Yes Jack, There is Crying in Baseball

"Are you crying?"

There was no doubt as to what was coming next, no use hiding my overly emotional, third out, Wild Card game over face.

"There's no crying in baseball."

Of course there is. There is crying at the All Star Game, crying at the MLB Thank You Fans commercials and crying when faced with the destruction down the street at Wrigley Field.

It's the same conversation, now happening in the context of the World Series, "it's a business Allyson, things have changed".

This from the man who grew up in Nebraska, the land of no professional sports, where team loyalty is dictated by the color red and where players, by design, are only allowed four years before they are shipped elsewhere. This is not a man who appreciates Frank White, or Ernie Banks, or Ted Williams, beyond batting averages and on base percentages. This is not a man who grew up with a hometown baseball team and memories of the family who loved them. This is someone who says he's a baseball fan, adopting the team nearest as his own. But this is someone who, after the sweep of the Baltimore Orioles, looked over to me and said, "Yep, I'm a Royals fan".

Lorenzo Cain Does Everthain

It was easy to get on board. My children, who attended their very first game at the age of one month and who can hear the roar of the Wrigley bleachers from the back deck, finally found, in this post season, a team that made them want to learn how to score a game. These children who have, for 10 years, confused fouls, strikes, and balls, now analyze the batting order and question why Perez was moved up two spots in game five. They do well playing their father's favorite game time challenge, "should you send the runner?" and woke up sadly disappointed Thursday morning, frustrated that their parents made them go to bed before the last out of the last game, to find that their heroes came in second in the most exciting post season a Royals fan had seen in years.


For me there is no comfort in the adage, heard in constantly in our neighborhood, "wait until next year". This year was just enough and I'm not ready to close the book on this wonderful season by looking to the next. Winning it all would have been amazing but making it to the Wild Card game was reason enough for me to be happy. I'm a product of the George Brett years, when the Royals battled the Yankees year after year for the American League title. I learned about stolen bases when Willie Randolph was on second and Reggie Jackson was batting, and I looked to Hal MacRae and Willie Wilson to save the day. I grew up expecting the Royals to be a winning team and usually they complied. The slow build to a pennant race this year was unexpected and glorious. It was enough, enough to make me cry.


If you know me you know I grew up in Kansas City. You also know I love cardigan sweaters and pearls but essential to who I am now is the first place I called home. Sharing that hometown has been wonderful, and sharing my baseball team, the one I learned to love from the front porch of my great grandmother's Plaza apartment, has been amazing.

No Royal bobbled the ball in the outfield to put a runner on third in the bottom of the 9th. They may not have won but they played great baseball. Thanks for an excellent season, it was fun to watch.

Take Me Out to the Royals Game

My love of baseball was cultivated in a time when baseball was the star of the game. I am so old that my first games were at Municipal Stadium in Kansas City which was torn down so long ago that a community garden now grows on the site. It was here I chose Lou Piniella as my favorite player and learned what the numbers 1 through 9 signified. It was here that I developed a passion for a summer day at the ballpark, warm and sticky, with 9 innings and a blank scorecard in front of me, in anxious anticipation for the 7th inning stretch. It was here I sat, between my father and grandfather, topped with a Royal Blue ball cap, Cracker Jack in hand, ideally happy for many a summer day.


Once again I am ideally happy. Once again the game of baseball is the star.


In the twenty nine years since the Royals last played in the post season I have grown too comfortable with the idea that the glory days of Kansas City baseball might have passed and that the Royals of my youth, George and Hal and Willie, might just be the only names to remember. My annual visit to Kaufman Stadium became more of an opportunity to share my childhood with my girls than one with any expectations for great baseball. Far too many stories began with "remember when Freddy Patek...?". (No one did.)

I've never been so deliriously happy to be completely wrong.

