Author: mw2828

A runner is thrown out by a step. A season ends. A team celebrates. The fan unleashes a smiling scream, his thirst for truth within the confines of sport measuring beyond naught, his more optimistic idea of human nature at least temporarily satiated.

Champagne adorns the clubhouse, on walls, soaking into the carpet, for all eternity. It will never dry. A manager accepts validation for his dedication, a player due adulation for an unforgiving occupation. An owner wipes away betraying tears. Commentators, live, attempt valiantly to trap a moment with words. Some succeed.

The sun sets earlier in the day; darkness accentuates winter, enveloping its essence. A hot stove flickers, belches, than burns. Amid the burning tumult, a team is delivered, forged and steadied, easily identifiable. We keep the game alive, us alone, carrying a tattered torch, at times expressively through will.

One day, nature scoffs at the calendar, and the air belies any tangible temperature. It feels lighter, looser; our mind automatically triggers a specific response. The mind searches for definition, until one magic word produces an exacting, all encompassing correlation.

Baseball, even in the winter we still think of Baseball.

The Ice melts. Days are counted, sped up, part of something greater than just game.

Finally, the pitchers and catchers report, our rhythm returns from the down turn of an infinitely epic crescendo, rising and flying again.

Ken Griffey’s bat waggles behind his head, a composer’s instrument of ultimate athletic expression, grace.

Nomar readjusts his batting gloves, Derek Jeter smiles while living the life we imagine, somewhere, sometime, Ernie Banks’ requests two.

Some fool analyzes his favorite team.

His name is Alex Rodriguez. Commercially known as A-Rod, he has the talent and benefit of playing in an era where salaries exploded, and a baseball player could add impossible digits to an already swollen bank account.

by Matt Waters

As the dogs days of August began to grudgingly give way to the promise of September, nary a thought of foreign politics or agendas swirled through my mind as I happily clutched the tickets to Cal Ripken’s final home game at Camden Yards. In just a few weeks, I’d be sitting in a modern cathedral, bowing at the altar of baseball history. The days dropped off the calendar with routine ease. September 9… September 10…

I’m sitting in a hotel room during late June, located ground zero in the “revitalized” section of downtown Detroit, staring blankly at the ninth rerun of SportsCenter. My father, brother, and me had taken a trip into the proud home of the Red Wings, Tigers, Lions and Robo-Cop on a sojourn to see our Yankees do battle in the newly minted Comerica Park. We had just seen Wrigley Field a week prior on our Baseball themed Summer Vacation, and once the initial and deserved shock of seeing what a cathedral that park truly is wore off, the main ingredient served in the back of my mind about seeing and experiencing a Cubs game was not the Ivy on the wall, the merrily obstructed views, or even the Hot Dogs [best in the free world].

It was the fans.

Cub fans are of a different sort. They weren’t watching the game in a modern, frenzied pace that is best reserved in Chicago for the middling Bears [a shuffling crew.] It was quite the contrary, as they took in the experience of a meaningless June against the Brewers wholly inside themselves. Pitch by pitch, inning by inning, one didn’t feel the momentum of the moment, a tie game, taking hold of the mass gathering bowing at the altar of their beloved Cubbies. Instead of tensing up, the crowd seemed to exhale as each frame ended, expelling all of which they had bottled up in the vast emporium that exists within any seasoned baseball fan’s mind. My brother and I had noticed the trend by the fourth inning. After Corey Patterson, a maddeningly gifted player who had not fulfilled his copious potential after ruining his knee during the ’03 season, failed to get a bunt down and than proceeded to strike out, a Corey Patterson trademark moment in a tight game which demanded perfection from both teams, we both prepared our eardrums for the venom sure to rise from the throats of those jaded by the stars Cub fanatics. There was booing to be sure. But there was something missing. Where was the anger? The booing had a different tone, a different tint if you will, that I recognized only later that night.

It was apologetic. Apologetic booing. How sweet.

” You believe these freaking people?” My brother Greg wondered it aloud in utter amazement.

I nodded my head in quiet understanding, than took yet another nervous quick glance at the romantic out of town scoreboard. The Yankees led Baltimore by one run, and hoped to stave off the ghost of .500 for at least one more night.