I'm a baseball fan, and have been about as far back as I can remember. Growing up, I have many life memories that in one way or another attach to the game. Long, languid summers playing pickup ball in a furloughed school yard. Listening to the Blue Jay games on static from a radio station in Leamington, Ontario. Going to the games with friends.
The 2023 is winding down, and recently, I was asked a question that is variant of one I suppose every fan thinks of from time to time.
In your memories of baseball, what was a great day.
It's subtly different from "what was a great game." I of course can think of many great games - some wins, some losses.
But great "days?" That's something different.
Two great days come to mind when I think a bit. Bookends, of sorts.
They were not “great” in the sense that something huge happened on the field. No heroic performance by a player, no season-changing outcome. There was no perfect game, or four home run performance. The San Diego Chicken did not make its debut nor was anything of historical import done.
For me, they were “great,” though.
In mid July 1978, as a young kid, we were visiting my grandparents in Cleveland, Ohio. My parents took us downtown to see a game at the old Cleveland Municipal Stadium.
I had never been to a professional baseball game before, but having just the year before begun playing, I was really excited.
The old stadium was one of those huge, horse-shoe shaped fields with a giant main concourse underneath. I remember emerging from the tunnel to see the brilliant sky and green grass. The smell of vendors hawking popcorn and hot dogs.
I can clearly remember the loudspeakers playing a 1970s, easy listening song, “Summer Breeze” (no; really), by Seals and Crofts.
The opponent that day was the Kansas City Royals, in their powder blue road uniforms. As part of the festivities, children were allowed onto the field to have our photos taken with one of the Cleveland players (in those days, the Indians). Eight year old me chose Horace Speed, who was the starting centre fielder that year.
As a souvenir, I asked for a pennant and a plastic batting helmet. Being from Toronto, I was a Blue Jays fan (the Jays had just begun play a year before), so my parents got me a Blue Jay helmet. I remember going back to my grandparents’ house that day after the game was over, and pretending to be a big leaguer, racing around imaginary bases with my helmet on.
Over the subsequent years, I’ve been to many hundreds of games, but my first is probably my favourite.
On the other end of the spectrum, in 1994, now 24 years old and in my final year of grad school, I went back to Cleveland, where my parents had settled. This time, to see my father. It was June, a week after school ended.
I went this time with my father to the new Cleveland Stadium - called Jacobs Field at first. It had opened that same year, and was brand new. Just my father and I went, reliving an experience and memory nearly twenty years past.
It was not the same, of course. I was not a wild-eyed eight year old. We couldn’t go on the field, and everything was on a more human scale - the field was still as green and the sky as blue. The game and the dimensions had not changed, but I had.
I was in Cleveland because my father had been diagnosed with lung cancer.
Going to Jacobs Field in June 1994, the day before I came back to San Francisco to start my first job, was the last day I got to spend with my father when he was alive.
The games themselves were not great, and in fact, I don’t even remember who won.
