You fight it.  You deny it.  In the end you come to accept it.  You’re a writer.  You may not be very good, you may have little insight, but you write anyway because you’re a writer and that’s what you do.  You need to write.  When you try to deny the urge it dams up inside you like constipation until you know that if you don’t release it you’ll encounter grave physical consequences.  So you give in.  You sit down and expunge all the things have been swirling around.  You know that by writing you can bring some order to things.  You can lay them out, give them structure, see how they relate, or don’t.

 

               I never wanted to write.  I hated the idea.  Writing was mom’s job.  I wanted to go out and do things.  I wanted to make things happen and let other people report on it and decide what in meant.  I’ve become a lot of things I never wanted.  I wasn’t going to become an academic, I wasn’t going to teach, and I certainly wasn’t going to write.  Basically I wasn’t going to become my family.  Then I was.  Now I am.

 

Sometimes your need to write overrides your better judgment.  It’s important to know when to write for yourself alone.  I sometimes struggle with the difference between writing to express something to the world, and writing to clear out my head.  The result is that I run the risk of posting something that could hurt someone.  Anyone who knows me knows I don’t often care about stirring the drink a bit.  That said I’ve realized that not everything has to be said in a public forum.  So, I’ll close with this, I’m sorry Miss K.  If you’re wondering what the hell I’m talking about, it’s not important.  What’s important is knowing when to stop typing. 

I was thinking recently that I used to really enjoy logging some couch time when I got the chance.  Now I can't stand the darn thing.  It's hard for active people to be forced into inactivity.  I wish I could be totally zen about it but I always found solace while running.  Running was one of the things that cleared everything else away.  No worries, no stress, no bills, just grass and maybe a ball.  Baseball is like that.  That's why I like to go alone sometimes.  Then it's just the game, everything else, the outside world fades away and for a while time freezes.  One of the nice things about baseball is that it's as close to timeless as anything this country has produced.  With minor exceptions the game is exactly the same as it was 100 years ago.  Compared with other pro sports it basically stands still.  Pro football came into it's infancy in the early part of the 20th century, at that point pro baseball was already 40 years old.  If you brought someone from 1920 to see a modern football game they'd hardly know what they were watching.  Football if radically different now than it was only 30 years ago.  But baseball remains untouched.  The bases are still 90 feet apart, the mound is still 60 feet 6 inches from the plate, the bats are still ash or oak, and the ball is still made the same way as it was when Ruth and Hornsby played.

 

   Michael Mandelbaum’s “The Meaning of Sports” compares baseball to our agrarian past.  It's a pastoral game, with its green grass and red dirt.  It is a game played with wood and leather and little else of consequence.  It begins in the spring plays out throughout the summer, growing to a climax harvested by the World Series every fall.  Then it lies dormant through out the winter.  Bart Giamatti, the former commissioner of baseball and father of the actor Paul Giamatti once said of baseball,

 

"It breaks your heart.  It is designed to break your heart.  The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”

 

I think these are some of the reasons that baseball endures for me, and for others.  The unchanging nature allows one to feel more of a connection to the past, and thus to the family that introduced the game to us.  Stars of the past can be compared to the stars of today because they play roughly the same game under the same conditions (I’m ignoring the steroid issue for now).  This is what gives the numbers of baseball the power.  The numbers as well as the deeds behind them are the stories we pass down from one generation to the next.  When I tell my kids, "I was there."  I was there for Jeter's flip.  I was there for Strawberry's pinch-hit slam.  I was watching number 70.  I was watching game 2131.

 

               Thus, I journeyed out to Camden Yards in Baltimore this past opening day crutches and all.  I went to escape work; I went to connect with my past. Though I was surrounded by thousands of strangers I was there alone, at peace.  With me in that park, along with the record crowd were those separated by both space and time, my brother, my friends, my fathers both past and current.  The magic of the game allowed me to connect with all of them.  Of course I did so in part by using the conveniences of the present.  I used my new camera phone to send pictures of the game to my family, particularly my brother with whom opening day had become a rite of spring. After drinking beers in the middle of the day and enjoying a few Eskae franks (which are, though I hate to say it, and with all respect to Fenway Franks, the best dog I’ve had at a stadium and the only ones close to being worth the price), I hobbled the interminable distance back to my car, and headed home, exhausted, sated, for some much needed couch time.