Playing the kind of baseball that is incredibly fun to watch, putting together runs like puzzle pieces, and behaving like genuinely good guys who are just as excited to be winning as their fans are, the Royals are headed to the World Series. This team that together only hit 95 home runs in the regular season has now swept two teams and won 8 straight post season games, putting together runs pitch by pitch. The team that has not one super salaried star but plays together like they've been doing it since 1985 (even though most of them were not yet born in 1985) is showing everyone what scrappy baseball looks like and why it works. The Royals are making baseball a team sport once again and we are enjoying every stolen base.
 

When the Royals moved from Municipal Stadium to Kaufman, we moved with them, summer days now spent in section 306, third base side.It was here that I announced to my Dad I was too old for the baseball cap he had dropped on my head, here that my grandfather saw his last game, and here that I watched, with my dad, Grandfather and sister, the Royals win Game 7 of the 1985 World Series. My view has changed; Royal blue cap on head I'll watch every game of the upcoming series with three new seatmates, not in section 306 but 500 miles away, remembering how great it is to be a Royals fan and loving every minute of this amazing year.

Derek Jeter: Twenty Years in the Same Outfit

In the late 1970's, when a good deal of my days were spent at the ball park with my dad or sitting on the back patio, listening to Denny Mathews' play by play on my grandfather's old transistor radio, when baseball was an integral part of summer and activities were planned around the Royals schedule, I knew that the players on the field on any given day were the same ones that were there the day before. The names: Brett, White, McRae, consistently causing my grandfather to scream in adoration, or frustration, through the crackle of the old radio broadcast. Those names, so familiar, were part of the comfort of baseball, the knowing that every day Bopaw would be there, in the shade on the back porch, listening to baseball while smoking a cigarette and musing on the condition of the garden.

In our paper plate loving society, does the disposable system of player rotation teach us all that we are easily replaced? And that allegiance and loyalty are nothing compared to the highest dollar? How do I raise Cubs fans when my children have no idea who is playing baseball on any given day?

My George Brett jersey was outdated when I outgrew it, not when George outgrew the Royals. And while I know it's easier to stick with a team like the Yankees, it's still nice to see someone in the same uniform for twenty years, in the age of disposable baseball. In one night Derek Jeter rose to the top of my daughters' list of favorite players, because right now they have no idea who is in the Cubs dugout. Neither do I. 

It's a business, says Jack, it's not that way anymore.
But I wish it was, I really do.

Knobby Knees? Look At These.

My knees are fat. Even when I'm not they are. It's how they're built, I have never had knobby knees, I never will.

On our first date, which was not actually called a date then because we worked together (but is now because we are married), Jack and I went to a Cubs/Royals game in Kansas City. It was a Sunday in late June, sunny and well over 90 degrees. It was the perfect opportunity to sweat away any chance at a future relationship.

Uncle Kenny, my long time best friend and simply wonderful person, was there when I came downstairs, dressed for my non date in khaki shorts and a sleeveless navy polo shirt.

"My knees are fat. He is going to see my fat knees."

He laughed. He did not tell me that my knees were not fat because we both knew that was not true. He said this, "if he doesn't like you because you have fat knees then he wasn't worth liking at all".

And I went off to a baseball game with a guy that I thought I might like knowing that a guy I loved appreciated me for who I was, not who I thought I should be. He still does.

Every girl should be so lucky.

 Not a bad outcome for a Cubs loss on a very hot day in June, so many years ago.
 

Take Me Out to the Amusement Park

My love of baseball was cultivated in a time when baseball was the star of the game. I am so old that my first games were at  Municipal Stadium in Kansas City which was torn down so long ago that a community garden now grows on the site. I am so old, in fact, that my clearest memories of being there are of falling in the gravel parking lot while racing inside, leaving several nice scars on each knee. Municipal Stadium was so old that it was once the home of the KC Monarchs, the Negro League team, and the stadium so bare that there was little else to do but watch the game. It was here I chose Lou Piniella as my favorite player and learned what the numbers 1 through 9 signified. It was here that I developed a passion for a summer day at the ballpark, warm and sticky, with 9 innings and a blank scorecard in front of me, in anxious anticipation for the 7th inning stretch. It was here I sat, between my father and grandfather, topped with a Royal Blue ball cap, Cracker Jack in hand, ideally happy for many a summer day.

