Being baseball fans runs in our family from generation to generation. How and why we choose our teams varies.
When I was a child, baseball was background noise for growing up. Daddy loved the game – not that he could play it. With a disability in distance perception from birth, anything athletic for him became spectator sport only, but he loved all sports. Baseball filled the air from the radio beginning with spring practice and continuing through the World Series. As a country preacher, Daddy multitasked sermon preparation with listening to the game. Church members, who knew his habits, joked that they expected any Sunday to hear that Moses had hit a home run or Noah had struck out. The New York Yankees were his team, which might seem odd since he spent his life in rural north Mississippi. However, he liked a winning team. In the forties and fifties, as the Yankees won ten World Series, they filled the bill.
My heritage with baseball waxed and waned over the years after becoming mildly involved in Daddy’s obsession as I came of age. My interest peaked when Al’s first Army duty assignment took us to Staten Island in 1963. The nearby start-up New York Mets were managed by the colorful Casey Stengel. Both Casey’s sayings and the ways the team succeeded in losing were strangely entertaining. Casey vacillated between calling them the “Amazin’ Mets” and asking, “Can’t anyone play this here game?” The opposite of Daddy, I loved cheering for the underdog even while they guarded their place in the cellar of the league.
Interest waned when Al got military assignments in Europe with little opportunity to follow the game, and I lost track. Our five-year-old son and I returned to Mississippi to live near my parents when Al went for a year’s assignment in Korea. One day, as I came in their door, Daddy asked me to guess who was likely going to win the National League pennant. I told him I had no idea so he said, “The Mets.” Knowing his predisposition to always be leading into some joke, I asked, “Okay, so what’s the punch line?”
He assured me there was no punch line. The year was 1969. My interest in baseball waxed once more, and I watched the “Miracle Mets” win the pennant and the World Series in their eighth year of existence.
Interest in the game waffled along for a few years until the fall of 1986 when I taught second grade at Fort Polk, Louisiana and the Mets began to live up to Casey’s “Amazin’” label again. I worked in a few word problems for my students with Mets baseball scores, and they began helping me cheer the team to victory.
My principal Mrs. Morgan, an avid Red Sox fan, came to my room on Monday, October 20, as I finished up our morning classroom routines. She said nothing but put two construction paper red socks on my bulletin board. One said “Saturday: Red Sox 1 – Mets 0.” The other said, “Sunday: Red Sox 9 – Mets 3.” My students moaned.
She smiled and went her way. We didn’t see her after Tuesday’s game (Mets 7 – Red Sox 1) or Wednesday’s game (Mets 6 – Red Sox 2). Thursday’s game brought a return the next morning with another red sock “Thursday: Red Sox 4 – Mets 2.” Saturday’s crazy game (10 innings to get to Mets 6 – Red Sox 5) brought us to three and three. Mrs. Morgan came down on Monday and did a few fun word problems with the students using all our statistics and leaving with assurance that her team would win after the rain-delayed game from the previous day. Tuesday morning some excited second graders and their teacher tried to be gracious when the principal came down to eat crow after Monday’s game (Mets 8 – Red Sox 6).
About this same time, WGN Chicago TV became a fixture in our house as our teenaged son became an avid Cubs fan. He fist-bumped to Harry Caray’s “Holy Cow!” and sang along (with better pitch) to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh inning stretch. How long he had to wait for a Cubs win in the World Series is, indeed, another story.