Eye On the Ball

Last night, I was at a theater event at a bar. The Rays/Red Sox playoff game was on. I couldn't have helped it if my attention wandered to the screen every time there was a cheer or deep-voiced "Yeah!" Of course, I couldn't tell exactly what was happening on the screen... but that's what chatty, slightly drunk company is for.

I grew up watching baseball. My grandfather was a Yankee fan before they had started winning championships, and I like to toss that pedigree out to assure people that my family jumped on the bandwagon before they had paved the road. As a kid, I went to games once in a while and rooted for the team, but my obsession with the Yankees (and, by extension, all things sports) began when I was twelve. This happened to coincide with my blindness fully setting in, so that reading books had gone from unusually easy to frustratingly difficult at best. Luckily, I had a couple of commentators/ on the radio keep me entertained.

I look at Sterling and Kay, the play-by-play team at the time, as my gateway drug to sports radio. From their surprisingly erudite conversations as they described the games, I found myself hungry for more and more discussion of sports. I lived and died by the outcomes of Yankee games, and I simultaneously became a repository for all knowledge of baseball, football, basketball, and hockey that I could acquire. I found something to talk about at lunch with my friends in high school. I also developed some fascinating superstitions about my activities during the day, and how they might affect the Yankees' chances in the playoffs. October would routinely see my sleep decline.

I'm happy to say that I no longer ride that particular roller coaster. The Series of , when the Yankees had a few post-9/11 dramatic victories before ultimately losing, gave me a pretty good cap to ten years of baseball fanaticism. I do still love to go to games, where I depend on the radio to tell me what the heck is going on. (The ball looks pretty small from the upper deck.) As a teenager, I would spend my entire night at the ballpark glued to my Walkman, not wanting to miss a single moment of (generally useless) commentary. Now, as a "grown-up," sometimes I have the radio off during the game. Being at the park with friends or family, and experiencing the atmosphere of the stadium, now outranks actually knowing where the ball is.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to take off my cap, place it over my heart, and have a moment of silence for Yankee Stadium. No one needed 20/20 vision to see the beauty of that place.