Falling in love with baseball

I went to a really, really small high school in a very remote part of Michigan. Somewhere out in the middle of the lower peninsula where there’s just nothing else around. We had a total of three stop lights, and we had to drive at least 45 minutes to get to a movie theater. And the mall? That was a day long excursion. My high school had something like 450–500 students in it when I was there (I graduated with just over 120 people). We moved there when I was 10, in 1992. Prior to that, we had lived about 45 minutes north of the Detroit area. It was living there that I experienced my first in person baseball game.

This was probably in the summer of 1990, but to be honest, I don’t remember for sure. I do know that my fascination with baseball had already taken hold when I set foot in Tiger Stadium the first time, and probably because of Kirk Gibson. I’m a sucker for dramatic underdog stories, and his improbable home run in the 1988 World Series is probably what did it. I was 6 then, and just old enough to appreciate what I was seeing. So, a lot of it was Gibson, but a lot of it was also that first jumbo pack of 1989 Topps baseball cards the following summer. Either way, I was in love with the sport more than I would ever be with any other sport (this remains true today) long before my Dad took me to my first major league game.

Tiger Stadium was grand and intimidating at the time (I had dreams about the walkways to the upper deck for a long time afterward), and now it’s just mostly an empty lot — I have resolved to visit the Navin Field Crew one of these summers — but back then, I had never seen something so big, grass so green, or so many people in one place. It was terrifying and wonderful.

I don’t remember a lot of the details of that first game, just that the Yankees were in town, someone spilled their beer on me, and I got an autograph on my Little League hat that I left on the bus on the way home. I was less concerned about losing the autograph at the time than I was about losing my hat and not remembering who the player had been. I was 8, so all the value in an autograph really came from the fact that an actual Major League Baseball player had ventured near enough to the stands that I could ask.

Since those early trips to Tiger Stadium when I was 8 and 9 years old, I ended up a Cubs fan. When we eventually moved three hours north, trips to Tigers games weren’t really an option anymore. The Cubs became my team simply because that’s who was on TV. Them and the Braves. I used to love the Braves, too, but something about the Cubs took a hold of me really early on. Maybe because they were on TV in the afternoon those summers, maybe because Wrigley Field looked so different, but probably because even back then, I knew they were an underdog, and I’ve always loved rooting for the improbable.