Why it’s so devastating that MLB’s incapable of loving its fans as much as they love it
Our older son is 6, which I’m finding is a pretty magical age. Every morning begins with him crawling into bed with us for a long hug. He wants to please, wants to learn, wants to play with his friends. He loves football and baseball and monster trucks and swimming and reading and these weird YouTube videos where computer-generated cars crash into each other.
The other day, he spent all afternoon looking forward to baseball practice, and when it was time to go he wanted to take his favorite matchbox car to show his friends. Both sides of that are perfect. If I could pause this moment forever I would.
He’s playing coach-pitch this summer. It was supposed to be in the spring but, well, you know. He talks a lot about “when the virus is over” and how he’ll get to go back to school and the grocery store with the race car carts and maybe even on an airplane to see his cousins in California. But, mostly, for him and his brother the lockdown has simply meant mom and dad are home more.
His first game was the other day. I coached first base. We tried to distance and the kids each had their own helmets and bats and there was no postgame handshake, but it was still baseball. Or, at least, as close to baseball as a bunch of 6-year-olds are capable.
Our son loved it. I mean, loved it. When he’s really into something his posture changes, his shoulders straighten. He even runs differently, strides faster, his growing feet taking him around like a race car. When he hit for the first time — and, I have to say, he hit the crap out of it — he came to first base with his shoulders up, strides like a roadrunner, a smile that was only barely contained by his cheeks. If I could’ve paused this moment forever I would’ve.
He’s starting to follow pro sports. He has a book and a half of cards, football mostly, and sometimes he and his buddies make trades. The Chiefs are easy to like, of course. He loves Patrick Mahomes and Tyrann Mathieu and Frank Clark and shares his first name with another player, which he might think makes them related.
Last summer, we went to four or five Royals games as a family. A blast. The younger one is mostly in it for the popcorn but our older son watches every pitch, dragged away only if he has to go to the bathroom or his little brother wants to go to the Little K. His favorite player is Salvador Perez, because of his energy and smile and big swings.
Last year, we splurged for good tickets, and Jorge Soler came up, and I told him to watch carefully because this was a power hitter. Soler hit the next pitch into the fountains, which had the duel effect of making him my son’s new favorite player and me something like a magician in his eyes. If I could’ve paused that moment forever, I would’ve.
I can’t, of course. Time moves on. Jorge Soler has not swung a bat in a Royals uniform since March. My older son — highly impressionable, baseball beginning to infiltrate his blood but stuffed with ways to occupy his time — has not seen a Major League Baseball player swing a bat in eight months.
We can’t pause these moments. Time marches on. My son can have a blast playing with his buddies, but without big-league games to watch, his connection with the game threatens to be like those matchbox cars — fun for now, due to be outgrown soon.
And that’s what is so damn disastrous about the supposedly smart people in charge of Major League Baseball leading a game that so many of us love.
Introduction to the game
One of my clearest memories of baseball as a kid came at a Royals-Angels game. Must’ve been 1985 or so. We sat in the upper deck, between home plate and third base, and the stadium erupted with boos when Reggie Jackson came to the plate. I’d never heard that sound before.
“What’s happening?” I asked my dad.
“That’s Reggie Jackson,” he said.
I was hooked. I didn’t know Jackson’s famous line back then — they don’t boo nobodies — but I felt something big. Not too long after that, I added Jackson’s swing-from-the-heels, back-knee-hits-the-dirt swing to my growing repertoire of impersonations.
Julio Franco was my favorite, a contortionist’s twist with the barrel pointed overhead back to the pitcher. Mickey Tettleton’s grip was so soft the bat might fall out of your hand. Eric Davis looked so passive in the box, right until the moment the pitch was coming and he turned into a tiger, a big leg kick and swing that could send a ball to the moon.
George Brett’s back lean, Frank White’s closed stance, Willie Wilson’s low bat wave. When one of us hit a backyard homer — right of the walnut tree, left of the corner of our house — we’d do Harry Caray’s HOLY COW!
Baseball jerseys were important. We all wanted No. 5 back then, for Brett, and the rest of the hierarchy went No. 20 (White), then No. 6 (Wilson). I was also open to No. 23 (Ryne Sandberg). Depending on the year, other popular options included No. 34 (Kirby Puckett), No. 33 (Jose Canseco), No. 18 (Darryl Strawberry), No. 45 (Danny Tartabull), No. 27 (Fred McGriff), No. 25 (Mark McGwire), No. 24 (Rickey Henderson) and No. 19 (Tony Gwynn). Eventually, I needed No. 16 — Bo Jackson.
The point is there was no line guarding what we saw on TV and what we tried to do on our own. We tried to be them. We wanted them to be us, theirs to be ours. We stuffed way too much Big League Chew in our mouths and had bubble-blowing contests and spit and grabbed our crotches between pitches because that’s what the pros did. On hot days, the slip-n-slide became a fun way to do more impersonating.
They say you can’t begin to know how your parents felt until you have kids of your own, and now, some 30 years after the best of those innocent days, I know my mom and dad would’ve paused those moments if they could.
But they also didn’t have to, at least not in the narrow perspective of me growing up as a sports fan.
The games always happened.
The stars always played.
Brett became Jackson became Sandberg became Sosa. The strike in 1994 was devastating, and for a while after that my dad was so fed up that if I wanted to watch a game I had to be the one to make it happen.
There were a lot of dads like that.
I suspect there are even more now, beginning to pull away from a game that already wasn’t nearly as strong in the American sports landscape as it was when I was pretending to be Brett.
This is what it looks like when a sport self-destructs.
Time will move on
Our kids will have baseball. Or, rather, they’ll have every opportunity to love the game. My wife grew up with the sport, her brother playing constantly and into college, and she loves baseball’s rhythms and stories and pace.
Baseball was the first sport I fell for, the first one that made me feel bigger than I was. Even now, when sports has become a job, I love it enough to watch random games on TV and catch a ballgame in a new place when I’m traveling.
Our kids may not feel the same, of course. Our 4-year-old is playing T-ball for the first time and appears to almost literally be incapable of caring less. The coach handed out bubble gum before the first practice. It’s been downhill since then.
Which is obviously fine. Kids need to chart their own course. They should do what they’re interested in, not what their parents want them to be interested in.
The point is our kids will have a chance to be interested in baseball, because their parents will make sure of it, because when I was their age I got hooked so hard I’m willing to love the sport again whenever the embarrassing incompetence of the moment is solved and we can have games again.
But how many others are like me? I thought about that the other day, when I was coaching first base. All the kids — well, almost all of them — were having fun. The parents were all positive. It felt good doing something again. It felt good seeing these boys feel big.
How many of them will be hooked, the way I am? The number was already going to be lower than it was when I was their age. There is too much competition for the attention and time of kids, and now loving baseball is harder than ever. The folks in charge are making sure of that. That becomes truer and truer every day.
I wish I could pause this moment, for my sake and, honestly, baseball’s. Because every day our kids get older, and baseball gets worse. Time moves on. Baseball charts its own course, with or without the rest of us.