My Top Five Baseball Moments - Number Five

These lazy days of summer when I enjoy just sitting in the stands with a dog and a beer and watching baseball - doesn't really matter who is playing - makes me think of my long life with baseball, starting from when I was a kid and going all the way to now when I am a much older kid. Watching the T-Ball kids run the bases with baseball legends looking on and hearing things like Andy's son saying that it was the best day of his life reminds me of all the wonderful things baseball has done for me over the years. I decided that in this uncertain time for sports where allegations of criminal activites seem to be surfacing about different stars every day, that it might be nice instead to dwell on the things that attracted us to the sport in the first place.

So here is my Number Five greatest Baseball moment in the countdown of my top five...

The competition for the five spot was rather exciting since there are many great, great moments from my life, but I decided ultimately to be completely representative and include at least one where I wasn't just a participant but an active competitor. The runner up to this story might very well be the time when video game baseball first came out and my Dad and I plugged about $20 in quarters into a machine in Las Vegas so that we could play a full 9 innings of head to head video game baseball, but that's not real athletic so I'll skip directly to my story.

It was my senior year in High School and though at the time I didn't realize it, I was somewhat of a jock. (To be fair, nerds and geeks never get labelled jocks even if they have more athletic accomplishments than most other jocks). As the end of the school year approached, my swimming coach/cross country coach decided to have a picnic for the athletes on his teams. We gathered after school outside the gym and ate hot dogs and hamburgers and what not while I made the rounds and spoke to all the members of the two teams. I was one of those guys that had friends in all strata of school hierarchies.

After eating about five hot dogs (I was skinnier than a rail back then) my coach suggested that we get a game of baseball going and selected me and one of the jocks as coaches. Now, while I did have more athletic points and higher accomplishments than any of the jocks on the team, I was considered an outsider by them. Basically, we got along, but we didn't like each other. So when it came time to pick teams, it was about four or five picks in before we both realized that the jock team was loaded with athletic talent and the geek team was not. I had naturally taken all the people I liked (the girls, the lesser athletes, the people who were nice, not good at sports, per se) and the jock captain had done the same - selecting all of the top athletes in the school. After that, I purposefully selected all those players that I knew the jocks would never select and he purposefully selected only the athletes. On paper, and in most opinions, we were going to get crushed. The jocks even appealed to our Swim coach to re-do the selections to make the teams more fair. But before he answered, I said, boldly, "I don't want any other team. I like the team I have. And, we're going to win." My Swim coach looked doubtful but he agreed not to interfere.

My team was a little less than enthusiastic. In fact, according to them we were going to be completely destroyed by the jock team. Half the guys on their side had actually played for the high school baseball team. But I told them not to worry, to have fun, and to just play to the best of their ability.

To make a long story short, we absolutely crushed the jock team. We had nothing to play for. Our pride wasn't on the line. We weren't expected to win. So we just relaxed, hit, ran, caught, pitched like it was a pick up game of baseball at an after school picnic. They, on the other hand, had to prove that they were better than us - being the athletes and all - and as we started to dominate them, they fell apart and started ripping on each other and each tried to become the star of the game. The I's got crushed by the We's. The final score was something like 16-4. I don't think we hit a single homerun. I'm fairly certain that every hit was a single. In one inning, we batted around twice.

I always remember this whenever anyone says, "That's why we play the game." There is more to the game of baseball than raw talent. Like golf, there is a humbleness that must be maintained for a player to reach the lofty and truly great heights of a superstar. As Jordan's commercial so eloquently pointed out, we fail more often that we succeed - but we keeping coming back for more. On this particular day, David beat Goliath because David was confident and loose. Almost 20 years later, that same combination of confidence and looseness finally brought a world series title to Boston after a long drought.

Baseball might not be everyone's life, but it is mine. Its ebb and flow marks my seasons and its highs and lows form my backdrop. If there is a more perfect game, I have yet to find it.