Do You Remember Baseball?

Do your remember your first Major League Baseball game?  There is something about the events of the San Francisco Giants winning their first World Series that pulls their fans back to the past.  Since November 1^st I’ve heard all sorts of stories about victories, frustrations, heroes and failures of the team and what that meant at the time.

While living in Fort Wayne, Indiana my father and a few of his buddies took their sons to Chicago to see the Giants play the Cubs.  I was only eight years old so my memory is rather hazy about that day. 

 It was August 20^th, 1960, a Saturday day game at Wrigley Field that began at 1:10pm.  We sat on the third base side just past the visitor’s dug out.  The Giants would lose the game 9-5.  With no men on and two outs, Orlando Cepada would hit a home run in the third inning against Chicago’s Moe Drabowski.  The Giant’s pitcher Sam Jones wouldn’t make it out of the fourth inning, giving up 6 runs. Willie May would go 0 for 3, but hit a sacrifice fly to get an RBI.  The game lasted 2 hours and 46 minutes. 

But I was only eight years old so my memory is a little hazy.

In the 1980’s and 90’s while living in Reno and Fresno our sons were young.  We would travel four hours each way on a Saturday to see a game a Candlestick.  The games would rarely have more than 15,000 in attendance.  Our boys insisted on getting there just as the doors opened so they could shag fly balls during bating practice and beg for autographs from the team.  We’d stay until the last out whether it meant freezing in the cold fog of a night game or getting back home at an ungodly hour before I would preach on Sunday.  Each boy would sit on either side of me.   One of my fondest memories is having arms around them both as we watched a game.

I tear up thinking about what such a victory means to the other devoted fans with which I share a life; my 86-year-old father or my dear friend with terminal cancer.   I think of my father-in-law, a San Francisco native dead now 3 years, or my best seminary buddy who died two years ago, with whom I went to many an Angles or Dodgers game (because we had no other choice in Southern California!).   I’d like to think that Don and Bob had the best seats in the house to watch the series up there in heaven!

A World Series victory will bring millions of dollars to the City, the Team and the Players, to be sure.  To the community of supporters, many of them life long, the value of such a title isn’t about dollars at all but the memories of laughter and tears, hopes and defeats shared with kindred spirits and those we love.

It’s about the memories.

It’s about the stories.

It’s amazing how the bitter pain of 1962, 1989 and 2002 just doesn’t seem so bad!