Post a Comment        E-mail To A Friend        Join The List

The Braves Are Coming: Anticipation In Emotion

by Christopher McIntosh
04/05/2006

I should have been a farmer.

Every time his team boots a ground ball, strikes out, or serves up a gopher ball, we hear the same response.

I should have been a farmer.

Granted, as far as movies go, it's not quite Pacino in the Godfather, but Brimley's frustration as the manager of a ball club whose owners are trying to sabotage the season is familiar to those who've seen his performance as Pops in The Natural.

Doesn't matter what I'm doing. The final scene stops me in my tracks. The rest of my world becomes like that MJ commercial where he comes on TV and everything else either slows down or stops. I can even be in another room and just hearing the music gets me going.

Makes me want to head for the diamond (or a place where I can "enjoy" the end of the movie in peace - if you don't know what I'm talking about you either haven't seen the movie, or are the Grinch, George Steinbrenner, or someone else born without a heart)

I should have been a baseball player.

My dad was a player. His brother, too. My uncle on my mother's side was an especially promising young player before a cramp at a Memorial Day beach party cut off something a lot more important than his baseball career. I never got to meet him.

I grew up with the Braves. We lacked cable until I was late into high school. WTBS, channel 17 on your UHF dial, was my lone escape from CBS movies of the week, bad sitcoms, and Full House - a torture my sister subjected me to weekly, then nightly once it hit syndication. Needless to say, we don't speak much any more.

It was also the time that I most remember spending with my grandfather. Newspaper out, late evening sun hitting him on the loveseat, looking over the top to cheer a good play, or, as was more likely at the time, grumble about some mistake.

This was not the Braves we know now. Not the Braves where the word "mistake" is associated with playoff choke jobs, Mark Wohlers fastballs, and Cox leaving a reliever in too long.

These were real mistakes. The kind of mistakes that keep a team mired in the basement of their division. A team so bad that they were somehow housed in the NL West and no one so much as batted an eye. These were the type of mistakes that kept home crowds to a minimum. And by minimum I mean crowds that eventually turned the Expos into a ward of the state. 2300 fans. 3000 fans. Less than a million a year. Don't know how many times I heard Skip Caray make the same joke, "plenty of good seats still available, folks."

Every year the same debate arose. Is this the year we trade Dale Murphy? He's the face of the organization, but what exactly does that get us? A link to the 1982 division crown? I never would have supported it at the time, but there was always a part of me that wondered if it could have somehow made the team relevant prior to 1991.

My team was so bad, that I distinctly remember angrily asking my grandfather, "How in the world, could we trade Doyle Alexander? Who'd we get in return? Who? John Smoltz? Who the **** is he?"

I'm wearing his jersey as we speak. Things change. The future has a way of playing out in ways you can't fathom, taking you around a set of corners that no one back then could have possibly seen around.

I had a chance to play serious baseball when I was a kid. My dad, like all dads, tried his best to get me to play the game "the right way." Eyes on the ball, head down, swing level, no hitch. Uncle, too. And they weren't wrong, nor am I trying to paint some ghoulish caricature or the archetypal overly involved parent living vicariously through their child's exploits. They didn't push me too hard. They just tried to teach me what they knew, which was a lot. Unfortunately, it was a little bit too much to figure out while you're going through puberty, early adolescence, and simultaneously realizing that your parents no longer possess the universal expertise you once thought.

My dad got the call. "Want to play for a traveling team? They got a spot for you, and they like the way you play."

Took me about three minutes to respond.

Nope. I'll take soccer, thank you very much. Baseball's a little too slow for my taste. Lacks creativity, too. If I had the vocabulary I have now I would have - quite ironically as it turned out - said that it lacked aesthetic appeal.

And that was that. I went on to be a fairly successful soccer player and I've never felt like I made the wrong choice.

Yet it still didn't quite add up. I spent the majority of my younger days reading anything I could get my hands on, but mostly I read books about baseball. I knew more about baseball history then I did about anything else in elementary school. I wasn't baseball mad, or baseball crazy, don't get me wrong, I played lots of sports. But I knew a lot about the history of the game, considering what I lacked in applied in-game acumen.

My grandfather came out once to watch me work with my dad and uncle.

It happened once. Once and only once. I remember him standing apart from the rest. His only contribution?

"Let the boy hit."

Enough of the elbows and the stances and swing planes. Just keep it simple. Let him hit. Let him figure out his own way.

After all, we never know where we're going to end up, so why try and fight it so hard.

Name
Email
URL
Body
Are you human?