On a glorious day like this, the Mariners’ home opener, there’s always a moment when my thoughts get lost in the sea of color, sounds and aromas of a big-league ballpark.
It might hit me during the National Anthem. Or when the kid runs around the bases before the game and, as the cheers build to a crescendo, finally reaches home plate. Or the standing O that Ken Griffey Jr. will get when he steps into the batter’s box for the first time. Or the quadraphonic murmur of the crowd during a slow time in the game. Or the smells of the pizza, burgers and dogs drifting from the concession stands below.
That’s when I think of things that make me realize how lucky I am to have this job, to be in this ballpark around people I thoroughly enjoy working alongside.
This is my 11th home opener while covering this beat for The Herald. It’s my 55th if you count every opener I’ve been exposed to in this life. I guarantee the radio was on and either Mom or Dad was bouncing their 10-month-old on a knee when the Cardinals took the field in April, 1955.
A day like this serves as a time capsule of life.
It brings back memories of Dad and his transistor tuned to the sometimes staticy signal of KMOX and Harry Caray. calling the Redbirds.
It reminds me of the birth of my son on April 6, 1982, the day baseball season brought the promise of springtime. It snowed that day.
It reminds me of a few years later, after we’d moved to Seattle, bringing that little boy to the Kingdome for the Mariners’ home opener. I forget the year, but never the moment when Brian Downing of the Angels hit a first-inning home run into the left-field seats, near where we were sitting. In perhaps the greatest statement ever made about Mariners pitching, my son immediately put on the catcher’s mask he’d brought to the ballpark.
It reminds me of my first opener on this beat in 1999, and how terribly nervous I was even though I’d been covering sports on a daily basis since high school for newspapers from Rolla, Mo., to Springfield, Mo., to Denver to Seattle.
It reminds me of the phone calls with Dad, who loved talking about the Cardinals, even after the Alzheimer’s had robbed him the ability to discuss much anything else at length.
Sadly, it also reminds me of the phone call I got last April, this time with Mom on the other end, saying he was gone. You think crazy things at a time like that, but one memory that stands out is how thankful I was that he had made it to opening day.
Everybody needs to experience that.
At some point today — maybe when all the players are lined up before the game, maybe during the seventh-inning stretch, or maybe amid the relative calm of a pitching change — it will hit me again.
There’s nothing like the sights, the sounds and the smells of a big-league ballpark to make time stand still just like it was 1955 or 1982 or 2008 again.
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