Discovering the artistry behind our national pastime

Before we moved to Kansas City in 1990, a highlight of our visits to my wife’s parents was listening to the Royals on radio.

We lived In Tulsa, where I’d had flings with the minor league Oilers and then Drillers, enough so that at one point I went to game after game at old Driller Park and envisioned myself writing a baseball novel.

A creaking old ballpark with wooden bleachers can do that to a person.

The hero, R.S. Blackwell, was a pitcher with a poetic streak, kind of a Chris Young, though not as tall or successful. Old R.S. and the scant output of my novelist ambitions eventually wound up stored in a thin white carton made for shipping Florida oranges.

It’s still on a shelf in my closet.

I suppose there was some underlying ironic connection between spring training, which then took place solely in Florida, the box and the book’s subject matter.

From the experience, I learned that pages and pages of colorful description – say the graceful arcs left by stadium lights on the orange infield dirt – were no substitute for plot development, action and dialogue among characters.

That realization sent my aspirations to an early shower, just as R.S.’s inability to command his change-up as well as his aesthetic sensibilities might’ve kept him from anything more than a cup of coffee in The Bigs.

Novelist or not, moving to a big-league city like Kansas City made my heart beat more quickly, just as reading this storied newspaper offered more of a cosmopolitan feel than the dailies back in Tulsa.

It was thrilling being able to listen to Royals games in the car and garage. And naturally, I was able to write about experiencing games at the stadium that Mr. K, George Brett and all the others helped create.

In one column, I put my writer’s propensity for eavesdropping to work. My seat at Kauffman was behind a family with a young child, a boy if I recall, who fidgeted his way through as many innings as his parents could endure.

As the parent of a then-elementary age child, I had the tools to immediately grasp the stalling tactics the parents were employing to keep their kid’s head in the game. Largely, if not exclusively, the tactics involved frequent trips to the concession stand for nachos, a hot dog, peanuts and those little frozen ice cream dots that cost roughly as much as a new muffler for an economy car.

Everyone agrees that baseball games can seem long and slow, but only to those who don’t understand the time it takes to get in the fine points: the strategy; the slow walks to the mound by pitching coaches and managers; the calls to the bullpen; the tightening of batting gloves, as well as all the general fidgeting, spitting and tugging at uniforms the sport would be nothing without.

The truly blessed – I include myself in this fortunate group – can see beneath all the trappings and discover the artistry and beauty that lie within our national pastime.

That being said, bringing a young child to a ball game still requires a level of parental ingenuity, pluck and deep pockets that few possess.

So that was the core of one column. Then there was another about taking my father to a Royals game. This was generational role reversal because, back in the day, it was dad who took me to ball games at Yankee Stadium.

This was well before the Yanks’ epic rivalry with the Royals, so I don’t imagine I’ll be blamed for growing up inspired by Mickey Mantle, Yogi, Whitey Ford and – yet another Moo…se – first baseman Bill Skowron.

My father tolerated football, but baseball was his game, even if it meant Mom would sit there reading the Sunday New York Times, which, at the time, weighed more than 6 pounds and was thick enough to get you through a doubleheader, even if both games went into extra innings.

At the Royals game, my father was already well into whatever form of dementia it was that struck him. He kept calling me Robert, my oldest brother’s name, and after a while I just went along with it.

It was late September if I recall, so the Royals of that period were playing out the string rather than “moving the line” as the wonderful current bunch so often does.

There’s probably nothing to say about the 2014-15 seasons that hasn’t been said. And with the season over and no games on radio and TV, we’re all left with a void as vast as the Kauffman Stadium outfield. Left with that and a the universal question … Where do we go from here?

Have a Royals story? Let me know at davidknopf48@gmail.com.

This story was originally published November 10, 2015 at 7:27 PM with the headline "Discovering the artistry behind our national pastime."