always got the change of the seasons to remind us of it.

“Its great to be alive. ITS GREAT TO BE A CONK!”