When Mark had to fly to San Francisco for a business meeting recently, we saw an opportunity to embed a little adventure into the trip. Since Connor has been playing spring Little League we thought it would be fun to take him to his first Major League baseball game. Impetuous as it was, our hatched little scheme was to sneak Connor out of town on a Thursday, call him in sick to school, and return him “healthy and recovered” on Monday morning. As if premeditated truancy was an act beyond his capacities, the excitement was altogether too much for Connor to keep safely locked up behind closed lips. By Wednesday the thrill of our impending escapade got the better of him and he revealed to everyone that he was skipping school to see a baseball game…including his teacher! This bit of news relieved me from committing one of the most dastardly parental crimes-falsifying an excuse note. The following Monday, I simply wrote: “Dear teacher, Connor skipped your classes on Thursday and Friday because he went to a baseball game instead.” So much for operation “Peanuts and Cracker Jacks”, Connor the mole had blown our cover.
Despite the scandals of skipping school, attending a Major League baseball game should be one of the foundations for educating a well-rounded American. In fact, I may be who I am today having been raised on ballpark franks with extra mustard. Then again, this may be the origin of my pernicious propensity to “steal” and wear tight pants. (okay, just kidding.)
As a native of Southern California, we baseball enthusiasts basically had two choices: you were either a fan of the Angels or a fan of the Dodgers. I was raised to be loyal to the former and an overzealous despiser of the latter. Clearly, but unknowingly at the time, I was really just a helpless child who was indoctrinated by my parents to bear false witness and foul prejudices towards any team that opposed the Angels. A lovely pastime I hope to pass along to my progeny.
In retrospect, from my adult point of view, it seems absurd that any fan of baseball, gifted with free will and in the market for a team to indulge their fanaticism upon, would arbitrarily choose to be an Angel fan. Admittedly, there’s the abysmal track record, which, would spurn the average fan’s basic need to align oneself to the most victorious side. But for me, the real heart of the matter is that Angels are benign winged wonders and not the sort of menacing baseball opponent that would strike fear into the heart of an adversary. Where’s the logic in that mascot? Smart teams name themselves after rebellious factions such as the Braves or Yankees or a freakish weather phenomenon like Tornados. Even the Brewers conjure up scandalous images of those law-less days of illicit rumrunners. All formidable sounding opponents don’t you think? So while my allegiance to Anaheim has never been called into question, it’s unconventional adoption of a peace-loving mascot has always troubled me. It’s hard to shake down a black and orange Giant fan when we show up for games in our velvety white shirts with halos and fairy wings embroidered on them. The biblical angel who slayed 185,000 Assyrians never really got a lot of publicity. You don’t see a lot of yard ornaments or dusty knick-knacks portraying this sort of cherub. People just don’t think of this terrifying version when they hear the word angel, but if that’s the kind of angel that Los Angeles meant to have as a mascot, the halo is certainly not getting the word out.
But the real truth of the matter is, for better or worse, you don’t choose a team, a team chooses you. It’s assigned by your family’s proximity to the nearest ballpark. The conventional question, when shopping for a home, is to inquire about the school district the prospective home resides in, what puzzles me is that no one ever poses the really important question which is “What professional sports teams will I be required to raise my children to blindly worship should I buy this house?.” Why does no one ever think to ask their realtor that? Kids will eventually grow up and move away. You can leave your school district but no matter where you move to, you will never rid yourself of the ingrained prejudicial fan lurking inside you.
The one lurking inside of me had developed an insatiable crush on Angel’s catcher Brian Downing, during his freakishly big glasses era no less. I was only seven or eight but I knew it was true love. And yes, I know, your asking yourself “Brian who?”, and to know this you would have to of been an Angel’s fan between 1978-1990 and quite possibly a freckle-faced girl fond of major league baseball players who wore unattractive eyewear. Brian was my lucky number 5 (sigh...). To this day that is my favorite sports number and each season I consider it my duty to try to coerce my baseball-playing son into picking that uniform number-with very limited success I might add.
Perhaps the only thing we Angels have in common with the pious breed of seraph is our patience. The all-capitals-kind-of-PATIENT. The kind that allows one to bear the stinging rebuke of relentless defeat, the kind a fan must summon in order to loyally wait until 2002 to win its first and only World Series. By then I was long gone from that sunny and gloriously warm womb of my childhood. I was a full-fledged Oregonian who could have easily hidden my true identity and changed teams in pursuit of an easy victory. But it was not to be, for the propaganda of my formative years had been so far-reaching that even shock therapy sessions could not have undone my deeply imbedded allegiance. For good or ill, it is my destiny to remain steadfast in my loyalty to the Angels-despite our pansy mascot and statistical carnage.
As with any sport, baseball fans take pleasure in the traditions and rituals that are unique to their game. I had to travel outside the country to understand that being a sports fan is like joining some sort of strange cult. You falsely believe everyone but your group is completely wacko. You never consider that your faction might be a bit peculiar until you witness the bizarre rites of someone else’s.
