Opening Day 2018

There's a buzz in the air, the fountains are flowing blue, the Truman Sports Complex parking is full of tailgaters and hardly anyone in the city is working this afternoon because we're all celebrating the return of our Boys in Blue.

Sad, minor side note:  The season couldn't have started much worse, with a 44 degree day bringing a 14-7 loss and news of Salvy going on the 6 week DL.

There are two things to get excited about for this upcoming season:
1) I  will still get chills when I see the World Championship banner flying in the outfield
2) The team will be so bad this year that I'll be able to find $5 tickets by July

Today is the perfect day to remind everyone of Terence's line in Field of Dreams:
"The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball.  America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers.  It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again.  But baseball has marked the time.  This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray.  It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again.  Oh people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come."

And if you would rather hear the actual voice of James Earl Jones, rather than just hear it in your head (as I do), then you can click here.

I've heard it said that as men get older, their interest in football wanes and their interest in baseball grows.  I don't know whether that's true of all male sports fans, but that's definitely been true of me.  I didn't even follow baseball till my first summer in KC, the summer after my sophomore year, when I finally began to understand the everyday enjoyment of the sport which includes the pleasure of having the play-by-play in the background on a beautiful summer evening and how the pop of the ball hitting the catcher's glove on an AM radio is the perfect soundtrack to summer.  By the pennant race of 2003, I was being sucked in but I wasn't fully hooked, however till I began to understand the numbers of baseball.  I owe my fairly recent appreciation of the nerdy side of baseball to Rany Jazayerli and his no longer active blog, Rany on the Royals.  With the exception of the postseason, baseball is a game of consistency and patience while football is a game of short and intense bursts of emotion.

My last  year of playing baseball was the summer before the first fall in which I was old enough to play middle school tackle football.  I was never coordinated enough to be good at baseball but I was just strong enough to earn a small football scholarship to a small university.  I think that I needed to put my horrible little league career behind me before I could fully embrace the sport as an adult fan.  To put it another way, I had to make peace with being a sucky baseball player as a kid before I could become a serious baseball fan as an adult.

To reference another idea I've heard but whose source I can't recall, sports exist to create a natural and easy bonding between father and son.  Of course, the most likely reason sports exist is for gambling on the outcomes, but I digress...  I can certainly attest to that in my own life.  I've been able to bond with both my dad and my son over Hawkeye and Royals games.  Though more over Hawk games with my dad and more over Royals games with my son, who once told me, "Dad, I was born in KC,  you were born in Iowa, so I'm a Royals fan, not a Hawkeye fan."  I believe that idea could be expanded however, to include bonding between friends.  Some of my best memories and most profound conversations have occurred during game watch parties, pre-game tailgates and (most importantly) road trips to sporting venues across the country.  In fact, several years ago, a high school friend sent me a note thanking me for sharing Christ with him during our sophomore year.  That conversation happened, naturally, on the drive home from an Iowa basketball game (a miserable loss to Northwestern, if I remember correctly, which I likely do). 

Of course, that's the main theme of Field of Dreams, the relationship (or lack thereof) between a father and son.  I'm glad that my relationship with my dad and my son doesn't revolve completely around sports, but I'm glad a shared love of sports has enhanced our respective relationships. I can honestly say, though that without a shared love of sports, I'm not as close to some of my closest friends as I actually am.

With that in mind, I'm going to share some of my favorite  Opening Day memories along with my favorite baseball pictures.

2004:  Despite having standing room only tickets, the day started and ended perfectly.  A group of close friends used my portable grill for tailgating before the game and convinced me to not leave in the 8th inning, when the Royals were down 8-1 to the Sox.  A miracle rally, which was capped off by a walk-off homerun, resulted in us jumping around hysterically in the concourse behind the 1st base line.  I jumped so hysterically, in fact, that I gave myself a deep bone bruise on my knee, making it hard to bend said knee for about two months.  I'd never been so glad to be a Fed Ex driver, rather than a UPS driver, as UPS trucks are sticks and FedEx trucks are automatic.

2009:  I was offered an Opening Day ticket by a dear man in the church I was pastoring at the time, for whom I had recently preached his wife's funeral.  The day was cold and the Royals were spanked by the Yankees, but it was a wonderful time of helping a dear friend through his grief while not actually mentioning his unmentionably sudden loss.  I believe there was a lot of grace passing between us that day.

2014:  This Opening Day I decided to embrace what most Parisians could tell just by glancing at me, no matter how hard I tried to mask it by sporting a man purse and scarves, that I'm an unfashionable American who feels most comfortable wearing jeans and a sports t-shirt.  This was actually the first day of the two weeks my parents came to visit us and as I was leading them into Saint Chapelle, a fellow KC native saw my shirt and called out, "Go Royals." I'll never forget that one, how the buzz of Opening Day can extend even to another country, at least among American tourists.

The formatting on this blog site is so complicated that I'm not even gonna try to put this in chronological order.

"Celebrating" the extra inning, WS clinching win against the Mets in November, 2015

Celebrating the World Title with hundreds of thousands of other Kansas Citians

Godbrothers at The K

Kids Day at The K, May 2015

Dad and enjoying a game on Father's Day, 2016

A great night in the Southside of Chicago

Dawson's first trip to The K, June 2011.  I felt kinda guilty trying to teach him to like a team as bad as the Royals, circa 2011

Royals at White Sox, June 2016

Catching a game where the Royals had clinched the WS the previous year.  Notice Dawson has on the WS Champs shirt while I decided to stick with the much safer, Hawkeye shirt, as we'd attended a Hawkeye game at Rutgers earlier in the day.

Enjoying the divisional race, June 2017

A baseball camp with Royals HOFer, Frank White

Hanging with my childhood hero, The Wizard of Oz

Royals at Cardinals, August 2017

Quite possibly the best weekend ever, June 2012

Watching the MLB internet stream of the hearbreak that was game 7 of the 14 WS the morning after it actually happened, Busingen, Germany.  My yells when Gordon tied it up scared Dawson and I might've cried two tears when Perez fouled out to end the game.

San Francisco, May 2013 with the biggest baseball nerds and one of the best people I know

Royals at Twins, June 2015

June 2017

July 14, catching a game during our time between France and Germany

One of my all-time favorite pics

When your close friend of several decades visits from CA, you have to go to The K with him and his boys