THE BOYS OF SUMMER.

     I went to a triple A baseball game a couple Saturdays ago. After a year of limiting my social contacts to a few people, I was eager to be part of a crowd. A small crowd, as it turned out, but a crowd none-the-less.

     It has been the better part of a lifetime since I've attended a baseball game. And then only a handful of times. Once in the mid-to-late 50s, my family went to a Portland Beavers baseball game. In the early 1970s I went to a few Portland Mavericks games. I have written about that time. Later, in the early 2000s, I had a girlfriend who was passionate about baseball. She had an autographed picture of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers in her breakfast nook. She offered to take my two kids and I to a Beavers game, we went but my kids had no interest. Neither of them had ever shown an interest in sports, though Quinn did crew as an undergraduate. They chose the academic path for their lives. I chose to encourage that. I met a guy in a bar in November of 2019 who was a fan of the Portland Pickles. I was looking forward to attending a game the following spring,, but Covid 19 locked down the nation and I did not get to go.

     There's something about baseball that no other sport has, a zeitgeist. I'm talking about smallball, not MLB. The movie Bull Durham captures a part of that, as well as having a snappy and hilarious script and a pretty good romance. Rare as my attendence was, there was always that memory of the green outfield, the dirt infield, with the grass around the pitchers mound,  and the anticipation of the umpire yelling, "play ball".

     I was a failure at little league, barely competant at pee-wees. I was an awkward kid, big for my age. My proud father, a Yankees fan in those days, took me to a sporting goods store in Salem, he bought me a Jimmy Piersol glove and I selected a great bat with Hank Aaron's name on the barrel. I had chosen a too-heavy bat; I wanted to hit the long ball, Mickey Mantle style. Consequently I was often the victim of the opposing teams pitchers. There was one, a lanky 11 year-old kid with red hair. I could see his freckles from home plate but couldn't hit his pitch. He could throw a tepid fastball past me before I could get my wrists around. His best throw might have been described as, heavily populated neighborhood speed. I wasn't a bad fielder, had a pretty accurate throw, but I couldn't buy a base hit. So I went out for other sports. None of them had the fascinating history of minor league promoters and impressario's. From the Negro Leagues that gave Major League Baseball some of its most iconic players, to Bill Veek, the promoter that sent a midget to bat when the ump was letting the strike zone grow. Bing Russell was such a promoter. A "B-movie" actor who was so much greater as an actor than Ronald Reagan, and a baseball promoter who modeled Bill Veek openly. He grew up shagging baseballs for the Grapefruit league in Florida. The Yankees practiced not far from where he grew up. Among his many stories were tales of meeting Lou Gherig, Mantle, Maris, Ford, Bill Skowrun, and so many more. He purchased the baseball franchise from the Portland Beavers when they left town for Nevada, then brought an unaffiliated single-A team, filled with misfits to Portland in 1972. He had sell-out games the entire time he was in Portland. The fans loved the bearded, long-haired crew of characters .  But not refusing to be affiliated with a major league team and beating those teams deciseively made him the target of  MLB owners who did their best to to screw him out of his contract. They offered him $25,000 for the franchise. They ended up paying him $250,000. This is baseball that involves the bleachers. It is baseball the inspires the kids to wear their uniforms to the games and to bring their gloves should a foul ball bounce around the bleachers nearby. It is also baseball where an errant foul ball over the backstop could possibly land on a car in the parking lot. Funny, a foul ball is by definition errant.

     The big day arrived, Terry and I drove to Volcanoes Stadium, just north of a shopping center whose connecting streets were designed by someone who had no doubt started their career designing Skinner's box. We parked near the front gate, just over an hour before game time. Parking spaces were plentiful. When the gates opened we walked into the stadium and found our seats. We were joined by a few dozen fans. That number would steadily increase until game-time, by which time maybe a hundred to two hundred fans were socially distanced in the seats. Opening ceremonies involved a line-up of young players getting their baseballs or mitts signed by the teams, a pee-wee player was chosen to throw out the first pitch, and of course the food offerings at the park. It was an occasion when the liquefied spinach and kale drinks of a sensible older person was left for another day. I chose a "Killer Keilbasa" a large fat-conveyance on a too-small hot-dog bun. Naturally I washed it down with a beer, the selection of which had improved since the last time I attended a game. It didn't matter who won the game. It didn't even matter that the grease from the Kielbasa would keep me up most of the night. What mattered was that we were in a small crowd of people. What mattered was that it was a warm spring evening and the sounds of a wooden bat connecting with the pitch could be heard above the public address system, and all of the memories of summers past, when I was younger were filling my consciousness. Once more, I was that 9 year-old kid still hopeful of hitting that red-headed kid with the freckles best pitch over the wall.