Opening Day (03-30-08)

Tomorrow is opening day for the Kansas City Royals.

I grew up in K.C., living there from six to eighteen. During these years, especially from when my family arrived in1976 to 1985, the Royals were an amazing team, regularly finishing high in the standings, usually making the playoffs, and winning it all in 1985.

These were heady days for the city. Having a perennial champion gave the town a great sense of pride. During my first nine years in Kansas City, we were a baseball town and I was a baseball kid.

I can attribute a lot of my loyalty to both the team and to the sport to my dad. During most of those amazing years, my father purchased season tickets for two seats, and he took turns taking my sisters and I to games. Going to these games were probably the best memories I have of my dad. It was at these games that he taught me much of what I know of baseball, sportsmanship, and life in general.

I can’t explain my fascination with baseball over other sports. Baseball seems to inspire a mad nostalgia. The smell of the leather of the gloves and the ball. The sound the bat makes when the wood makes solid contact. The stunning green of the grass, brown of the freshly raked dirt, white of the chalk baselines, all under high blue skies.

Perhaps it is the slow pace of the game, or the sheer number of games. If you count the month of spring training games, the major league season lasts seven full months, with close to 200 games in all, counting the playoffs and World Series. Add to that the hundred plus years of recorded baseball, and you begin to understand why baseball is referred to as America’s pastime. Growing up, I passed a lot of time watching and playing baseball.

Baseball, more than any other pastime, allows the fans to relax and enjoy the moment. Most of the time I passed watching the Royals was spent in conversation with my dad. I forget the hundreds of conversations I must have had with my father during all of those innings during all of those games. I forget the hundreds of conversations I had with him watching hour after hour of baseball on television. But I turned out okay, so all of that bonding time must have had some positive effect.

After I moved away to college and then away from home entirely, I stopped following the Royals. The Chiefs rose to become the toast of a town I no longer associated myself with expect as a sports fan.

But I still remember the last big league game I attended. It was in the early nineties, and I sat in the left field bleachers with a college friend. The Royals were playing the Seattle Mariners, and the great Ken Griffey Jr. hit a homerun.

But what I remember the most was looking over to the first base side, on the lower level about half way back under the overhang, right where we used to have season tickets. I wondered who was sitting there and if another father/son relationship was being formed.

For many years, I stopped following the team, but began to following the Royals again about the time that Nathan was old enough to swing a plastic bat at a wiffle ball on a tee. Teaching my kids the game has been one of my greatest joys, and over spring break, I took Nathan out and got him a new glove and couple of baseballs. We have been playing catch regularly, and while I can’t take my son to major league ball games, I play catch with him as much as I can.

My son has always been the sort of kid who would rather play sports rather than watch them, but last year he began to take an interest. We have yet to watch an entire game together, but I still hope.

I hope to one day take my family to a Royals’ game. Maybe we will get seats along that good old first base side. Maybe my kids will one day understand why I get so worked up every year come opening day.