It's mid-March. Which is when the greatest yearly sports event takes place--March Madness. The greatest sports event is the World Cup, but every four years? Sigh.
Despite the fast-paced, messy, winner-takes-all, upset-heavy characteristics of the college basketball tournament, the long crisp days of spring mean something else to me: baseball season is about to begin.
My history with baseball goes back to when I was a little kid, 6 or so. My mom was on a softball team and I used to play with the children of other parents while the adults practiced on the field. My dad bought me a left handed glove so I could play catch, too. I remember I took it to school and my bully told me I threw weird. He said I threw with the wrong hand. I was upset, I don't remember whether we already had the elastic pitchback, or whether this was the impetus for getting it, but I spent hours practicing until I could throw, and then hit, righty. For many years later I was ambidextrous, but then I ended up playing all sports righty.
Somewhere around this time my brother started working as a vendor at the SF Giants and Oakland A's home games. He sold hot dogs for a $1.50, Drumsticks for $1.25, and even joined in on the vendor Olympics one year tossing peanuts. My mom and I used to go to the games. She'd buy a program and keep score, while I would look for my working brother through binoculars and contemplate which one snack I'd get that day. I was only allowed one per game. That went on for years, even after my brother went to college (he was 8 years older than me), he would return to vending each summer and I would return to my spot in the crowd collecting plastic baseball caps that held my hot fudge sundaes and begging the giveaway woman to give me the Mark McGuire figurine and not the Jose Canseco one. The love affair with Mark McGuire would later end in heartache, but under age 10 I was purely enamored.
I joined a baseball team when I was 11. It was an all boys league, besides myself that is. All the other girls my age played softball. I didn't wanna play softball. That was not what Mark McGuire played, or Carney Lansford, or Dennis Eckersley, or Ricky Henderson. Why should I throw differently and use a different ball just because I was a girl. I wasn't the best player on the team, but I also wasn't the worst. I was a platoon player, but often played third base. My career in baseball only lasted a year. I always said that it was because when the boys moved to the 12-13 range, they threw way too fast and it terrified me to have a ball hurdled at my body that fast. The truth was that this year coincided with the biggest trajectory change of my life. I didn't just stop playing on the baseball league, I stopped playing basketball, and my favorite, soccer, as well.
Age 11 was when I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. I didn't get it then, but I get it now--my whole world changed. My sister always said she thought I would have gotten a sports scholarship to college. I was almost as good at horse and my brother and two male cousins (the only basketball game where height didn't matter), and I was well on my way to be 5' 10" or 6' tall. But I stopped growing at age 12, a mixture of steroid use (not the type my sports idol was taking) and malabsorption. By the end of 7th grade I was hospitalized for a month and had my first surgery to remove 100cm of small intestine.
Fast forward to age 16 and my junior year of highschool. I only had one year of remission after my first surgery and things had tailspinned again. I survived my first few years of high school on a cocktail of fever reducers, nausea calmers, and painkillers, until taking the cocktail every four hours wasn't good enough. At the end of the first half of my junior year I couldn't keep food down and my 5'6" frame body was closer to 100 pounds rather than 130 that the doctors informed me it should be. I spent the next 5 months on bed rest and received home-schooling. The nutritionist gave me a sheet that she handed out to over-weight children. It explained what NOT to eat. She said eat everything on the list.
And I remained like that until April. The only reason I know the month is because my first outing out of the house, besides to the doctor's office for weekly weigh-ins, was to an A's game. There was not much I had the energy to do when I was that sick. Even having my eyes open felt like a lot of energy for my brain. I started reading the SF Chronicle's sports section, though. I started following spring training. I listened to Bill King and Ken Korach call games at the Cactus League. And so when I felt like I was ready to get out of bed for something other than a visit to Children's hospital, I asked my dad to take me to an A's game.
In his truck on the way to the Stadium, I couldn't keep my eyes open. It was too exhausting to see the other cars moving so fast on the freeway. I know he was worried that he was enabling me to do to much, we were taking it too fast. But we went. I don't remember the walk to the stadium. We really should have gotten a handicap placard when I was sick, but I was too proud and I didn't have a visible disease, unless you count being pale as a blood-sucker and emaciated like a zombie. I thought people would judge me for using a handicap spot. A worry not unfounded in reality.
I might not remember the walk up to the stadium, but I do remember the walk inside the stadium. I walked extremely slowly because I was constantly out of breath. I didn't think I could manage the stairs to our seats on the second deck. Slow and steady, my dad said. It was like the whole stadium was quiet and in the distance. It was just me versus the mountain of evenly spaced out concrete blocks. After we found our seats I didn't get up until the game was over. On his way back from getting sodas and hot dogs my dad's back was facing the field as he walked up the stairs. He missed the grand slam which led to the A's victory.
It was the beginning of the Billy Beane era. Just a year later this team would carry Miguel Tejada and Jason Giambi to the first A's post-season in seven years, the first in a longer time that didn't include McGuire. It was the beginning of my serious love affair with Oakland baseball, a relationship that hasn't wavered since. My idolization moved from a power hitter to three young starting pitchers; my favorite an intense small guy full of southern charm. It was baseball that got me through my rocky return to high school and through an even rockier experience in college. It's what kept me up until 4am when later in life I found myself streaming the A's post-season on my computer while living in the UK.
I can see why other people don't love baseball as much as I do. College basketball, for example, is a thrill ride from start to finish in a way that the pitch-by-pitch never will be. For me, though, spring will always mean a rebirth and the beginning to long summer days filled with baseball.
