Baseball

 The other day my roommate said to me, "I had no idea you were so in to baseball."

Growing up in the Bay Area in the 1980s, baseball felt like an inevitability.  Wasn't everyone this into baseball? It felt like part of the fabric of daily life.  T-ball, Giants games at Candlestick, A's games with Grandma Kate.  Will Clark and the way he wound himself up when he really took it out of a ball, Jose Canseco and his legendary attitude.  The Bash Brothers.  The Battle of the Bay.  My Grandma Kate and my dad had a friendly rivalry as an A's fan and Giant's fan, respectively, and that felt like the only real rivalry in the world, to the point where I barely registered the betrayal when I moved to Los Angeles and started attending Dodgers games.  I remember even after the Giants moved, and I moved, going back to South San Francisco felt special because that was where Candlestick park was, and that was a special place.  

Moving to Indiana in the summer of 1993 meant going to Wrigley for the first time and watching our beloved Giants play the Cubs.  Learning that my dad could also be a Cubs fan, and watching him slowly disown our Giants felt like a parallel story to the one we were living; trading the Bay Area in for the Midwest, learning to see my father as a much more complicated person with desires that might be contrary to my own, or to our family's. 

I remember going to so many minor league games over the summer in Indiana, usually coupled with blues music and barbecue.  The baseball felt like a thin string connecting the past to the present, to some bright future I would have to imagine.  I did not always enjoy these games; triple A ball felt like a cheat, like a trick my dad was using to make things seem normal when they weren't.  It felt like having an off-brand Disney character show up to your birthday party.  But now I look back on those games with fondness, treasuring the idea that you could always see good baseball at great prices if you could find a minor league game.

When I moved to Arcata for college, discovering the Humboldt Crabs felt like a revelation.  It was minor league ball with all of the things I loved, was learning to love as an independent, individuated person.  Cheap tickets, cheap hot dogs and beer, loud local crowds and a rowdy band.  If felt like home on those aluminum bleachers.  The Crabs were an easy symbol of what made Humboldt County feel special to me; the quaint small town feelings wrapped up in hippie-dippie nonsense at a price I could actually afford.

When I started going to Dodgers games, it had been a few years since I'd been to a ball game.  I was responsible for teaching my immigrant husband all about the sport of baseball, why it mattered and how it was played.  He latched on to some of my favorite elements, the camaraderie found between neighbors, the bitter sweet of the overpriced beer, and the thrill of shouting at the great plays and terrible calls.  Dodgers games became part of our Summer tour for visitors, and I watched him teach his little sister about the game a few years later.

Last Friday I went to my first baseball game in 2 years.  I'd watched half of a Crabs game two summers ago, and it had been years before that.  But We got great seats at Oracle park and watched the Cubbies play the Giants in the chill of a San Francisco summer night.  I felt alive.  It felt like it was for me.  After the first few innings I barely paid any attention to Chris, because he didn't seem to care enough about the game and one thing I know from being a sports fan is that you have to care.  It's bad luck not to.  It felt good, like a homecoming.  The city has changed a lot, and I have spent a lot of very different times there under very different circumstances over the years, but it felt like I was where I was supposed to be.  And that's a good feeling.

I guess, in a way, that is my point.  Sometimes that's the way a good baseball game makes you feel.  It makes you feel like you're at home.  I don't get that 'home' feeling a lot, so I treasure it when it floats to the surface.