Family and baseball

My family likes baseball. We've flirted with football a little, basketball a little. I like soccer ok and cycling. But baseball is the main sport. This is an odd thing, actually, since none of us played it much. My brother played a year or two of little league. I played intramurals in college and go through batting cage phases. Hard hit balls=people's heads in my weaker moments.

I like going to the ballgame with my mother. At some point she will observe (always with the same sage nod), "home team bats last."

I grew up in Atlanta, home of a really bad baseball team for a number of years. There was one good year in the Dale Murphy/Bob Horner era. But mostly, it was Chief Knockahoma and Princess Winnalotta in the outfield. If I recall correctly Princess Winnalotta was arrested for drunk driving at some point, bringing an end to THAT particular racist mascot. Knockahoma persisted longer.

As the Braves got better, our family collective fandom of them increased. I loved Mark Lemke and Terry Pendleton and the rest of the early 90s Braves. I've never done the chop and never will. It's bad, really bad. I wish they'd stop. Ok? Ok.

By adulthood, I had moved to a broader conception of baseball. I liked going to old Memorial Stadium in Baltimore where really old women with whiskey and cigarette voices talked about Billy Ripken had more heart that Cal Jr. The O's were ok in my eyes, though the whole Ripken thing never did a lot for me. I've only been to Camden Yards once. It was nice, but I missed the thrill I always got when returning to my car at Memorial Stadium and discovering it was still there.

To say that my brother and I are not close would be something of an understatement. I regret that we aren't, I try occasionally to rectify things, and usually fail.

We can talk about baseball. He likes it a lot. We both carried it away from Atlanta.

When I moved to L.A. I couldn't root for the Dodgers. They were in the same league (and for many years, geographically counter-intuitively, the same division as the Braves). When I met my honey, I found a new baseball home. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the O.C., place of her birth, had a team all its own. An American League team. One with a compelling and tragic history like the BoSox but without the operatic hand-wringing that the older cursed teams had. Ok, so Disney owned them for a while and Jackie Autry isn't exactly my kind of person, but the 2002 World Series was one of the great periods in my life. Honey and I even named our 2002 new cat Halo. Sometimes I wonder if I take things from my honey by liking them too. But, that's a topic for another time.

I also developed a baseball aesthetic. I wanted to root for good guys, men of honor and character and intelligence. I read the sports pages and magazines carefully. I became something of a Blue Jays fan because of my admiration of Carlos Delgado. As the Salon sportswriter King Kaufman notes, there a complex calculus to being a fan. If you care, here's my hierarchy in baseball:

Angels
Braves
Blue Jays Orioles

Then there's the Yankees, but I'll save them for another time. Hate isn't pretty, but it is real.

So, I got an e-mail from my brother today asking if I'd like to be in the his fantasy baseball league. I was feeling really warm toward him (and said so in my return e-mail). Then I found this phrase in the e-mail: "All of you are close friends (or family members)." Nice to be in the parenthetical dichotomy, don't you think? I told him I'd do it. But, now I gotta find some National League players who aren't Braves, Nats, Mets, or Cubs (his league's admitted emphasis) to buy and root for. It's hard to work up a lot of enthusiasm for drafting Pirates, or Reds, or Rockies. I'm going to try. I guess I like the Padres ok, maybe some of them are worthwhile. And then, my brother can lose all his money to his parenthetical sister. Go team!