National Pastime has Passed

I remember when I was a kid, as much as I loved the Steelers, I also loved baseball. I grew up watching the Pirates and I was Pirates fan until around 1980 or so when I began to follow the Phillies and Mike Schmidt like my older cousin. My cousins and I would stay overnight at our aunt's and grandmother's house and hold a draft one night and then play numerous hours of wiffle ball the next day updating our drafted player's stats after every at-bat. We lived for that. Who didn't play some form of backyard baseball where the one side of the garage roof was a double and over the crest of the roof was a HR? If the ball went into the grapevine, you had to run it out, but over the grapevine was a dinger. How many hours were spent arguing over whether a ball was fair or foul, high or low, ball or strike? We all had our own "home" fields and everyone in the neighborhood knew the rules for your field. It's not like we didn't play "Bradshaw to Stallworth" as Stallworth was falling out of bounds with two feet barely in.....but we also hit home runs after cranking up our "Willie Stargell" bats or slapped singles after doing the "Joe Morgan chicken wing". We had our acts down for everybody! The Byrd, The Mad Hungarian, George Brett's stance, Rod Carew's stance, Pete Rose's stance....if someone batted left-handed, we had to bat left-handed when they came up. We were dedicated to accuracy if anything. If it rained outside, we played APBA. In my mind at that time, I was football 55% and baseball 45%. It helped those percentages that I played organized baseball and didn't have the physique to play football! Every year around this time we'd be so jacked up about the All-Star game that we couldn't stand it. The All-Star game was HUGE when I was a kid. I'll never forget the game where Dave "The Cobra" Parker threw out 2 AL runners in key situations during the game. I think it was either 1979 or 1980. If memory serves, he threw out Jerry Rice at the plate with Gary Carter doing the catching and another runner at third, but I can't remember the exact situations. It may have been Rice at third...I'll Google it and see what I come up with. Somehow - I think Still A. Dog might be able to remember this better than me as he seems to has a photographic memory for key sporting events. I bet Still A. Wife wishes he could remember to flush the toilet and put the cap on the toothpaste with that kind of regularity! Anyway, the following year, This Week in Baseball with Mel Allen used the Parker throw to the plate in the clips shown with the credits as the show ended to the familiar theme music. I couldn't tell you how many times I hummed that song and pretended I was Parker making that throw. I continued to watch baseball through college where I was the commissioner for our Rotisserie league in 1990. My team was the "Screaming Vikings" which was a Cheers reference. In college me and "Tailgating Big W" used to lay in bed (not together!) and quiz each other on starting 9's from teams of the past if we weren't in the mood to snuggle...I mean sleep. When you collected baseball cards, you knew most players from every team. My joy for baseball peaked somewhere between 1975 and 1990 and I got interested again as the Phillies had a tremendous 1993 season, but after the strike I got so disinterested that I never went back. In fact, since 1993 the only complete games I've seen are the 10 or so games that I've attended - and I probably didn't pay that much attention to the games. I went to see PNC Park 3 times and the Phillie's new park once. The other games were at the Vet and I went with coworkers to hang out, not to watch the games. I used to watch several complete games a week when I was a kid. What happened to baseball? I can't name 20 current players but I can probably name 20 players on the 'Big Red Machine' alone. Baseball lost me and a ton of other people my age. Will it continue to lose people? Who knows. I just know that as the All-Star game approached the past 10-15 years I could care less. Not one lousy bit. I didn't care what the score was or who the starting pitchers were. We used to argue over who the starting pitchers should be. Now, I couldn't even guess 5 players on each side with 100% certainty. Is that sad or what? I could go on forever about this and it's really old news anyway as this could have been written 10 years ago....but long live football. Long live th NFL. Long live the Rooneys and The Steelers. The King is dead. Long live the King.