                       The following is a reprint of last year’s opening day post.  It rings as true today as it did when it was written.  I’ll have a new opening day article soon, but I’ve been too busy going to games this weekend to sit downa and write anything.  Enjoy…

 

                       I love opening day.  That may not come as surprise, but I'll say it again for effect.  I love opening day.  It hasn't really seemed real for the past two years, but as I sit here, on the cusp of so many changes and so much uncertainty, I know this one thing for sure, I love opening day and opening day will always be there for me.

 

                       My first memory of baseball is going to the Oakland Coliseum with my dad.  I must have been about four years old.  The A's had a hot young left fielder named Ricky Henderson but I was stuck on Duane Murphy.  I loved the way his hat flew off when he chased balls in the outfield.  Growing up, one of my treasured possessions was a Henderson signed Billy Ball.  Basically, the only real positive memories I have of my father revolve around baseball and, while I swore to be a good brother to my little bro in every way I could, it was baseball that I really strove to pass on to him.

 

                       I brought my brother out to our first game on opening day 1997.  We went for his birthday, which is always within a week of the season's first game.  Until I moved to LA in 1999 my bro and I went to about 40 games a year.  We did other things too, but baseball was ours.  It was our brother's day out; away from the world, away from the craziness of our family and our friends.  It was time when he and I could bond.  We could talk about anything, we were as much two guys going to a game as we were brothers separated by 13 years and a world of experiences.  Baseball kept us close.

 

                       I think baseball helped me internalize (if you teach it, you gotta live it.), and pass on some of my values and traditions, as well as invent some new ones.  For example, I got to teach my brother the nuances of the game by pointing out the moves the games greatest player (we can debate that later).  We got to see Ricky play in his last stint in Oakland.  I got to teach my bro about the beauty of "The Ricky Run."  For those who don't know, a "Ricky Run" is a lead off walk, steal second, steal third, and come in on a single to right.  I got to point out the subtlety of the shift, the fact that a triple is three times as exciting as a homerun, that the splitter was the pitch of the 90s, that yelling Daaaar-yl Daaaar-yl could get into a grown man's head.  Together, we decided that the fourth inning was the nacho inning and that this sacred rite must never be broken, even in Anaheim where the nachos suck.  Through baseball I taught him that you never give up, you never leave a game early.  No matter how far behind your team is, you never leave; because in baseball, more than in any other sport, anything can happen.  You never know when you may see something you'll never see again.  My brother and I were in the stands, with our grandmother attending her first game in over 20 years, for Derek Jeter's amazing backhanded toss to nail a not sliding Jeremy Giambi in game three of the ALDS.  We saw Eric Chavez's first career dinger.  He was there for "The Bunt Heard Round the World" to beat the Sux in game one last year.  Now he's getting into that teenage phase, he wants to be cool.  He doesn't hang out with the family as much.  But when I came home two weeks ago, the first time since my marriage dissolved he was there for me everyday.  Our bond is strong, in part because of the countless hours we spent around baseball, going to games, listening to games, playing catch in the yard.

 

After I moved to LA I still made it to three more opening days in Oakland.  Last year was the first one I had missed since '97.  Still, I made sure that someone took my brother.  This year I'm still in DC, I'm still in school, but I made sure he was going.  He still calls me from the games.  Thanks to him I was there for Giambi's first visit to Okaland as a member of The Evil Empire.  I was there as the winning run crossed the plate in last year's ALDS game one.  And I'll be there tonight, for the national anthem, and the seventh inning stretch (where they'll sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" like they should), but best of all I'll be there with my bro, like always.

 

Baseball is forever.  Baseball is timeless.  Ignore for a moment he fact that juiced balls and juiced players belie my basic premise, the fact is that when you bring a kid to a ball game it's the same for them as it was for us when we were kids (even if it is costing you a weeks wages).  The smell of the grass, the call of the hot dog guy, seeing 20,000 people wearing the same shirt, it's magic.  Baseball is fathers and sons, brothers, friends, its generations connecting.  I can argue pitch selection with old men, I can turn to the complete stranger next to me and tell him that David Cone just pitched a perfect game, and he'll care.  I can look behind me and know, from voice alone, that the kid behind me is the one that calls the post game show every night.  Baseball is a community event and we can all be a part of it.  It starts today, the Devil Rays and Oriels are tied for first.  Happy Opening day.