“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. It reminds us of all that once was good and it could be again.”— Terrance Mann,
“Field of Dreams”
Thirty years ago, on a hot, humid night in Kansas City, I took in my first big-league baseball game.
The Kansas City Royals hosted the New York Yankees in what would be a preview of that year’s American League finals. I don’t remember which team won, but I do remember the nachos. I’d never seen them in Colorado, and to this day I’ve never tasted better.
I also remember that the stars on the field that night surely outshone whatever celestial delights were in the Midwestern sky: George Brett, Frank White, Amos Otis, Reggie Jackson, Graig Nettles, Tommy John, Bucky Dent, Goose Gossage. (Even Yogi Berra was in the dugout as a Yankees coach.)
And I remember waiting outside the stadium afterward to get a glimpse of the faces I’d seen only on bubble gum cards and on the sides of the white plastic Slurpee cups I had saved. Reggie Jackson stopped at the glass doors, took one look at the crowd that had gathered, and turned back. A few moments later, two stadium workers wheeled out a giant laundry cart — big enough to conceal a grown man — and some wiseguy started chanting, “Reg-gie! Reg-gie!”
The details of the game, such as the score, faded quickly. But certain memories from that night are still so thick, as Terrance Mann would say, I had to brush them away from my face last week as my wife and I took our daughters to Coors Field to watch a game between the Rockies and St. Louis Cardinals. It was the first baseball game for our little one, and the fourth or fifth for our oldest. It turned out to be the biggest comeback in Rockies history.
I’d like to be poetic here, and say it was the smell of freshly mowed outfield grass or the crack of the wooden bat that sparked my nostalgia, but instead it was simply watching my girls tear through a giant cinnamon Tornadough, a twisty, doughy confection that neither had ever laid eyes on before. It reminded me of those nachos, and a hot summer night in Kansas City back before ballplayers and contracts were juiced.
Before the game started, the Rockies’ first base coach tossed a ball to my 8-year-old. She beamed.
I pointed out Albert Pujols, one of the best players in the game today, and wondered if, for them, seeing Pujols would someday be like my seeing Reggie Jackson.
It’s amazing how much this child’s game can still captivate us in this increasingly complex and connected world. I guess it’s because each of us finds our own reasons for loving the game.
As I tried to explain some of its nuances, to instill in a new generation a love for our pastime, I was reminded of how much of life there is in baseball. My first editor, Ron Franscell, once wrote a column about how everything he needed to know in life he learned playing Little League baseball.
The overall objective to baseball, after all, is being safe at home. In baseball, as in life, we sometimes see things differently than the guy who has to make the call.
We learn that two hands are better than one, and that everybody gets at least one chance to be a hero. And it’s never good to dig yourself into a hole at home.
On our way home, I asked my daughter about her favorite part of the night. She hesitated. It was either getting that big league baseball or eating that Tornadough.
Tough call, the nacho guy in me says.
Oh, and one final lesson we can learn from baseball: Never give up.
And never, ever, leave a game early. While we had achieved the objective of being safe at home, we missed the greatest comeback in Rockies history.
Editorial page editor Dan Haley can be reached at dhaley@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter at .
