I Love This Game

Sundays have meant one thing to me for twenty-seven years. Roll out of bed, groggily turn on the television, and watch a day game featuring my Los Angeles Dodgers. It was 1980. Steve Garvey. Pedro Guerrero. Ron Cey. Jerry Reuss. Bill Russell and Don Sutton winding down their careers. Most importantly, my favorite player ever, Mike Scioscia, was making his major league debut. Fernando Valenzuela started the season by pitching a 2-0 shutout in his debut in the bigs, on his way to winning the Cy Young Award and leading the team to winning the World Series. What a year to become a fan and it is all due to one little old lady.

My family is very sports-oriented. My grandfather was a basketball coach at the high school and collegiate level for twenty years. Four of my cousins received four year scholarships for basketball, one for baseball and one for track. My mother and uncle were track athletes, with Scott holding the county record for high jump for over twenty years. I was in sports, with track and field, football, and wrestling on my resume, but my sports career is quite unremarkable. I probably could have been a decent lineman in football and was offered varsity in my sophomore year in high school, but I was more interested in drinking and playing in my band and dropped football altogether.

With my grandpa a coach, I spent considerable amount of time on the hardwood floor but have never had any sort of skill at basketball. Because of this, I have been trained to watch basketball from a coaching perspective. I pay attention to how teams react under pressure and what kind of defense is on. Ever since Chick Hearn died, I just cannot watch basketball on television, though. There really is nothing like hearing the squeak of the shoes and seeing a spectacular assist live. Baseball, on the other hand, I can watch anytime, anywhere.

I spent lots of time at my grandparents’ house when I was young and sports were always on. My great-grandmother was a huge Dodger fan and, as a result, I became a huge baseball fan. She had been a long-time watcher and taught me the history of the game. There is no other professional team sport that has been around as long in America. I agree that there are overpaid players in the league, but for every multimillionaire, there are five players making the league minimum and playing for the love of the game. Major League Baseball keeps statistics for everything and has for a hundred years. I love seeing a record that hasn’t been broken for over one hundred years, like Charlie Sweeney’s dubious feat of giving up seven home runs in 1886. I like how all the parks are different, giving an extra challenge to each series. Most of all, baseball is ultimately friendly competition. Opposing players chat while at first base; I see Dodgers’ first baseman Nomar Garciaparra do it all the time.

This morning, my wife woke me up to tell me the Dodgers are playing the Atlanta Braves. So I roll out of be, groggily turn on the television, and watch a day game featuring my Los Angeles Dodgers. I yelled at the TV while the Dodgers blew a three-run lead. Just like my great-grandmother would twenty years ago.