Lives were ruined. Dreams were destroyed.
A few hours spent leering at the car wreck prompted me to grab the remote control. Instead of reveling over D.C.'s drama or fretting about the nation's disintegrating standards, I did the mature thing.
I watched baseball.
The Cubs played the Brewers. I should have been dismayed that the Cubs, a team I love, lost 13-11; instead I felt an instant wave of relief.
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| Jeff Eldridge
Sticks |
Baseball remains the only sport I've ever followed with genuine affection. Few moments in life will match the undiluted joy I knew in the fall of '87, when Frank Tanana capped the regular season with a 1-0 complete-game shutout against the Blue Jays, bringing the Tigers the American League East title.
The game had me hooked. I knew I'd never leave.
The world has been breaking my heart ever since.
But this summer, life got good again, right when baseball was needed most. Pastel-shaded, slow-motion, Roy-Hobbsian fantasies poured over network news and front-page headlines.
Recently, there have been moments when the game has seemed not just inspiring, but, well, downright mythic.
My conversion came during a two-game series between the Tigers and the Cubs. Tiger Stadium surely has seen better times, but for two muggy nights in June, the stands had an echo of grandeur.
Crowds surged to 30,000 - a drop in the bucket at Coors Field or Yankee Stadium, but a major turnout for the hobbled Detroit team.
Better yet, we were drawn by players like Kerry Wood, Sammy Sosa and Bobby Higginson - not by Beanie Babies or free ball caps. When Sosa hit home runs both nights, partisan allegiances dropped, and he fielded ovations comparable to any he'd receive in Chicago. Later, when Matt Anderson made his major league debut, the crowd roared for the highly touted reliever.
The Tigers won both games, but on a certain level, the results didn't matter.
I watch baseball like I read a book; studiously, the field as text, multiple stories playing out simultaneously as I try to take in as many details as possible, and the pleasure of seeing the Cubs and Tigers play each other - the two teams of my adolescence, teams I never expected to go face to face in my lifetime - was enough.
I now feel sheepish for having bashed interleague play.
Someday Tiger Stadium will be laid to rest. I wasn't there in '84 and I wasn't there in '87. But I will be able to say I was there to see Sosa hit two home runs, and I was there when Anderson threw his first pitch in the majors.
It was the highlight of a summer that included several other ventures to Tiger Stadium, my first trip to Wrigley Field and a Mets-Cardinals double-header in sold-out Shea Stadium.
And it goes without saying that the season unfolded before the Homeric backdrop of the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa home run chase, a story heaped with so many superlatives that all comments about it become instant clichés, an apple-pie epic centered in two historic, Midwestern baseball cities. Their gee-whiz humility falls straight out of an old Frank Capra movie; they're a Walt Whitman poem.
Not to mention David Wells's perfect game.
Not to mention the continued brilliance of Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux.
Not to mention the Mets-Cubs wild-card chase.
Not to mention the Yankees' torrential success.
It will still take years to heal the sores of the 1994 strike. No quantity of home runs or Yankee victories will make the owners seem any less greedy, the players any less selfish, or the game any less vulnerable to sophomoric assaults on its traditions.
Baseball is a cruel mistress. Putting my heart back into the game, I know it's only a matter of time before I'm left dejected.
For now, it's good enough to whistle the winter away with the images of the past five months.
Legends were made. Dreams were restored.
God bless the game, forever and ever.
-Jeff Eldridge can be reached over e-mail at jeldridg@umich.edu.
09-17-98
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