Despite the fast-paced, messy, winner-takes-all, upset-heavy characteristics of the college basketball tournament, the long crisp days of spring mean something else to me: baseball season is about to begin.
My history with baseball goes back to when I was a little kid, 6 or so. My mom was on a softball team and I used to play with the children of other parents while the adults practiced on the field. My dad bought me a left handed glove so I could play catch, too. I remember I took it to school and my bully told me I threw weird. He said I threw with the wrong hand. I was upset, I don't remember whether we already had the elastic pitchback, or whether this was the impetus for getting it, but I spent hours practicing until I could throw, and then hit, righty. For many years later I was ambidextrous, but then I ended up playing all sports righty.
Somewhere around this time my brother started working as a vendor at the SF Giants and Oakland A's home games. He sold hot dogs for a $1.50, Drumsticks for $1.25, and even joined in on the vendor Olympics one year tossing peanuts. My mom and I used to go to the games. She'd buy a program and keep score, while I would look for my working brother through binoculars and contemplate which one snack I'd get that day. I was only allowed one per game. That went on for years, even after my brother went to college (he was 8 years older than me), he would return to vending each summer and I would return to my spot in the crowd collecting plastic baseball caps that held my hot fudge sundaes and begging the giveaway woman to give me the Mark McGuire figurine and not the Jose Canseco one. The love affair with Mark McGuire would later end in heartache, but under age 10 I was purely enamored.
I joined a baseball team when I was 11. It was an all boys league, besides myself that is. All the other girls my age played softball. I didn't wanna play softball. That was not what Mark McGuire played, or Carney Lansford, or Dennis Eckersley, or Ricky Henderson. Why should I throw differently and use a different ball just because I was a girl. I wasn't the best player on the team, but I also wasn't the worst. I was a platoon player, but often played third base. My career in baseball only lasted a year. I always said that it was because when the boys moved to the 12-13 range, they threw way too fast and it terrified me to have a ball hurdled at my body that fast. The truth was that this year coincided with the biggest trajectory change of my life. I didn't just stop playing on the baseball league, I stopped playing basketball, and my favorite, soccer, as well.
Age 11 was when I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. I didn't get it then, but I get it now--my whole world changed. My sister always said she thought I would have gotten a sports scholarship to college. I was almost as good at horse and my brother and two male cousins (the only basketball game where height didn't matter), and I was well on my way to be 5' 10" or 6' tall. But I stopped growing at age 12, a mixture of steroid use (not the type my sports idol was taking) and malabsorption. By the end of 7th grade I was hospitalized for a month and had my first surgery to remove 100cm of small intestine.
Fast forward to age 16 and my junior year of highschool. I only had one year of remission after my first surgery and things had tailspinned again. I survived my first few years of high school on a cocktail of fever reducers, nausea calmers, and painkillers, until taking the cocktail every four hours wasn't good enough. At the end of the first half of my junior year I couldn't keep food down and my 5'6" frame body was closer to 100 pounds rather than 130 that the doctors informed me it should be. I spent the next 5 months on bed rest and received home-schooling. The nutritionist gave me a sheet that she handed out to over-weight children. It explained what NOT to eat. She said eat everything on the list.
And I remained like that until April. The only reason I know the month is because my first outing out of the house, besides to the doctor's office for weekly weigh-ins, was to an A's game. There was not much I had the energy to do when I was that sick. Even having my eyes open felt like a lot of energy for my brain. I started reading the SF Chronicle's sports section, though. I started following spring training. I listened to Bill King and Ken Korach call games at the Cactus League. And so when I felt like I was ready to get out of bed for something other than a visit to Children's hospital, I asked my dad to take me to an A's game.
In his truck on the way to the Stadium, I couldn't keep my eyes open. It was too exhausting to see the other cars moving so fast on the freeway. I know he was worried that he was enabling me to do to much, we were taking it too fast. But we went. I don't remember the walk to the stadium. We really should have gotten a handicap placard when I was sick, but I was too proud and I didn't have a visible disease, unless you count being pale as a blood-sucker and emaciated like a zombie. I thought people would judge me for using a handicap spot. A worry not unfounded in reality.
I might not remember the walk up to the stadium, but I do remember the walk inside the stadium. I walked extremely slowly because I was constantly out of breath. I didn't think I could manage the stairs to our seats on the second deck. Slow and steady, my dad said. It was like the whole stadium was quiet and in the distance. It was just me versus the mountain of evenly spaced out concrete blocks. After we found our seats I didn't get up until the game was over. On his way back from getting sodas and hot dogs my dad's back was facing the field as he walked up the stairs. He missed the grand slam which led to the A's victory.
It was the beginning of the Billy Beane era. Just a year later this team would carry Miguel Tejada and Jason Giambi to the first A's post-season in seven years, the first in a longer time that didn't include McGuire. It was the beginning of my serious love affair with Oakland baseball, a relationship that hasn't wavered since. My idolization moved from a power hitter to three young starting pitchers; my favorite an intense small guy full of southern charm. It was baseball that got me through my rocky return to high school and through an even rockier experience in college. It's what kept me up until 4am when later in life I found myself streaming the A's post-season on my computer while living in the UK.
I can see why other people don't love baseball as much as I do. College basketball, for example, is a thrill ride from start to finish in a way that the pitch-by-pitch never will be. For me, though, spring will always mean a rebirth and the beginning to long summer days filled with baseball.
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