Two years ago we took the girls to a game at Kaufman Stadium, the current home of the Royals, which replaced my old Municipal Stadium years ago. It's a beautiful stadium which recently went through a $250 million dollar renovation. Somewhere during the process I think they forgot about baseball, or at least baseball as related to children. In the outfield area you can now find a batting cage, a playground, a carousel, and miniature golf. I don't know but I suspect you might also find a nap room, pony rides, a magician and a place to get your oil changed. There is a "child friendly" food area; as the mother of two children I am wildly curious to know exactly what ballpark food falls outside the definition of child friendly. Wasn't ballpark food created with the child like idea that food should be bad for you and served utensil free, preferably on a stick? It seems that the Royals succumbed to the relatively new notion that children cannot be happy unless they are entertained at every possible level and that a good day out with your family is simply not enough. It's still a beautiful stadium but I worry that this kind of day at the amusement park baseball is doing little to cultivate baseball fans; when the Royals are down 7-2 in the fifth, is that really the time to get in a round of mini-golf?

The beautiful old gal down the street is soon to be having some work done, and it's time.The Cubs recently announced plans to renovate Wrigley, which, given the netting that hangs above, protecting my head from falling concrete, seems reasonable. Included into the agreement, a jumbo screen, twice the size of the beautiful old scoreboard, to be placed in left field, next to the existing one. Doesn't that seem a bit like marrying your young secretary but keeping your middle aged wife around to do the laundry? Is anyone going to wait in anticipation for the scoreboard guy to manually change the numbers when the jumbo screen will have that information up immediately, as well as instant replay, advertisements, wedding proposals and various games intended to embarrass and entertain fans in those 7 second increments, previously so painfully boring, between strike out and new batter.

Thankfully, should you not be entertained by watching two strangers kiss on the 5,000 square foot video screen, you can now spend your baseball watching time in a two story Captain Morgan Club, doubling the size of the previous eyesore on the front of the stadium. Perhaps in making it two stories they might diminish, by perspective, that ridiculous pirate that now stands near the Addison and Sheffield entrance.

The 21 year old quasi Cubs fans are covered, they can spend their nine innings swilling run in the shadow of a pirate, but what about those precious children who come to the ballpark; what are they to do for nine long innings? Surely we cannot have them sitting in their seats with nothing to do but watch baseball for three hours? Having thought of everything, the Cubs have included a kids play zone on the west side of the park, confirming my suspicions that the Cubs now agree, baseball is simply not enough.

Municipal Stadium image courtesy of ballparks.phanfare.com. 
Image of Kate courtesy of me.

A Late Announcement

Allyson, a daughter of Sharon of Kansas City, and the now late William, was married ten years ago today to Jack, a son of Dave and Mary of Lincoln, Nebraska. Reverend Patrick Sean Liam Flannagan, a Roman Catholic priest with an over the top Irish name, performed the St. Patrick's day nuptials at St. Clement Catholic Church in Chicago. The bride, who is known as Ally, is also the stepdaughter of Jackie and the also late Jack. The bride does not have great luck with regard to keeping wonderful fathers living.

Allyson, who will stick with the name she has been using for too long to consider changing, was, until ten years ago, a trust officer with UMB Bank in Kansas City, responsible for taking care of truly lovely old people who entrusted their financial concerns to a woman who had difficulty passing Algebra 101. The groom, who was also, and still is, a banker, is far more skilled in mathematical logic and will, forever, be responsible for balancing the family checkbook.

The bride's father worked in the soft drink industry, specializing in packaging products, at a company bearing his family name. Years of store deliveries to the bride's childhood home required Ms. Ally to kick a very long standing addiction to Tab when the soda became difficult to find on store shelves. The groom is still happily attached to his daily Coca Cola but finds that he prefers the version produced in Mexico, available at Hispanic markets all over Chicago. The bride now abstains from all soft drinks, as do their children. The bride's mother has retired from a life of random volunteer work and car pooling, and now spends her days inside collecting Ironstone, newspapers and soy sauce.

