Baseball is Amazing

The scene is still clear in my head, because that's where it originated anyway. I was eight years old, the summer of '87, alone but with 80,000 people cheering my name. My mission was more profound than a finding a cure for cancer or eliminating world hunger. I was ending the Indians' World Series drought, live from Cleveland Municipal Stadium, transposed to my grandparents side yard in Madison, Ohio.

I threw the tennis ball in front of me, and took a mighty hack with the Bombat designed for softball, dented by fierce hacks at Roland Beach down the road a half a generation before me. My aunt Susan would buy me a bat later that summer, one with a prettier complexion and truer barrel, but this old thing would do for the time being.

I cleared my bony hips early and extended my toothpick thin arms, aluminum mating with rubbery felt. I was a pull hitter, a power hitter, and this baby was gone. The ball soared towards the maple in front of the ditch, but I didn't even need to look. This might as well have been hit in the opening between the blue bleachers and the red and yellow seated concourse on the Lakefront, the rare air only Doby, Mantle, and Joe Carter ever hit balls to. Herb Score was already butchering the home run call on the radio, his mangled prose high poetry from the Mahoning Valley to the Maumee Bay.

The home run trot was fast and stoic. I hadn't yet adopted the Albert Belle stutter step gait around the bases. The bird house was first base, the big tree was second, the thorn bush was third, and the spot where the grass didn't grow any more because that's where I pretended I was a baseball player was home.

Last night's World Series game six took me closer to the magic of that make believe moment more than any I can remember. It was the magic of baseball and it was all in your face. There ain't no clock in baseball. But there is timeless magic, when a boy can live out his ultimate fantasy, and it can all be real. David Freese, a man a couple years younger than me, a boy that grew up just outside St. Louis pretending to hit game winning home runs in the World Series for the hometown team, hit a game winning home run for the hometown team. Preceding that for Freese was a bottom of the ninth triple misplayed by Texas' outfielder Nelson Cruz (prompting a late night text session with a friend that produced the nicknames Nelson Keller and Suri Cruz). And preceding all of these heroics was a dropped pop up. He was the goat of the hour. And then he was an instant icon.

I will be tuned in tonight to game seven, although its result will be meaningless, save a small wager or two amongst friends. I don't need any more proof, however, that the greatest game needn't be measured in Nielson ratings, ticket receipts, or jersey sales. America's game is measured in moments, and baseball produces moments more consistently and poetically than any of the rest. Last night's game produced more tension-filled, memorable moments than any game I can remember.

Baseball brought me home, to that place where the grass didn't grow any more because that's where I pretended I was a baseball player.