Wednesday, July 13, 2011

More Than Just a Game

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: My mom taught me how to play baseball. She taught me how to throw. How to hit. How to catch.
When I was a teenager she made fun of my batting stance. She said I shook my butt too much.
My mom loved to watch me run. She loved to watch me steal bases and chase down fly balls. She said I was the fastest kid in the world. On some days I was.
But as much as my mom taught me about how to play the game, it was my dad who taught me to love the game. To respect it because it was more than just a game.
He learned to love this game from his dad. My papa learned from his. It’s one of those cycles in our family that’s almost genetic.
My dad’s a New York Yankees fan. He has an entire bedroom in his house devoted to them. There’s a Yankees toothbrush that accompanies him when he travels. A license plate that sets his car apart from every other car in Tulsa. He’s a fanatic when it comes to Yankees baseball. I am not.
On paper, the Texas Rangers are my team. I do not have a toothbrush to denote this when I travel.
When my dad lived in Detroit back in the late Eighties and early Nineties, I would spend two months of the summer with him. On average we’d attend ten to fifteen baseball games a year. One summer he gave me the option of driving to Cleveland, Cincinnati, or Chicago to catch a baseball game over the extended 4th of July weekend. I asked if we could just stay in Detroit. The Rangers were coming to town for a four game road series with the Tigers. We went to all four.
Now, when I say “on paper” I mean that the Rangers may be who I root for, bleed for, and cry for, but they don’t have my heart. Instead they only get a piece of it because I’ve learned that in thirty-five years of baseball I can’t give my heart to just one team. It belongs to the game itself.
Baseball’s always imperfect, except for those rare occasions when it actually is. It’s a game that boys play with the hopes of one day playing as men, and a game that men who wish they were still boys play because fully growing up is something they want no part of.
This past weekend I was in New York City with my dad. He had just turned sixty the weekend before, and to celebrate we took a quick trip to Gotham, and more specifically, to Yankees Stadium for three games.  My dad was finally going to be able to see his favorite team in its own house. More importantly, the fates had aligned to put us in a position to see his favorite player, Derek Jeter, become the first New York Yankee to ever reach the elusive milestone of 3,000 hits in a career.
Within minutes of settling into our hotel room Thursday night, I’d learned via ESPN that a fan had fallen from the stands during the Rangers home game earlier that night and died. At that time I didn’t know the whole story, but without being asked my memory confirmed that this was the third time a fan had fallen from the stands in Arlington.
Friday finally came, and because I wanted the people of New York City to know it was I and not them that was a fan of the greatest team in all of baseball I wore my red Michael Young t-shirt with the number ten in white on the back and a blue ball cap with a red ‘T’ stitched on the front. My attire gave everyone license to stop me and inquire of the previous night’s tragedy of which I had very limited knowledge of.
I responded the same way every time. “Yeah, I saw that on ESPN. It’s the third time since 1994 that someone’s fallen from the stands like that.”
This continued all day and into the early evening as we waited in the rain outside Yankee Stadium. I still knew none of the facts. It seemed the people I spoke with really didn’t either, but they wanted to talk about it right up until 5:30PM EST when those of us hiding under ponchos received word that the game was postponed and began heading back to where we came from. An hour later my life changed forever.
We took the subway from The Bronx back to our hotel in Manhattan. While changing out of my wet clothes, Scott Pelley informed me during the “CBS Evening News” exactly what had happened the night before. It was worse than I could have ever imagined.
He reported of how a man from Brownwood, Texas had driven several hours to take his six-year-old son to his first Texas Rangers game. Pelley talked of how this man wanted to share first hand with his son his own love for the greatest game on Earth. How the man had reached over the left field fence to catch a ball that Josh Hamilton had thrown into the stands for the man’s son. And how the man lost his balance and fell over the railing, landing on his head twenty feet below. Pelley said that the man could be heard pleading to anyone listening to take care of his son. The words were devastating, but the photos were heartbreaking. One photo showed the man reaching for the ball while another a strange woman holding his son, protecting the boy from seeing the horror below.
I sat on the edge of the bed, and fought with everything inside of me to hold back the tears. I didn’t want my dad to see how much this was affecting me, especially on his special weekend. It was a battle I couldn’t win.
On the subway back to The Bronx the next day I found myself thinking about this little boy that I’d never meet. I wondered if he’d ever go to another baseball game again. I wondered if he’d grow up and blame the game I loved so much for taking his father from him. I thought of all the games my own dad and I had attended together, and the baseballs we’d collected in that time. I thought of how many games I’d taken Kacie to. How I’d yet to take Brady because I wanted to wait for him to actually understand the game, to remember it, unlike Kacie who was less than three months old when she attended her first.
I couldn’t help but to feel guilty for getting to experience something so incredible with my dad. Moments of joy were overtaken at times by moments of extreme sadness. I found myself wishing I could give up my shot at witnessing baseball history with my dad if it meant bringing back this little boy his. Baseball was now more than just a game.
During the course of the weekend we reveled in watching Derek Jeter become an elite part of baseball history on Saturday and cheered as CC Sabathia threw a shutout on Sunday, yet all the while I kept finding myself re-living an entire lifetime of baseball. I remembered my mom hitting me in the face with a baseball when I was five and telling me that if I’d kept my glove up it wouldn’t have happened. I remembered my dad telling me of how he’d snuck into the 1985 World Series and watched the Kansas City Royals claim their only title in franchise history. I remembered shopping in 1998 for just the right baseball glove to buy for my first child, not knowing if it’d be a boy or a girl. I remembered how Traci’s mom used to tell me that if I wasn’t careful I’d force baseball on my kids to the point that they’d grow up to not even like the game. I’d defended myself by saying that I didn’t care if they never played on a team or watched the game, but that all I would ever want from them was that they would humor their old man every now and then and play a game of catch in the back yard.
Even as I write this, I find myself hoping that Cooper Stone’s mom is in some ways like my mom. I hope that as she starts the process of merging the life she once knew with the reality she’s now forced to live that she will continue to teach her son how to play baseball. That she teaches him how to throw. How to hit. How to catch. Maybe even how to shake his butt a little too much when he’s batting.
But more than anything, I hope that this little boy who will forever have a place in many of our hearts will one day learn to see past the unimaginable pain he may feel when looking onto a baseball field and love the greatest game on Earth as much as his dad must have.

2 comments:

  1. I remember playing baseball with you many eons ago. In fact, I even remember your butt shaking...my mom used to comment on it. I have many of the same fond feelings and emotions tied to baseball. My dad both taught me to play and love the Game. I live and breath Rangers, and like you, I don't have paraphernalia displayed exhibiting my love for the team.
    My life was affected on that day as well. I could not get poor Cooper off my mind. I imagined the dad being me. I have a four year old son that loves to watch the Rangers with me. All I could think about was the dad's thoughtfulness and that poor boy, and how easy that could have been me. I still think about them. I hope he will not curse the game that we love, but embrace it.

    Mike Ivey

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