The groom's father is a meat inspector with the USDA, supervising a pork production plant in Nebraska. That his son chose to marry a woman who does not eat meat has proved to be very difficult. Convinced that she has just not yet had a good steak he has offered repeatedly to sign up the bride for the Omaha Steaks Meat of the Month Club. The bride is horrified but has graciously declined this kind offer. The groom's mother is a nurse who is thankful she no longer has to beg for grandchildren.

The couple met in June of 1996, at work, where Ms. Ally initially thought that Mr. Jack looked like a secret service agent who appeared to be far too stiff and boring to ever go for ice cream after work. That she does not actually like ice cream was not considered relevant. The groom immediately found the bride to be witting and charming, with dazzling blue eyes, cascading chestnut hair and a keen sense of style. They first had lunch together on the way to visit a mutual client. The groom ordered a very messy sandwich; his great concern about spilling on his suit did little to dispel the earlier notion that he was stuffy. When he appeared a few weeks later in the bride's next door office, long after the bank closed, to regale her with tales of a last minute post happy hour trip to New Orleans she realized that he might not be as dull as once she thought.

The couple, both avid baseball fans, went on their first outing, not called a date, to watch the Kansas City Royals host the Chicago Cubs. "I knew then that I wanted to marry someone just like Jack" Ms. Ally said, "but I had no idea that I would actually end up marrying him". The groom remembers that day as the hottest he has ever been in his entire life and spent several innings completely focused on the child directly in front of them, wondering if he was going to puke the chocolate malt he had just inhaled in the 95 degree heat. This was before the groom became painfully aware of his future wife's all compelling fear of vomit. "It was miserable, horribly hot, and she insisted on driving in her new Jeep. There was no top and no air conditioning, it was painful. I did enjoy the game though, Royals won", said Mr. Jack.

To the surprise of many the couple actually married and have stayed happily in that fashion for ten years. The groom, it turns out, does like ice cream and enjoys going out for a scoop or two of Chocolate Malt Supreme on any given day. The bride still does not like ice cream, but is always happy to go along.

Thanks Sweet Lou

From 1969 to 1973 Lou Piniella played for the Kansas City Royals, the very years that I learned to love baseball. Either on the front porch, sitting with my great grandmother in her big red chair, or on the ottoman at my grandfather's feet, I spent hours listening to games on the old transistor radio. So long ago did this love begin that I remember falling, and suffering scraped knees, in the gravel of the parking lot at the old Municipal Stadium, torn down years ago after the Royals moved to their current home, Kaufman Stadium. Lou played almost his entire tenure at Municipal Stadium, where, I suspect, he occasionally rewarded himself for a game well played with a brown paper package of burnt ends from Arthur Bryant's, only blocks away.

Lou was my very favorite baseball player, the one whose name I always listened for crackling out of the old radio. In Denny Matthews' so familiar baseball voice, "Piniella with a line drive to second" sent me bouncing, arms outstretched, straight into my grandfather's lap. Clearly the choice of Piniella, rhymes with vanilla, was not a random pick; when Lou defected to the rival Yankees in 1973 I chose Cookie Rojas as my new favorite Royal. Baseball, as influenced by baking, made perfect sense to a six year old.

Four years ago when the Cubs chose Lou as their new manager I was elated. Now in Chicago, Piniella Vanilla and I would be reunited. Two good years, two dismal years, but I loved watching him storm onto the field, red faced and furious, sometimes appearing confused post game, it was good to be back together again. Baseball is not a business to me, it's history and people and sport. And it's this attitude, as I understand, that will keep the Cubs from ringing and offering me Lou's job. Which is just fine, we've had a good run, Lou and I, and I wish him well. Thanks for the wonderful memories, of both then and now, Mr. Piniella.

Maybe Cookie Rojas is available?