PERSONAL ESSAY
Take Me Out to the Ball Game
But only if it’s Baseball
Sports is Sports. I’ve never been a big sports fan. It’s all sportsball to me.
However, if you manage to get hold of my high school yearbook, you might think otherwise.
My friend, Jan and I took photo-bombing to a new level back before photo-bombing was a “thing.” Going to an all-girls parochial school in the late 1970s gave us but few options, but we took them all — options, that is.
We were on the golf team, the tennis team, the softball team, and the volleyball team. It was all there in black and white: photos, names, and everything. So it had to be true.
We were even on both the cheerleading squad AND the marching squad at the same time. Clearly, we both queens at multi-tasking. All it took was showing up at the right photo shoot at the right time and giving the photographer our names. Done deal.
When my father saw my yearbook, he howled. I think I never saw him laugh harder.
I will say, I did like watching boys play baseball. I kind of still do, and I’m not sure why. Maybe the rules are easier for me to understand. Maybe the outfits are cuter (no maybe about it). My town has a feeder team to a Major League Team, so our local baseball team is pretty damn good, and there really seems to be no crying in baseball if you want to get to the major leagues.
And, when the season is ripe, I’m free, and someone asks — I’m almost always down to “root, root, root for the home team.”
“Take Me Out to the Ball Game” is a 1908 Tin Pan Alley song by Jack Northworth and Albert Von Tilzer.
