Baseball and Money for Pizza
I’ve had a loving relationship with baseball since I was a child.
My father would take a young, untainted, and yet to be wearied version of myself to the ballpark on frequent occasions. He was a painter. He would take me on jobs when mom would work and there wasn’t a sitter. Or maybe I just asked to tag along.
He painted houses. Wallpaper and custom jobs. I remember the smell. The stained bed sheets draped across carpets and tiles like wood chips do in familiar playgrounds. And I remember one specific memory.
While dad worked I watched a stranger’s television. A rerun of an MLB Home Run Derby. I think it was 1993. The brick walls of the B&O Warehouse located in right field at Camden Yards stands out in my mind.
I was a kid, I loved my dad, and I loved baseball.
He was my coach for multiple teams. From tee-ball to the first few years I was allowed to pitch. I could run and hit, but I didn’t throw very hard. He always told me “just wait until you get a little bigger”.
My parents split just before my tenth birthday. I kept playing, but he didn’t see me get bigger. I began throwing harder, not by much though. He didn’t see that either.
I resented him for it and I thought about him a lot during the proceeding years. But I never stopped loving the game he taught me to love. In a way, it was the one way I could be at peace with him. No matter the day. No matter how I was feeling or what happened in school.
He passed when I was 20 years old. It was July and the Red Sox were on the road. I fell into a jagged depression. One resembling a crash test windshield. Hating the breath in my lungs and the whiskey in front of me more so. Feeling like unkempt grass beaten down by vitamin-less sunlight, I was my own victim most nights.
I lived in the city. I was in school and I was alone. Academics became bill collectors; easy to avoid. I looked disheveled and unhealthy. I rarely slept.
But I still watched my favorite team. Still checked in on former teammates that played across the eastern coastline.
Climbing out of the valley of depression isn’t simple. A montage incorporating Hall & Oates only works in romantic comedies, after all. It’s especially difficult when you avoid help, as one, such as myself, tends to do.
I always had baseball, though. I had the Red Sox. Rain or shine there was a reason to discuss them. To forget the stinging thoughts of yesterday and the reluctance of tomorrow.
Distracting, a remedy, whatever the hell it was. Watching the games on television or in person if I splurged felt like practice with my dad. They felt like the single voicemail I kept from him on my phone. The one where he said he had sent me some cash for my birthday. He told me to get a pizza or something, whatever I wanted to use it on.
Baseball was the fuel line to remembering happier days. The engine wasn’t flashy, but it ran.
It’s been nearly five years since I needed a corny montage to save the day. I’m better, but I’m sick. Infected by the greed and the lack of cognitive awareness of the game I needed to survive my early twenties.
We’re in a pandemic. We’re witnessing the single greatest social movement in the United States since the Civil Rights Movement. Baseball is not a priority and frankly, I don’t care about it right now.
That said, the ongoing debates and the Mr. Burns-esque level of shrewdness and cowardice business tactics of MLB owners have turned my stomach into a shameful game of Bop It.
They refuse to pay their players. Use divide and conquer tactics against the Player’s Union. Cut hundreds of minor leaguers from the payroll just to save a million or two for multi-billion dollar companies.
Acts like these have turned the pale, leather-bound ball that I hold in such high regard into a shade of repugnant green.
I needed this game for a long time. Some days it was life or death and the ballgame was the prevention line. I just came to grips with the absolute nature of my father’s passing and now billionaires have killed my last standing connection to him.
Truth be told, I don’t care if a season happens. Out of pure selfishness, I know. But I don’t. I hope the players receive appropriate compensation and the small fish in the big pond get fed justly. Regardless, when open season does begin again I will not be one of the fishermen eager to renew his licenses.
