Take Me Out To The Old Ballgame…Please!

Take Me Out To The Old Ballgame…Please!

– By Ed Kociela –

Sometimes, this business of analyzing politics and world events gets to be all too much.

I need a break from the insanity of a Congress settled into the act of hanging onto a job at any costs to taxpayers and the public good, justice, or peace.

A calming is needed to put it all into perspective, which has become more and more difficult to achieve these days as we try desperately to separate the egos and irritants of politics and world leadership from our fragile lives.

Thank God for baseball.

As a kid, there was nothing as important in my life as following the St. Louis Cardinals. I was lucky and had the opportunity to get quite intimate with the little box on the corner of Grand and Dodier called Sportsman’s Park, a gem of a ballpark.

The steel girders stood tall and strong, supporting the upper decks, wooden seats curving perfectly for an afternoon at the yard, the grass the most remarkable emerald green imaginable.

It was nirvana, a holy place in some respects, where my heroes played a child’s game with passion unlike anything I have ever witnessed.

The perks were few, at least in comparison with what Major League Baseball is paying today, and back then there were only eight teams in each league. We had none of that divisional stuff, just the American and National leagues.

And salaries?

Let’s just say that one of today’s stars makes enough in one season to have bought several franchises back in the 1950s.

Still, it is baseball and it is part of my DNA.

They have begun playing spring training games this season in Arizona and Florida in stadiums that would rival some of the old parks from my childhood. People travel great distances, too, to take in the rites of spring training, from the rigorous workouts to the games, all because hope springs eternal, especially in the heart of the baseball fan.

I got into this crazy business of stringing words together because as a child, I had this admiration for Bob Broeg, an ink-stained wretch for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who covered the Cardinals for 40 years.

I mean, as a kid, all I could think of was how lucky Bob was. I knew, at a tender age, I would never make it to the big leagues as a player, but I knew I wanted to be close to the game like Bob.

He knew Stan Musial. Hell, he gave him the nickname Stan The Man.

He knew Bob Gibson.

He knew Curt Flood.

He knew Ken Boyer.

He got to go to spring training with the team, to every game – home and away – and he got to spin colorful tales about the game’s most colorful players. Because my handwriting was so poor, my folks bought me a typewriter. I would sit at a table behind the typewriter while I watched a game on television and write my own stories after it was over, wondering how close I could come to Broeg’s precious prose. I never got it right, of course, but nobody really, could touch the dean of American baseball writers when it came to this writing gig.

All of this matters why?

Because.

Because our hearts sometimes beg for simpler things, beauty, a certain poetry, a connection to the innocence of our youth. Quite frankly, I truly believe that most of us are quite tired of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and the rest of those fat cats who, no matter how empathetic or charismatic or whatever are the same as the old boss. I guarantee that most of us who sling words together in the political arena are quite fed up with these guys and need a little shelter from the raging storm of politics. George Will, my favorite conservative, is a dyed-in-the-wool Chicago Cubs fan and has written several books on baseball in his articulate, poetic verse.

I promise that if you bumped into him at a cocktail party that he would probably much rather talk about the Cubs’ pitching rotation than the debt ceiling. For the record, I am sure his knowledge of both is much deeper than anybody I know.

But, baseball is his parachute as well when he wants to jettison from the daily world.

I cannot afford to go to the ballpark any longer, which is a shame because there is nothing like walking through a tunnel to the seats and seeing this magnificent field open before my eyes. It always reminded me of the scene from “The Wizard of Oz” when it went from black and white to color. The sights, the sounds, the smells of the ballpark are forever etched into my memory.

I can remember my most rebellious years and how, through it all, Dad and I could always find common ground over baseball. Dad, by the way, truly had one of the most brilliant baseball minds I ever ran into. I remember an alcohol-fueled night huddled with a bunch of fellow sportswriters, Billy Martin, Dick Enberg, and Whitey Herzog when I wished Dad was with me. He could have held his own in that discussion, especially with Martin, who was his kind of player.

Yeah, it bothers me that the game has become a country club of sorts for overgrown little boys earning millions of dollars, that they have lost some of the one-on-one aspect of the game with minimal interaction between players and fans, that the ticket to the bleachers that cost me a quarter as a kid is now probably priced in three figures making it difficult for little fans to make the memories I have.

And, although the game has changed quite a bit – from designated hitters to pitch clocks – it is still, fundamentally the same.

Most importantly, it is a place to go during these lost times when sense and sensibility seem things of the past and hope seems hopeless, even if it means snuggling into the couch and dialing up the game on television.

Welcome back, baseball.

It has been a long, cold winter.

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