MIKE BURKE
Allegany Communications Sports
We went to the ballgame in Baltimore yesterday. Why? Why not?
It’s baseball, stupid.
It’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards, the best ballpark ever (after Memorial Stadium), and it’s going to be a lot different from here on out; so we wanted to check it out one last time as we’ve known it for the last 33 years.
On top of that, since college, we’ve always tried to catch the final home game in Baltimore, for if nothing else, it gives us an afternoon in Bawlmer, hon, and ain’t the beer cold!
The beer was cold, and it didn’t even rain. That’s because Baltimore is not a hellhole. Baltimore has sunshine on a cloudy day.
The Orioles finished it up with a stirring come-from-behind walk-off victory to send the small, but hardy assemblage of diehards home happy, even if there will be no postseason to follow.
It was all so bittersweet, as the final home game usually is, for even when our team is in the playoffs, a melancholy surrounds us when the 162-game season comes to a close.
The baseball fan, you see, whether his or her favorite team is in the playoffs or not, is never ready for the day-to-day of baseball to be over, because, to us, baseball is forever.
We never want the season to end because even bad baseball is better than no baseball, or, as Orioles fans re-discovered this season, injury-riddled baseball is better than no baseball.
Sadly, it won’t be long from now, when the postseason is complete and November comes, the nights will be barren, carrying with them the grim reality of the saddest words ever – No game today.
The stability of knowing there is a game every day and every night and being able to count on it, then adjusting your entire day and night around the first pitch provides great comfort, whether you are attending the game, watching it on TV or listening to it on the radio.
As Baseball Hall of Fame writer Thomas Boswell said in Ken Burns’ “Baseball” documentary, “(Baseball is) one of those forms of gentle poetry that runs through our lives and makes the more important issues of living bearable. You have to have moments that give you pleasure with your children or your hobbies or your games. Life can’t all be big issues and heart surgery. Something has to bring joy into the day.”
A friend of mine, while overcoming health issues last year when the Orioles were entering the playoffs, said, “I’m very excited about the postseason but also very sad about the regular season ending … Baseball has always been my happy place, and that’s been even more true since my diagnosis. I love regular-season baseball. It’s like a friend who’s always there for you.”
Boswell said, “I’ve always thought that the six months during the baseball season there was something in the day that wasn’t there the other six months in winter. It was not that you had to listen to the game, but that you could if you needed it.”
Many of us need it.
As Earl Weaver once told Boswell himself in the dugout just prior to the first pitch, “This ain’t football, kid. We do this every day.”
Many of us need it every day.
That’s because baseball is every day. Baseball is something new every day. Baseball is something new every game. You see things that continue to provide you with wonder and goose bumps, no matter how long you’ve been a baseball fan and no matter how late into a lost season that moment may occur.
The baseball season, you see, is not unlike the experience of a high school class reunion. As it approaches, you’re filled with great anticipation. Then it arrives and lives up to and often exceeds your expectations, and in the wink of a young (or old) girl’s eye, it’s over; and once the so longs and the we’ll stay in touches have been said and the final tastes are savored, you miss it.
Almost as soon as it’s over, you miss it – your class reunion, your classmates and the people and things you hold dear to your heart. And that’s how it is with the day-to-day of baseball.
It’s the companionship. It’s the companionship of those and what you are familiar with and what you love that you never look forward to missing. It’s the familiar voices. It’s the company that lives in the heart of all that defines who and what we are.
In “The Green Fields of the Mind,” A. Bartlett Giamatti wrote, “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”
The chill rains have come, but we’ll keep watching for as long as we can, because, really, what else better is there to do?
As Art Hill wrote, “With those who don’t give a damn about baseball, I can only sympathize. I do not resent them. I am even willing to concede that many of them are physically clean, good to their mothers and in favor of world peace. But while the game is on, I can’t think of anything to say to them.”
It should be a wild final weekend of this regular season; and then, it’s good night, 162.
Rest easy. Thank you for our summer afternoons and evenings.
We’ll miss you.
See you in the spring.
Mike Burke writes about sports and other stuff for Allegany Communications. He began covering sports for the Prince George’s Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in 1984, serving as sports editor for over 30 years. Contact him at [email protected]. Follow him on X @MikeBurkeMDT