Dear Tom Hanks: You Were Wrong

Last night, like any 34-year-old man about to start his period, I was an emotional train wreck. I’d had a long day at work, Kacie’s 12U softball team was playing a make-up game that I wasn’t able to coach due to school commitments, the Texas Rangers were fighting to make franchise history after what looked like a guaranteed trip to the ALCS just five days before, and I was stuck in an Interpretation and Analysis class helplessly interpreting and analyzing “A&P” by John Updike while my thoughts were completely consumed with what was happening between the lines both in Frisco, Texas and St. Petersburg, Florida.

The plan was for my wife to update me by text every half inning on how the girls were doing. Like most instructors, my English professor had a strict no texting policy in class, so this was going to require a certain degree of secrecy. While understandable on the surface, texting is no more of a distraction than the guy in the back corner of the class who gets up every thirty minutes to go outside and smoke a cig. The way I see it, those texting in class are really only distracting themselves – Chain Smoking Guy is a distraction to everyone. Alas, I’m getting off track….

Her first series of texts noted that our girls had jumped out to a 4-0 lead after one inning, but because the team was short three players they started the second inning with an out since we didn’t have a number nine hitter. One run was all they could muster in the top half of the second, so our pitcher had to take the circle again hoping to duplicate a phenomenal 1-2-3 first inning.

Chain Smoking Guy was in the middle of one of his “I’m smarter than you” speeches. I was in serious need of an update to drown his voice from my head. It’d been thirty-three minutes since the last one. Had she forgotten about me? I’d somehow managed to allow myself to become part of the classroom conversation when the little green indicator light on my phone started blinking. I stopped talking and covertly opened the text.

“OMG! Dropped 3^rd strike…brianna took the runner from 3^rd OUT at home.”

I have no clue what this meant. I didn’t even know if my wife knew what it was she was trying to convey to me, but nevertheless I was right there with her in spirit. But then came eight long minutes of radio silence. From 7:10PM to 7:18PM I got nothing. The break in communication was worse than the previous, even longer one. I’d begun to think that maybe the offense had kicked back in and the girls are going to put the game out of reach.

“Started 4^th with 2 minutes left, we went 3 up, 3 down…now we have to hold them 5-8,” she texted.

My nerves weren’t in any shape to handle the stress of a game like this. Even though I don’t smoke, I thought about bumming a cigarette from Chain Smoking Guy; I wanted a plausible reason to leave class and call Traci. I desperately needed to know what was happening.

A few anxious minutes later her final text came through noting the girls held on to win 8-6. I started to cry. Here the class had moved on to stating and restating each other’s thoughts on something by William Faulkner and I was choking back tears – not because I was sad to have missed the game, but because I was happy for the eight girls who showed up and fought through being short-handed to win the game. I was proud of our pitcher who at times has felt like she’s had to unfairly carry the weight of the team on her shoulders. I was emotional that our team was finally starting to turn things around.

The blond kid to my left stared at me. He saw that I was crying. Too late to check myself – I’d already wrecked myself. Oh well.

By some miracle of either Hell freezing over or donkeys learning to fly, class let out twenty minutes later – a full hour early. I raced to my car which was strategically parked only six blocks away. I got in and searched for the Rangers game on the radio. I could easily have gone to one of the many bars around campus and watched the game on TV, but I needed something familiar at that exact moment. I needed Eric Nadel's calming voice to come over the radio and tell me that everything was going to be okay in St. Petersburg just as my wife had done in Frisco.

I’d pretty much watched all of the previous four games on the radio, so I settled in for the car ride home knowing that my trusted friend would call the game in a way that allowed me to vividly see it in my head, just as he’s done every summer since my family moved to Texas in 1983. I had front row seats to the most important game in Texas Rangers history from the driver’s seat of my car.

My forty-seven minute trek home was over in thirty-one, and that’s after stopping at the gas station to get Kacie a newspaper for some class assignment that I had no knowledge of. I sprinted upstairs, threw my backpack on the floor, plopped myself on the couch, and flipped on the TV, just like any anxious child does when getting home from school. My wife and kids gathered in the living room to see what the commotion was about. After seeing the game on the TV, they too knew that something special was happening.

Our family togetherness lasted all of an inning – Brady opted to watch PBS Kids in our room where he immediately fell asleep in our bed. Kacie fell asleep on the living room floor before the 8^th inning. Neither one of them got to witness our team’s baseball history or their father cry for the second time that night.

Traci didn’t make fun of me for crying like she had fourteen years earlier when the Rangers lost to the Yankees in their first playoff appearance. She understood after all these years that I loved the Texas Rangers long before I loved her. She got that I loved the game of baseball – and now softball – for reasons I’ll never fully be able to explain.

“Look,” she said, pointing to the television. “Even Nolan Ryan is crying.”

I looked. There he was – one of the greatest legends in Texas Rangers baseball history - on my TV standing next to his wife, fighting to control his own tears. I guess sometimes there really is crying in baseball.

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