Thank God, it's baseball season

Roman is ready. I am ready. Red is ready to taste orange Gatorade for the first time. (from Aug 2010)

I'll admit. I was not and never have been a part of the Communist party. I have also never been a life-long, gung-ho baseball fan.

As most brainwashing--err--fandom starts, it starts young. My youth was introduced to baseball as many 6-10 year-olds trot onto a little league field. But my distaste started when I was positioned in right field. Now, if you are playing any outfield position on the 5-6 year-old team, that basically means you have zero hand-eye coordination to prevent a baseball from hitting you in the face. If there was a baseball card for my stats, it would include zero errors (due to zero balls driven past the infield dirt) and a few HBP from other dads (during coach-pitch ball). I better served the team and the league pulling weeds from the outfield. Hey, keeping up those fields was a team effort.

I stuck it out for two years, if you can call it that. It's wasn't my finest hour quitting "the great game". But it just wasn't my bag. I was going to take my talents to PE and score a Presidential Physical Education award by being a prepubescent gym rat (amazing that it's still around today). Two days a week of dodge ball, two days a week of some goofy volleyball hybrid that wasn't volleyball and one mean game of wall ball a week with pull-ups, push-ups and wind sprints in between. So, I was essentially giving an underdeveloped middle finger to baseball.

So, aside from stealing glances at my older brother's and younger brother's baseball card collection, I had a limited engagement with baseball aside from the annual "hey, you wanna go to an Astros game?" conundrum. Pre-strike, it wasn't so bad when they played at the Astrodome. But later, well after the strike, it was a beating to drive to "downtown" Houston to watch lethargic NL Central baseball. Also, they play in a venue with the dimensions of a little league field, with a "berm" in center field. Ha! Enron Field.

So, to recap, the high school and college time frame was nearly absent of any baseball conscientiousness. Which is sad.

Then, I roll up into Dallas. If there is one thing Dallas is starved for is a champion in the 00's. The town was spoiled in the early nineties with the Cowboys as all of the teams got better and better. The Stars won the friggin' Cup in '99 while half the fans didn't know what a blue line was. Hell, even the Mavericks showed up as a NBA team of reckoning. Then there were the Rangers...the lowly, lowly Rangers.

They are still paying ARod (he was still a financial consideration during the sale of the Rangers in 2010). They had a dysfunctional series of owners and team management that somehow looked better after they ruined a baseball team. It was literally an ugly stepchild that was stowed away in the back upstairs bedroom when dinner guests arrived. During the Hicks stewardship, there were Dallasites disowning the Rangers like a daughter marrying the wrong guy.

But then something happened...to me and to the fine folks of North Texas (and likewise the remote Ranger fans that have been long suffering). The Rangers started winning. Within all of the turmoil of the team sale and the skeletons in the closet coming out, the Rangers were playing solid baseball under the radar. Their June and July of the 2010 season was so torrid, they locked up the division as early as in previous years they were eliminated from any playoff contention. The DFW area was talking about significant baseball in August as opposed to following the circus of Cowboy training camp. It was a complete mental shift that no one was prepared for but was totally prepared for.

And I was sucked in. I was caught in the vacuum of awesomeness that reignited the reason why I wanted to play little league baseball in the first place...because baseball is exactly what you need when you need it.

I wanted to be part of a new town. I needed a common thread. A baseball team that had absolutely nothing to lose brought a town and a region together every damn day they took the field. Downtown was a hub with the traveling fans and the hometown revelry that brought everyone together, including me. I fell in love with the story. It was a rag-tag bunch with a survivor of addiction, a statesman of the game, a kid primed for greatness and a traveler that showed up at the right time. They were all meshed with a modern-day zen master that isn't the perfect zen master, but a zen master of the passion that found him.

C'mon, at that point, who wouldn't fall in love.

So, the Rangers are back. The configuration and the love affair might be different and matured, but it's still there. And just like I needed it to facilitate the geo-social identity, I need it again today. My mind is everywhere. This has been one hell of a month and a more-intense past two weeks. Sometimes you need to see how an inning is built or falls apart to get away from things that are falling and constructing in your life. Sometimes watching the challenge of pitcher and batter puts your challenges in perspective. Sometimes you need a break. And as much complaining there is of the 162-game schedule, for my mental and physical health, I am certainly glad it is there. To boot, it's another cool thing Dad and I can talk about. So, the love affair is back. And it doesn't matter about balls and strikes, it's about the escape that is sometimes desperately needed.

So, go Rangers. Yay, baseball. And Yankees suck. Welcome back, past time.

Lessons Learned, my three things.
1) So, that's how it happened, huh? Okay, then.
2) That's a pretty creative name, Longhorn Network. Did you think of it 15 seconds ago?
3) If you don't know how to convert your time zone from GMT, "I bid you no points and may God have mercy on your soul".

So, now that one fixture has been re-established, there seems to be a new-coming fixture that is close to installation. More on that next week. Until then, talk later.