It’s not often I attend baseball games anymore, primarily because my eyesight has deteriorated to the point that it’s impossible to tell a pop-up from a warning-track blast, never mind seeing who’s at bat by looking at the Jumbotron, which is a colorful blur. I’ve worn glasses since I was a 16-year-old (didn’t bother with contact lenses, although putting the specs in a pocket while at parties was crucial, I thought, to eliminate a four-eyes appearance), but as a fan for 65 years who’s seen over 1000 games live at 22 different stadiums—many defunct, like the Polo Grounds, Connie Mack Stadium, Candlestick Park, Shea Stadium, Memorial Stadium and the original Yankee Stadium—it’s a crummy sign of age. There are worse infirmities that people my age suffer, so don’t cry for me Ceddanne Rafaela, and even if the on-field play’s a squinting-won’t-help rosin bag of confusion, the atmosphere at a ballpark is still thrilling. You get the gist of the game from chatting with section neighbors, and the banter about MLB’s “old days” as well as the current standings, is plenty to keep me going.
Last Friday night, I was invited by a longtime friend (I’ve known RW since 1989, when we both lived in New York, and he read, and enjoyed my MUGGER column in New York Press, as well as working with two my brothers at a financial firm) to the Orioles/Red Sox game at Camden Yards. RW, who’s a baseball encyclopedia, is as devoted to the Yankees as I am to the Sox, but he also owns a sliver of the Orioles, which affords him many perks.
It took me almost an hour to get to the park from our North Baltimore home—usually 20 minutes, but roadblocks for the next day’s Charm City Live festival downtown, gummed up the Uber ride. Anyway, I met RW at the Truist Club—a “luxury” section of Camden Yards behind home plate that seats 350, many of them eating dinner instead of watching the game, which strikes me as odd; there are few great restaurants in Baltimore, but surely it’s easier to dine at the Prime Rib with no parking hassles—five minutes before the first pitch and in time for an unfortunate rendering of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by a local singer. She did belt out the lyrics with admirable gusto, but her voice cracked repeatedly, and not like Merry Clayton on the Stones’ still-explosive “Gimme Shelter” (a song undiminished by the number of times it’s in a movie, mostly by Martin Scorsese) not just for Clayton, but also Jagger’s lead vocal and Keith Richards’ unforgettable opening guitar riff. When my brother Gary and I bought Let It Bleed at the end of November in 1969, we looked at each other in awed silence as “Gimme Shelter,” the opening track, played.
On June 24th, when the can’t-hit Sox were 14 games under .500, a season already lost, I couldn’t imagine caring about a Sept. 4th game against the O’s, never mind attending, but in the weirdest Boston season in my lifetime, they got drenched in voodoo and now are poised to make the playoffs, with a 48-19 record since that lowpoint. No small happenstance for this fan: it was a highlight of the summer.
The Sox swept the rudderless Orioles last weekend, mainly due to pitching, but it was the Friday night game that was the most tense (for me, not my friends there) and typical of their season. On the second pitch of the game, journeyman Mickey Gasper (a Sox force this year; in five years he’ll be a trivia question) took the O’s very good Shane Baz deep and that was the extent of the scoring in a 1-0 win.
There was a faux-brawl in the eighth inning which none of us could understand—turned out it was over a supposedly dirty slide—but we did see all the players run towards second base, and, as usual, the bullpens emptied, as if those players were necessary in this charade. I doubt there are many old-timers like RW and me who didn’t relish the real fights (especially in Sox-Yankees games) in the 1970s, but in the modern game when opponents laugh with each other on the field, that’s not allowed.
I watched every pitch Ranger Suarez threw to O’s hitters with trepidation, and was tempted to tell RW’s son to clam up with the boisterous catcalls, but manners prevented that kind of bad sportsmanship. I stayed until Aroldis Chapman dispatched the O’s in the ninth, thanked my host, and made a beeline for the exit, anxious to get home. It wasn’t easy! The Truist Club was in an unfamiliar location, and I walked for blocks trying to find Pratt St. for an Uber pick-up, lost in a maze of departing fans, bright lights in this small (and shrinking ) city and vendors unloading at half-price their pennants and bags of peanuts.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023