Dreamy Day Revives His Faith in the National Pastime

The verdicts are in. The crisis is over. Forgive me for recalling a semi-idyllic day in that tense week.

If you follow baseball, you may have been at Dodger Stadium last Tuesday for the season opener against the St. Louis Cardinals. If not, you may have read the results in the sports pages: St. Louis won 9-7 when an overeager fan gloved a three-run homer that Darryl Strawberry might have caught.

Mike Downey called him a blockhead; rightly, I thought. But revisionist thinking says the guy was blameless. The ball was in the stands. OK, but why would a grown man take a glove to a game, like a kid? To catch a souvenir? To protect himself? To be a hero? Whatever, it cost us the game.

Otherwise it was a dreamy day--a day that revived my belief in baseball as the great national sport, despite recent signs that the game is faltering.

It is hard, for one thing, to reconcile the idea of “the boys of summer” with the fact that those boys loping about so gracefully on the field are mostly millionaires--plus. Also, the league’s quality is being lowered by the addition of two new teams and may be further lowered by two more. Like the rest of our society, baseball seems to have been taken over by greed.

But one forgot these dark shadows as the first pitch smacked into the catcher’s mitt and the game was on. The players were as beautiful as ever. Their fielding was nothing less than sheer ballet, with muscle.

Before the game there was the usual opening day pageantry and ceremony. A jazz band played “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and other old favorites; a massive band of high school musicians marched out on the field to blow the little guys away; 200 Little Leaguers lined up in uniform around the base lines--the boys of the future.

Grammy-winner Ruth Brown sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Her treatment of the old English barroom song was measured and passionate. The Stars and Stripes and the Bear Flag flew at half staff in memory of the two Cleveland pitchers killed in a boating accident. A flight of pigeons was released to swoop over the field and away.

The day was beautiful. Transparent white clouds hung over the stadium. Beyond the green hills and trees of Elysian Park a denim fringe of mountains showed. The field was a vibrant green. Denise and I had come with our son Curt and our grandson Trevor, using Curt’s box seats above the third-base line.

When the game started, hundreds of empty seats--red, blue, orange and yellow--showed in the four tiers. But by the third inning the house was almost full. The final head count was 53,529.

Strawberry was cheered and booed when he came to bat in the second inning. He grounded out to deep third.

The Dodgers didn’t get off to a great start. Kevin Gross, the starting pitcher, was yanked in the third inning after giving up five runs, six hits and four walks. Fortunately, my wife and I were occupied with our Dodger dogs in the third inning and weren’t acutely aware of the apparent disaster.

In the fourth inning, Tim Wallach doubled to score Strawberry and Eric Karros. One could hardly expect less of Wallach, whose salary is $3.4 million.

Incredibly, the Dodgers tied it up in the fifth inning at 5-5, and went ahead 7-5 in the sixth. At crucial points in this comeback, the fans screamed and banged their feet rhythmically on the deck-- rap, rap, RAP--rap, rap, RAP . ( At such times we are all reduced to cavemen.) The Dodger organist repeatedly played Charge! to inspire these surging emotions.

In the seventh inning, I saw Roger the peanut vendor in the aisle to the south of us--about 30 feet away. Roger may have the best arm in baseball. I signaled with three fingers and Roger threw us three bags--one to Trevor, who caught it, one to Curt, who caught it, and one to my wife. She reached up to catch it but, fearing she would drop it, I stuck my hand up in front of hers. I dropped it. “You blew it!” Roger yelled. “ She would have caught it.” It was my error.

We thought we had the game won in the seventh when, leading 7-5, Gerald Perry, a Cardinal pinch-hitter, with two runners on base, banged one into the right field corner, just over the three-foot wall. Left fielder Strawberry not only kept his eye on the ball, running to the corner, but banged into the wall and went half into the stands, as a $3.8-million player ought to do. But the fan reached out and stole the ball, and there went the ballgame.

There was only one good thing about that play. It took the heat off me for dropping the peanuts.