At a pub somewhere in northern England, I had an up close and personal encounter with an entirely different breed of sports fan, it was an eye-opening experience to be sure. I found myself mingling with a bunch of locals who were glued to the telly for an intense game of cricket (that is if cricket can be intense-I never caught on enough to know). For those of us living “across the pond”, it goes without saying that this is a highly confusing sport. Overcome by curiosity and emboldened with sheer stupidity, I plopped myself down, declared my American naiveté, and pronounced my desire to be educated! The pub-sters were more than happy to oblige my request and commenced launching information faster than I could absorb. Apparently educating a daft American is more intoxicating to a Brit than their lager, as I then spent the better part of a day marinating in a dizzying array of bizarre terminology and perplexing rules. I had officially entered the Twilight Zone.
As I attempted to gain an elementary understanding of this British sport (they like to complicate things with serious formalities), I found myself in the middle of an advanced course for which I had mistakenly not taken any of the pre-requisites (i.e.
British Slang for Beginners) . These poor blokes will be disappointed to learn that the return on their investment was paltry, for the only thing I retained about cricket was this: The pitcher is called a bowler, the bat is still called a bat but doesn’t look like one. (It looks more like spanking paddle-minus the holes) and a strike is not what we consider a strike in baseball (I’m still trying to figure out what exactly it is). I struggle to recall that different hits in Cricket can be called a “slog”, a “snick”, and a “skier”-all which make as much sense to me as the terms “Nurdle”, “Grubber”, and “Googly” (these words even confuse my word processor and are currently highlighted in spellchecker red!). I realized this sport would never really make it to “the land of the free, the home of the brave” when I posed this question: “So, if the “bowler” pitches a ball and it accidentally hits the batter, does a fight ensue?” With the distain of a man who just stepped into something foul, the fellow scrunched up his face and replied, “Of course not, this is a gentleman’s sport!”
A gentleman’s sport indeed, and that is exactly what baseball is not, which leads me to conclude that cricket will forever defy an American’s attention span beyond a curious glossy-eyed gaze. But baseball, glorious baseball, now you’ve got something! A true American sport is one where verbally abusing the umpire is art form, scandalous and original insults are encouraged and at a premium. Baseball etiquette encourages fans to distract the pitcher by reminding him of the loose standards of his mother. Top the whole experience off with a few of those tasty ball park hot dogs that, if eaten anywhere else outside the stadium, would easily be discovered for food fraudulence…now you’ve got yourself a real sport!
Oh the splendor of a stadium! All these dubious traditions were the rites of my youth, and they gloriously awaited my son.
Inside the AT&T Park, a very focused Connor headed down near the dugout to watch the players warm up. He was dressed head-to-toe in his Giants uniform (yes, this stung a bit) and armed with a brand new ball, just in case. A dugout manager quickly spotted him in all his gleaming orange and black glory and called him over, the man then shouted something at Giants pitcher Tim “The Freak” Lincecum and motioned for him to come over. He handed him Connor’s ball and Lincecum signed it, gave Connor a high-five, and placed the ball back in his hands. In that horrific moment I was seized with terror, my son had officially become a fan of the wrong team!
The rest of the evening was filled with peanuts, hot dogs, high-fives with an occasional drunken stranger, and singing off-key to the organ. There’s something about crooning with 30,000 other shamelessly tone-deaf people that makes you feel like the world is flawless for a moment. At last, the Giants emerged victorious, which I didn’t mind one bit, perhaps due to the fact that they were not playing the Angels-not to mention for safety issues there remained the simple fact that I was covertly entrenched in the bleachers of enemy territory. I simply reminded myself that Giants would always remain the losers of the 2002 World Series against my beloved Angels.
As if the evening couldn’t get any better, Connor headed back down by the dugout one last time to gaze with boyhood wonder when suddenly, Giant’s catcher Bengie Molina emerged from the dugout and came back out onto the field. Like a surreal scene from a Hollywood movie, he tossed Connor a game ball followed by a hearty high five. A wide-eyed Connor walked back to the car that night with a baseball in each hand completely intoxicated with baseball.
The delirium of his baseball fever was still in full swing a few days later when Connor was called on to pitch during his own game. He had never pitched before in his life but you’d never know it by the way he strutted up to the mound. With the big leagues still fresh in his memory, he took his place on the hill, scratched at the dirt with his cleats, glared at the batter, then deceivingly wound up like he’d done it a million times and pitched the ball! His counterfeit enterprise struck the first two batters out! Lincecum's high-five must have passed on a little magic!
Perhaps my parents were right. A little inspiration (and indoctrination) never hurt a kid (look at me, I'm just fine!). I guess operation “Peanuts and Cracker Jacks” may have been successful after all.
