FOR the first time since 1977, I've watched a couple of baseball games all the way through. Like a lot of baseball idiots, I was pulled into the fold by Mark McGwire's home-run fest. Big Mac makes
baseball a
hum dingerI've always been jealous of baseball fans. Especially the ones who have followed baseball for so long they can get into long, esoteric conversations about the sport, punctuated by arcane statistics, like the lifetime bunting average of every third baseman under 5-foot-6. The rest of us only manage to recognize baseball's major historical signposts, like, Babe Ruth hit more home runs than any fat guy alive at the time.
I was always a bit suspicious of a sport who's biggest star was shaped like a eggplant. Babe ran bases like he was slogging through 3 feet of water and he looked like he might stop at second base for a cigarette break. On the other hand, here was a guy who could stay up all night with with booze and babes and still get out there and knock a little leather-bound ball several hundred feet through the air. The man was an inspiration.
But in order to really get into baseball, you have to know individual players and team rivalries. It's the drama of these matchups that counteract the severe boredom of watching a pitcher and batter slug it out while 16 other fellas scratch themselves and spit tobacco.
It seemed to me the only way to develop this team loyalty was to live in the general jurisdiction of where professional baseball was played, within the sphere of influence, so to speak, of a particular ball club. As a military brat, I moved constantly. And it seemed that one of the criteria for setting up a fully functioning Air Force base was to put it as far away as possible from any city with a baseball team. So, while other 5-year-old boys were using their spongelike fertile brains to memorize the names of players, I was in Northern Africa trying to figure out which insects were likely to eat a child on the way to school.
By the time I was in college, all I knew about baseball was that Koufax was not an office machine and the Drysdale of baseball was -- I was fairly sure -- not the same banker Drysdale on the Beverly Hillbillies.
At my first newspaper job in Wheeling, W.Va., I met a staff member who boasted that her father had box seats at Pittsburgh's Three River Stadium. When my face failed to reflect the appropriate amazement, she realized she was talking to a baseball idiot. She allowed me to tag along with her and other staffers anyway to an actual baseball game between the Pirates and a team from Texas I believe were called the Houston Astroids. But don't hold me to that.
I knew I was really out of the baseball loop when the entire league apparently went on strike and I didn't notice. The strike ended and I didn't notice that either. I take it, however, there was some residual resentment by fans about the strike that Mark McGwire finally has laid to rest with his home-run extravaganza.
I can't tell you how happy that makes me, because I'm not sure how happy that does make me.
All I know is that McGwire's gravitational field became so large that, like a lot of other baseball idiots, I have been sucked into baseball's orbit. I have watched two complete games. Including commercials.
I am learning heaps of baseball lingo, like "dinger" and "IRS butthead." Dinger means home run. "IRS butthead" refers to the jerk from the Internal Revenue Service who tried to say that anyone who catches one of Mc-Gwire's home run balls and gives it back to him instead of selling it to some St. Louis car dealer may be subject to thousands of dollars in taxes.
I may be a baseball idiot, but even I could see that was stupid. Luckily, the IRS realized the statement was foul and retracted it.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to charley@nomayo.com or
71224.113@compuserve.com.
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