Life is too short. I’m beginning to realize that the older I get. But leave it to a trip back home and a little fun at a ballpark to let the thought really sink in. The time I had off made me remember an answer that a youth baseball player gave to a question I asked a group of kids a few months back. “Every time I start to feel like it’s starting to get boring, something happens to make it so much fun again,” the middle schooler said in response to how they keep interested in competing for their travel team.
“Boring” is how a sports writer might feel if he or she spends too much time taking notes at games without finding a moment to let themselves loose in the stands every now and then. What reminded me of the “so-muchfun- again” feeling was being able to take my 70-something grandpa to a baseball game in Cleveland for his birthday, where the Indians happened to be playing everyone’s new favorite team in Florida, the Tampa Bay Rays.
And to make this experience even more worthwhile, I picked him up before the game wearing a Rays’ cap before he and two of my three younger brothers made the journey to the newly named Progressive Field (formally Jacobs Field, for those not in the know). Aside from enjoying a short break from my desktop at the office in exchange for a rebirth in my fanhood, I had one clear objective upon arriving at the parking garage.
That was to tally up the number of Tampa Bay logos I came across amongst the crowd. In doing so I counted nearly 20 fans sporting Rays’ T-shirts, hats and jerseys. One fan in particular said he was one of the team’s first employees back in the mid-1990s, a few years before the Rays even took the field in 1998. Since those days he’s been working in the University of Notre Dame athletic department, spending three- or fourgame stints traveling to watch the often last-place Rays play in stadiums around the Midwest in Chicago, Detroit and, of course, Ohio.
He was strolling through the stadium’s “Heritage Park” exhibit behind the center field wall with his brother when I caught up with him for a little Tampa Bay baseball history lesson. That encounter was closely followed by the fun gramps and us were about to have.
A few fouls balls in our direction kept our section on its toes and some well-deserved ribbing by my Clevelandrooting brothers had me pulling that hat I was wearing down over my eyes for much of the night. The Rays went on to lose that game and eventually drop four straight in Cleveland before entering the all-star break earlier this week.
But that’s not even the reason I decided to write this column. I tend to get a bit nostalgic at times and that rare trip back home was met with the reality that no matter where you’re from or where you’re going, life keeps moving along no matter where you’re at right now. Just as I’m a bit of a historian when it comes to sports, I took some time to get to know a little about my ancestors this past weekend as well, hearing about a great-grandfather who had passed away the very year I was born.
This was during a weekend that included perhaps the final cross-country visit by my great-uncle, a Vietnam veteran, while chemotherapy continued to be administered to a far-too-young aunt of mine. It was hard not to feel a bittersweet sense of such a visit while gazing through an airplane window at the clouds and landscape en route back to Florida.
I recounted the chance I had to step back and cheer at a ball game, which was a nice way for me to remember why I’ve invested all this time in such a profession in the first place. And it made me realize the parallels of baseball and life, of returning home and going to a game. That you don’t have to love sports to enjoy a few hours at the stadium.
That the time with loved ones at a ballpark is as good a place as any to put the thoughts of illness and war out of mind, if just for a little while. You see it right here in East Orlando, at UCF games and at high school sporting events. I began to grasp my own understanding of what that Little League player might have meant when he explained how the thrill seems to come and go, and how it always finds a way to return eventually.
Sometimes we get so wrapped up in what’s in front of us that we end up losing sight of all that’s taking place around us. In doing so, if we’re not careful about the way we get caught up in our everyday routines, it would be easy to misinterpret a pitching duel or defensive gem as a bit of a bore when we’re looking to be treated to triples and stolen bases instead.
Both can be beautiful in their own unique ways, if only we don’t forget what we’re at the ballpark for in the first place. To savor every last sight and sound in case we never make it back there again.
