In a strange and chaotic world, it’s good to know that some things are reliable as clockwork…like the Atlanta Braves crapping the bed in the playoffs every single time out. For at least the sixth time in a row, the Braves reached the playoffs only to be eliminated in the very first series. It’s like an entire team of Peyton Mannings.
It wasn’t always like that. The Braves went from worst record in the bigs in 1990 to the World Series in 1991, which is about the time I caught onto baseball (aside from a brief flurry of interest in the Mets-Red Sox in 1986; I regret to say I was on the wrong side of that). My late grandfather, who was something of my spirit animal in the latter days of my adolescence, had been a huge baseball fan, and his brother-in-law was as fond of the Braves as he was the Tennessee Volunteers. And it was on a family trip in the summer of 1991 when I caught the bug from him after a couple of nights of watching TBS. And since this was the beginning of my sports fixation, it did no harm at all to latch onto a team whose exploits could be followed effortlessly on television or radio every single night.
And so I rolled with the Braves through back-to-back World Series losses, and through a gripping pennant race in 1993 when they spent the summer chasing the San Francisco Giants (oh, irony). I saw my first major league game, and saw the Giants’ new acquisition Barry Bonds hit a home run so hard I swore the ball disintegrated before my eyes. I watched Birmingham grind to a halt for three days in August as the Braves and Giants battled directly (and the Braves swept, if memory serves) and sweated out the last day of the season as the Braves handily dispatched the Rockies while the hated Dodgers got the better of the Giants. And the Braves won, 104 games to 103. The Braves went to the NLCS to lose to the Phillies. The Giants got nothing.
Then the strike in 1994, then another World Series in 1995, and the Braves won. And at that point, I sort of felt my obligations were discharged, and stopped paying attention. And somewhere in there, I found out that the Seattle Mariners were streaming their games over the Internet, and the latter days of my Vandy career are bound up with memories of late nights with an AM-quality crackle of Dave Niehaus coming out of the PowerMac 6100 between RealPlayer buffering.
It was all American League for a while, to be honest. I met a new girlfriend from Ohio, a huge fan of baseball in general and the Cleveland Indians in particular, and so it happened that my second major league game ever was Game 5 of the 1997 World Series. My baseball affections drifted aimlessly between the Mariners and the Royals before settling lightly on the Red Sox, and my shelves quickly creaked beneath the body of literature surrounding that most star-crossed of franchises. Besides, it seemed like half my crazy Internet friends were Sox fans, so there you go.
And then the Giants happened. First I saw them in 2000 on the same road trip where I first met my future wife in person. Then we took the stadium tour together in March of 2002. Then they went to the World Series, and they were my default team thenceforth. I still pulled for the Red Sox when I noticed them in the postseason, but that was about it – any interest in baseball at the professional level went to the San Francisco Giants. And in 2010 and 2012, it suddenly paid off. It wasn’t the same as when Vandy won the SEC tournament, or would have been had we won the College World Series or the Skins gone to the Super Bowl, but it was still meaningful. Just like 2004, when Game 6 of the ALCS found me fixed on a TV in the laundromat, endlessly repeating “Thousands Are Sailing” on a gold iPod mini as the blood seeped through Curt Schilling’s sock.
And now I have a Vandy pitcher for a local team – Sonny Gray, plying his trade for the Oakland A’s mere yards from the stadium where Festus Ezili plies his trade for the Golden State Warriors. Maybe next year is the year I give equal love to the A’s. Or maybe Detroit calls up some of their many Vandy selections. Or maybe the Giants or Nationals sign David Price in free agency (the Nats arrived after I left, but I still feel a tiny pull there).
But it’s out there. And it’s a welcome bit of autumn to have around when the temperatures steadfastly insist on sticking around 80 of an afternoon and the leaves are taking their time about turning…fall is coming.
Of which more later.