A Bad Day for Katie

It's a bad day for Katie. The opening of the 2008 Major League Baseball season.

From here on until October, she'll be talking to me over the dulcet tones of Mike Krukow and Duane Keiper (better known as "Kruk and Keip", whose on-air chemistry is that of legend), calling Giants games on the radio. Yes, I'm a baseball dork.

While I eschew all other sports throughout the year, baseball is my vice. There's something undeniably soothing about it, resonating from early in my childhood, when I'd nestle my spherical green radio under my pillow -- (supposedly) hidden from my parents' sight -- listening to Mets games late into the night, well past my bedtime. Tom Seaver was my hero, the greatest pitcher of his day. Dave Kingman was a man of mythical proportions, hitting towering home runs into the depths of Shea Stadium.

I still have a faded, creased photograph of myself at 8 years old, posing with the great Tom Seaver in his back yard ... I'm nearly bursting out of my Cub Scout uniform, the crooked teeth of my smile aimed up at him in pure unadulterated bliss. It's in black and white, but you can fairly see the blushing excitement blasting from my face.

At school, I would hover intently over the Mets' roster with my friends, a tiny finger dancing over the faces of the players -- Mazzilli, Torre, Milner, Stearns, Henderson, Koosman, Foli -- my soft-sided Mets lunchbox sitting by my side, holding my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an apple. When my dad would take me to Shea for a game, the orange seats would pop against the perfect green of the infield grass, mixing with the mesmerizing sounds, sights and smells of what was, for a small child, an absolutely larger-than-life experience. Still to this day, I get that same feeling in my gut when I turn from the concourse, heading down the steps towards the field, and first see that grass, and the players languidly tossing a ball across the infield. Every. Single. Time.

Back in 1977, when I was surreptitiously listening from my bed, the top player made $160,000, not $30,000,000. Until recently, I'd revel in the nostalgia that the players had loyalty back then, they'd stick with their team year after year, and the game really was about the game, and not the money. But in the cold light of mature perspicacity, I now see that really, they didn't. They too followed the necessities of salary, of opportunity and waning skills, as younger players inevitably came up from the minors to supplant them. Ultimately, the majors are a business. It goes where the money is.

What I realize now is that it doesn't matter. For a kid laying in his bed, listening to a broadcast, despite knowing his mother's gonna kill him if he she catches him, none of that matters ... there's just something about the flow of baseball that becomes a quiet fire sluicing through the veins, inevitably becoming part of the very make-up of your being. And every time you get to the ballpark ... every time you hear the crack of the bat ... the commentators giving the count ... or calling a quality out ... it moves through you like an old familiar friend. Katie will surely never fully understand it, but baseball -- the sensation of baseball -- is truly a part of my internal reserve.

I'm certainly not the first to write about the psychic mythology of baseball, nor will I be the last. Because ultimately, baseball holds as personal a mythology as imagination itself.

Play ball.