I Still Love the Game of Baseball

<(Houston, Texas) I’ve been in Houston this week for meetings. I really enjoy what I do but as you can imagine, sometimes it can get a little old being on the road and living in hotels. I usually stay at a Hampton Inn or a Holiday Inn Express or something like that. This week I’m staying at a nicer place which happens to sit next door to Minute Maid Park, home of the Houston Astros. Instead of going out to dinner tonight, I joined a group of about 20 of my business associates and attended an Astros game.

I was in hog heaven.

I’ve been a baseball fan since I was a little kid. I remember watching the Game of the Week every Saturday when Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese were the announcers. I became a big time Yankee fan. I can still name their lineup… Moose Skowron (Joe Pepitone later) on first, Bobby Richardson on second, Tony Kubek on short, Clete Boyer on third, Yogi Berra or Elston Howard catching, Roger Maris in right, Micky Mantle in center and Tom Tresh in left. Sometimes Elston Howard or Yogi would play left when the other was catching.

I also collected baseball cards as did all my buddies. Xboxes hadn’t exactly come on the scene yet in those days so we played games with the baseball cards. We would take a few sheets of paper, cut them up into little squares and write the different hits, strikeouts, groundouts, walks etc on the little squares. We would create a baseball scorebook on another sheet of paper and choose teams from the baseball cards. We had it figured out so as to put about 4 times as many outs in the stack of squares and we would hits. We would then develop a batting order from the cards, write those names in the scorebook and the game would begin.

We would be looking at the baseball card of whoever was at bat, call the game as if we were Dizzy or Pee Wee and close our eyes and draw a little square from the basket. The square we drew would be the outcome of the hitter.

We not only learned to appreciate the game of baseball but we learned all about the players. On the back of each card was that player’s statistics for his entire career year by year since he had been a professional baseball player. All my buddies knew all the Batting Averages, Earned Run Averages, Homeruns, RBI’s and any other statistic you could think of for most any player.

We also learned how to score a baseball game. For instance, I know very well that E-6 means an error on the shortstop. I know that F-9 means a fly out to right field. I think I would be qualified to work for any major league team as the official scorer.

I spent a lot of me time as a kid either watching baseball on TV on Saturdays, playing the little games we made up with the baseball cards or playing little league.

Tonight as the Astros played the Reds, I was watching some kids. I figured they were about 10, the same age I was when the Yankees and Dizzy and Pee Wee were on every Saturday. The kids I was watching hardly paid attention to what was going on. I wondered if they even knew the players on the field.

I understand that kids have all kinds of things today that we never even dreamed of having. They have handheld devices, computers, Xboxes, Satellite TV and the list goes on. Certainly they have enough that they would never be interested in playing a made up game with baseball cards. They are way to high tech for that.

I guess they have it made.

Or do they?

I’ll just go ahead and tell you. I will take being a kid in 1964, watching the Yankees on Saturday afternoon, and playing the little games with the baseball cards on Saturday night over Xboxes any day of the week.

I had a wonderful childhood. And sometimes I get the feeling it was more advanced then than it is now.

Maybe I'm wrong.

But I really don't think so.

I know I still love the game of baseball.

And I can't help but wonder if the kids of 2006 love it as much as I do.