For the Love of the Game

You always get a special kick on opening day, no matter how many you go through. You look forward to it like a birthday party when you're a kid. You think something wonderful is going to happen.  – Joe DiMaggio

I’ve attended one Opening Day game. And Joltin’ Joe was right. Something wonderful did happen. It was April 7, 1986 and I was a senior in high school. My dad had won two tickets by correctly answering a radio-station trivia question. Over 51,000 packed into Tiger Stadium for a matchup with the Boston Red Sox. It turned out to be an unforgettable game. Boston’s Dewy Evans hit Jack Morris’ first pitch for a laser-beam homer to straight-away centerfield. Morris yielded three more home runs, but Detroit had Kirk Gibson. He blasted a pair of two-run homers, the second giving the Tigers the lead for good.

For a baseball fan, Opening Day is like a wedding anniversary. It’s a celebration of a lifetime of love. We look past the hurts and disappointments and reminisce over the good times. We renew our vows and pledge a full season of faithfulness, even if our team will be in the cellar by Father’s Day. We spring forth with eternal hope, believing that our team can reach October, despite its shaky rotation and lack of bullpen depth. On Opening Day something wonderful will happen, baseball returns. Today we celebrate all that is baseball.

For me, baseball is walking into Tiger Stadium for the first time as a six-year-old in 1975. From the outside, Tiger Stadium looked more like an auto plant than a ballpark. Inside, it was dark and spooky, as if the ghost of Ty Cobb was hiding in a corner. I crossed a catwalk-like bridge that connected the concourse to the upper deck seats on the third base side. My knees wobbled as I looked down on the spectators in the field boxes below me. I exited the darkness through a passageway, nearly blinded by brilliance of the afternoon sunlight, into a lifetime of love.

Baseball is coming in from mowing the lawn on a Saturday to watch Mel Allen’s This Week in Baseball. It’s Dave Parker throwing out Brian Downing at home and Jim Rice at third in the ’79 All-Star Game. It’s Monday Night Baseball and the Cubs on TV every afternoon.

Baseball is a George Brett hissy fit, an Ozzie Smith back flip, and Mark Fidrych playing in the dirt. It’s getting tucked into bed by the voice of Ernie Harwell and then getting up to check the newspaper to see who won the game.

It’s little league games on the Michigan rural fields where you dad was the coach, the league president, and the architect of the complex’s restrooms. Baseball is your mom confronting an umpire after a game to tell him she took up a collection so he could buy new glasses.

Baseball is playing high-school ball at school so small that anybody with a glove and a pulse made the team. It’s hitting a pinch-hit grand slam. It’s smashing another homer at the behest of the cutest classmate this side of Memo Paris.

Baseball is staying up before games with your best friend to watch The Natural for the 200^th time. It’s Ray Kinsella having a catch with his dad. It’s books by David Halberstam, George Will, and Roger Kahn. It’s “Put me in Coach” and “I don’t believe what I just saw!”

Baseball is flying to Seattle and back in one day just to see Safeco Field. It’s gauging your attendance at a family reunion in St. Louis on whether the Cardinals are in town. It’s witnessing Andre Dawson smack three homers on your first visit to Wrigley. It’s a pilgrimage to Fenway and seeing Roger Clemens strike out 18 batters, as a Blue Jay. It’s road trips to Milwaukee and Oakland and vacation stadium tours to places like Pittsburgh and Baltimore. It’s driving from Grand Rapids with a gang of college buddies to see the Tigers steal the ’87 division crown from Toronto. It’s returning home after years on the west coast for Tiger Stadium’s last game.

Baseball is having friendships that traverse both time and geography dating back to the glory days of skinned knees and grass stains and it’s forging new relationships that are instantly solidified thanks to years of watching grown men try to hit a round ball with a round stick.

Baseball is finding the ticket to that first game at Tiger Stadium. It was a baseball fan’s biggest archaeological find. It was tucked away in a book, a lost artifact in pristine condition, my own marriage license, which sealed our National Pastime as my own.

Baseball is front-yard whiffle ball with dad, using a red, plastic bat as big as a caveman’s club. It’s working on your fastball as he crouched down like Johnny Bench after a long day’s work. It’s listening to him explain the infield-fly rule and tell stories about driving to Cleveland to see Bob Feller beat the Yankees when he was young. It’s watching games together now for five decades.

Baseball is remembering how he held your hand as you walked together across that Tiger Stadium catwalk, ushering not a daughter down the aisle, but a son into a lifetime of wonderful memories, each as bright and vivid as a cloudless Michigan summer sky.