I grew up a Dodger fan. They abandoned Brooklyn but liberated southern California when I was in the 8th grade. Somehow I'd already become addicted to the game, following from the west coast the exploits of the Cincinnati Reds and my hero Ted Kluszewski starting a couple of years earlier. The arrival of the Dodgers three years later was truly a dream come true.
June 28, 1959 (exactly 14 years to the day my son Matt was born) marks the moment of the first major league baseball game I'd ever seen. By then, an aging Big Klu had been traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates. Although he didn't play that day (another poor managerial decision by skipper Danny Murtaugh) I did see him hit a ball out during BP. I failed to get his autograph after the game; he rebuffed me with a "get away, kid" and boarded the team bus. He wore a shiny green silk suit and clamped the biggest cigar I have ever seen in his mouth. My mother never forgave him, but he remained a God in my mind.
Later, now residing in the Pacific Northwest, my allegiance… suffering allegiance I should say… shifted to the Seattle Mariners. The one-year wonder Pilots preceded them and I may belong to a very small club of people who have attended every opening day of major league baseball in Seattle, starting with the Pilots in 1969, then picking up again with the Ms in 1977. Sicks Stadium to the Kingdome to Safeco… with a few notable exceptions I've seen a lot of mediocre baseball.
If I'm not mistaken, the Mariners are the oldest franchise to never make a World Series appearance and several that came into existence with or after them have: Toronto, Florida and, most recently, Tampa. Perhaps not as long-suffering as the Red Sox fans were or the Cub fans are, but still pretty sufferable. But like all dedicated Mariner followers, I'll always have 1995 and 2001… soooo close.
Today the Ms are still in recovery. The loss of Lou Pinella as manager and the unproductive reign of Bill Bavasi as General Manager brought us to where we are today: a slightly less than .500 club. Don Wakamatsu, the new manager and the new GM Jack Zduriencik have made some good moves, but the years of neglect have dulled the need to win and the failed the instill the hatred of loss that propelled the Pinella teams.
As much as I find little to support my dreams in this current Mariner teams, unlike many, I'm not in despair about the game in general. The discovery of widespread use of steroids over the last 20 years certainly taints the records and character of many of the players. But I never held baseball players on a particularly high moral pedestal anyway… at least not after being shoved aside by Kluszewski.
Baseball players were among the first professional athletes, an accomplishment regretted by many purists at the time when amateur athletics was looked at as a virtue. No one under the age of 50 can remember what a non-commercialized and subsidized Olympics looked like, but there was really a time when we glorified those who competed for the love of the game. Baseball players were already tainted when the game became an industry in the late 19th century. They were money-grubbing, hard-drinking, tobacco-spitting, rough and tumble players. The Black Sox scandal on 1919 was an unsurprising result of many seasons of dirty baseball and marginal on-the-field ethics. It was, is and probably always will be a game of cheaters.
Today we look at the exploits of Ty Cobb or the excesses of Babe Ruth as though they are examples of a by-gone, gladly departed age. Nope. A-rod and Clemens are born of the same lineage and they and many of their peers will do just about anything to win. While Alex Rodriguez closes in on Aaron's all time home-run record (the pursuit abandoned by Barry Bonds as he struggles with his own performance-enhanced shame) I have to be fair. I have a pretty good idea what chemical fueled his taters. I have a suspicion Babe Ruth had his own enhancers and maybe even the mythical Aaron did, too. Maybe Babe's beer and hot dogs, while legal, kept him loose enough to hit them out of the intentionally designed short porch of right field in Yankee Stadium. As honorable as Aaron is, I can't believe that he didn't make use of the pharmacy of pain-killers and cortisone discovered and freely prescribed in the 1950s and 60s, which while legal, helped him keep playing until he was 42.
What the 19th century purists detested about professional sports has pretty much come to pass. They could never have imagined the greed, addiction, cheating and debauchery that came with a paycheck, but they had an idea that sport itself would be transformed in some undesirable way.
I'm not turning a blind eye here. I never attached heroic status to the players and owners. But the sheer beauty of the game, the brilliance of skill required to play it and the inherent drama of two evenly matched players, pitcher and batter, is as compelling to me today as it was to me as a kid.
I was reminded of this last night. My 7-year old grand-daughter Larkin is playing her first season of baseball. Yesterday was team photo night for the Fircrest Giants. She's got a good hitting eye and is a real ball hawk. She's getting the game inside of her. The real game. She has no idea who A-rod is and couldn't care less. 
While the kids were playing catch and running around I heard the unmistakable sound any baseball fan loves: solid contact of a bat on ball. I looked over. A local beer league softball team was practicing and the guy at the plate had power. He was really ripping ball. Long looping fly balls and screaming line drives. There was no sophistication in his hitting at all. He was strong with good reflexes… a righty - everything he hit was pulled to left field. His cut-off sleeves brought by memories of Klu.
And oh how that ball rose in the twilight. It looked like it would go on forever.
-30-
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