Opening Day
It’s spring and a semi-youngish man’s thoughts turn to baseball and Opening Day. We capitalize it in Cincinnati because the Reds are to Opening Day what Harry Caray was to the 7th inning stretch. Sadly, the long-held tradition of having the Reds open the season was dismissed a few years ago by those who would slough off tradition in the service of money.
I see that Ken Griffey Jr. isn’t playing and it irritates. Spring training did him in apparently. I struggle to banish negative thoughts - like the fact that surely he’d get injured picking his own nose. And don't get me started on the Red's pitching staff. You've heard of "Spahn and Sain and pray for rain"? For the Reds it's just pray for rain.
Baseball is a sluggish game, delivered at a contemplative pace, so I supplement it with a stroll down memory lane with my baseball card albums. Imagine, I think, at having had the time to worry about how much my ’78 Topps Molitor rookie card was worth? Or better yet, the time in the late 80s spent traveling to baseball card conventions and wandering gape-jawed amid the offerings. For better or worse I seem to have lost the “collector mentality”. I collect books but for utilitarian reasons; any reading copy will do. I don't have any first editions. I haven’t bought a single baseball card since the last baseball strike, but that was just a welcome excuse. For a few years prior I was going through the motions.
But it was nice to re-visit the old cards. I hadn’t looked at them in three or four years and there was a freshness in returning to them. There is Harmon Killebrew again and damned if he doesn’t look sixty years old on his ’69 Topps! Baseball in the ‘70s seemed to span generations. Killebrew didn’t look like a father to his teammates, he looked like a grandfather. Balding with gray hair but only 33 years old, I guess everyone aged more quickly back then. I “killed a brew” in his honor.
I turn to Ferguson Jenkins, who with his sober mien and artistic pitching somehow reminded me of Langston Hughes. But his was no dream deferred, his string of 20-game win seasons was not only a marvel but a source of comfort. The security of changelessness always is, like Pete Rose’s magical array of .300 seasons. These were the saints of the baseball card world. But Dale Murphy lost his halo quickly. There was nothing more shocking than his descent from greatness, from sure HOF’r to solid big-league player. One minute he’s hitting 30 dingers and .280 a year to .220 and 10.
It's sure good to hear baseball Hall of Fame announcer Marty Brennaman again. The native North Carolinian still drops his g’s (“tyin’ run at third”) and I await, cringe at the ready, for his advertisement for a local restaurant in which he pronounces cuisine as “quee-zine”. Some things are timeless.
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