A family trip to Cincinnati was punctuated with a trip to see Reds game. Their relatively new stadium is a wonderful place to see a baseball game on a spring afternoon. On the plus side: parking was easy an hour before the first pitch. Entrance was eased by plenty of security and ticket scanners. Large-bore kielbasa at the food concession with outboard, individually wrapped packages of kraut. To top it off, we never missed more than a single at-bat of play for food, drink or bathroom excursions. Everything flowed together (Ohio stories require river references) to make it an outstanding game day experience.
One of my less-secret goals in life is to visit every Major League Baseball stadium, to sample their food and comment on the sight lines and respect their new or old histories by refusing to use corporate names when referring to a field of play. Our Reds seats (acquired through Stubhub a week before the game) left us in the second row of the left field bleacher balcony, with a view fit for the day. “Great” and “American” are perfect compound adjectives for baseball, but I’ll refrain from adding them to the stadium moniker to invoke an insurance company by name. Deep down, it’s still an echo of Riverfront Stadium, home to the Red Machine of the 1970s to me, which is what set the stage for the afternoon’s game. Like visitingPNC Park last year, there was a childhood memory waiting for me inside the gates.
I can trace my childhood love of baseball to October 11, 1972; a month to the day from attaining double digits in age and three years precisely before my Bar Mitzvah. As I sat on the floor with my twin friends Scott and Glenn, watching our favorite Pittsburgh Pirates play the Big Red Machine in the National League Championship Series, Game 5, bottom of the ninth, tie score, George Foster on 3rd base with Bucs reliever Bob Moose on the mound. Moose threw a wild pitch, Foster scored to win the game for Cincinnati and I saw my friends’ mother cry. It is one of the most amazingly trivial pieces of knowledge I carry around, yet for 80% of my life it’s been one I can recall as the moment at which I correlated sports with something I felt, not just something I watched or a champion for whom I cheered. It was easy to get caught up in the Miracle Mets of 1969 or Joe Namath and his Jets; it was hard to watch WIllie Stargell, my childhood hero and number-sake, lose one that literally slipped away.
Stepping into the Reds’ ballpark, I wondered if visiting an echo of an event 36 years prior might somehow bring closure. It would be the equivalent of forgiving the girl in your 5th grade class that tortured you over a ridiculously colorful pair of pants, without admitting that you’re secretly happy her life turned into the equivalent of the Reds in the last decade and a half. Like an old Masters’ canvas, though, the answer comes not from recoloring the past but from applying fresh paint over the old to create something of recent memory.
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Enter Ken Griffey Jr. On the east coast we have little incentive to follow him, although his pursuit of 600 career home runs has made the occasional breakfast time SportsCenter appearance. Center field in the Reds’ park has a home run counter, tantalizingly set at 598 dings when we arrived. In Griffey’s first at-bat, he deposited a 3-1 pitch into the right field bleachers, igniting fire works in the stands and above the running total. Each inning, each play, became a game of front-running to determine a sequence of hits and base running to bring Junior to the plate, giving us a chance to be first-hand witnesses to history. For a game in which my main interest was sampling the hot sausages, the baseball mattered more.
For anyone who doubts there is redemption through baseball; that family memories can be intertwined with a sport in which the names of players, teams and stadiums change literally with the seasons, I offer this: leaving Cincinnati this morning, my son found his game ticket in his pocket and said “Have to keep that one, #599″. No matter where the paper stub ends up, he’ll keep that one.