Baseball Tidbits
It's the little things that make life (and baseball) great.
If you really think about it, baseball is pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things. You wouldn’t know it by the way we talk about it sometimes, but it’s just a game. Sure, it’s always a lot more fun when you win— or at least, when the team we root for wins, since few of us will ever actually play pro baseball. I always make the joke during March Madness that it’s time for me to get way too worked up over how well a group of 18-22-year-old kids can throw a ball through a circle. The same is true of baseball, more or less, albeit with a wider age range.
Most of us probably don’t get as stressed out over all 162 games as we do during the NCAA Tournament, but if you’re the kind of person reading a baseball history newsletter, chances are the ups and downs of your favorite team has a bigger effect on your mood for six months out of the year than you’d like to admit.
We wring our hands over things like unreliable bullpens and slumps. We pay as much attention to the health of starting pitchers as that of friends and family. The same kind of butterflies we used to get in our stomachs before we asked out the girl we had crush on arrive in twice the force before a playoff game. Arguments over who belongs in the Hall of Fame grow heated, and if they’re happening online, people really lose themselves and turn vicious. I suspect such conversations are generally more civil in person, but that doesn’t mean some of them don’t end with one of the participants getting punched in the nose.
This gets to me sometimes. Occasionally, I think I should be writing about something more meaningful. (Whether I have anything relevant to say about life’s most consequential bits, is open for debate.) I mean, I’ve lived a relatively full life up to this point. I’ve fallen in love, experienced fatherhood, traveled, lost people I loved, fallen into hard times, and pulled myself out of them. Those are what the greatest stories are about, and I should be leaving behind a record of my perspective on them.
Here's the thing though. I have been doing that. Looking back at the Powder Blue Nostalgia archive, I can see that baseball encapsulates all those things. Sure, some articles in this newsletter are more light-hearted than others, and others go into greater depth, but it’s never been about copying box scores for me. In addition to telling the stories of the players and teams I grew up watching, I’ve to attempted chronicle them through my own experiences. And even though baseball is just a kids’ game, if you love it and embrace it, it really does connect to everything that matters. People who don’t watch sports will never understand that, but it’s true.
Having said all that, I do want to remind us all that baseball is just a game. It’s supposed to be enjoyable and entertaining. There are bigger issues in the world than a losing streak. A disagreement over the validity of Barry Bonds’ accomplishments is not grounds for a fistfight. And rivalries are great, but just because you’re a Red Sox fan, you shouldn’t really hate Yankees’ fans. Trash talk all you like, but know where to draw the line.
With that in mind, I want to talk about some of the little things that make baseball fun. These might seem mundane to some fans, and they may vary widely for all of us, but these minor details add so much to the game, and more often than not, they’re the things we really cherish— not box scores or even wins and losses.
The first thing that comes to mind for me is hats. Obviously, hats are essential to any baseball uniform, but they’re also one of the easiest ways to showcase our loyalties and a sense of style. And the two don’t have to go hand-in-hand. I have a couple of Royals hats, but my collection extends far beyond that. My Expos hat is a prized possession, and over the last two summers, I’ve supplemented my collection with Brewers and Cubs hats purchased from their respective ballparks.
I don’t even wear hats that much anymore. I only have a short window after I get my yearly haircut where a hat will fit comfortably on my head, but it’s still the first place I go whenever I step into a sports apparel store. After reading my powder blue uniform rankings, my wife concluded uniforms are how guys care about fashion. I wouldn’t say that’s true of every guy, but I admit that while I’m severely challenged when it comes to fashion in the real world, I am serious about my sports uniforms.
I even have a favorite hat that I sometimes think of longingly. It was a Minnesota Twins hat I picked up for five dollars off the Walmart bargain rack when I was in middle school. I’ve never been a Twins fan and I have no idea what it was doing in a Walmart in Kansas, but it was the most comfortable hat I’ve ever worn. I wore it everywhere, including to Oklahoma to help my aunt and uncle move.
One of their friends was a guy named Colin, who was trying way too hard to be cool for the visiting middle schoolers. My cousin and I called him Super Colon Blow, inspired by the SNL sketch, because he was impossible to take seriously. The first time he saw me in the hat, he said, “Brew Crew fan, huh?” Before I could correct him, he did that thing with his thumb and pinky that surfers do and said, “Totally tubular!” That was the extent of my interactions with the guy, but he’s burned into my memory because of his connection to the hat.
I’m not much a collector these days, but I suppose hats qualify as a kind of collectible. My collection isn’t very extensive though. Part of me would love to be one of those guys who goes all-in on collecting something, and when you go into their house it’s almost like a museum devoted to their hobby. I guess I’ve never found that one thing to trigger that sort of passion in me.
I collected baseball cards when I was a kid, and I was fairly serious about it then. I’ve written a little about the card shop in the town I grew up in, and I bought the new issue of Beckett every month, but I never had the kind of expendable wealth to build a serious collection, and my timing was all wrong anyway. My aunt constantly told us to take good care of our cards because they’d be worth something someday— all while constantly complaining about how my grandma threw out her Mickey Mantle card— but it didn’t matter. The card companies saturated the market to such a degree that even all these years later, the cards are barely worth the price of the paper they’re printed on.
Maybe if I’d gotten some of them autographed that might have made a difference. I never really understood the whole autograph thing though. Nothing against it. It was just never my thing, although I have relented a bit in the last year. In addition to scoring Dennis Leonard’s autograph at Kauffman Stadium, I was able to meet Willie Wilson, one of my all-time favorite players. Not only did I get to show him Powder Blue Nostalgia and the articles I’d written about him, but I also got him to sign a ball from my very first game in 1985. The ball’s value has always been sentimental, but I have long considered it one of my personal treasures, and Wilson’s autograph elevated it that much more. It is prominently displayed on my bookshelf at home.
This leads me to my next subject, the stadiums themselves. I’ve been going to the K for nearly forty years now, and there’s something special about each visit. I suppose I might be jaded if I’d gotten to go more often, but as a kid, it was a once a year event. (Maybe twice, if we were lucky.) I do go more often as an adult, but this has not diminished the ballpark. The K is my happy place.
I love almost everything about it. The iconic CrownVision scoreboard looming over centerfield. The fountains set it apart from every other ballpark, and not only do they provide a spectacular visual, but it’s also nice to feel a cool mist drifting over your seats if you’re sitting in the outfield on a hot day. No other ballpark can offer that.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve tried to visit as many other ballparks as possible on our travels in recent years, and hopefully I’ll knock out more in the years to come. They all have their charms. I’m quite partial to Coors Field, and Wrigley Field was an almost religious experience for a baseball history nerd like myself. Even though my instinct is to withhold praise for anything related to the St. Louis Cardinals, I enjoyed Busch Stadium and this last summer we caught a game in Milwaukee. Heck, I even like going to minor league parks and my son’s little league field. I don’t even have to be there to appreciate it. I could look at pictures of the Polo Grounds with its giant Chesterfield Cigarettes display for hours on end.
Compared to other sports venues, which tend to have a great deal of uniformity, baseball stadiums revel in their architectural individuality. This worries me as the Royals take steps to leave Kauffman behind. Even if they find a way to incorporate the CrownVision and fountains, the new place will never be the same as Kauffman, and no stadium will ever be my stadium in the same way as the K. I suppose I should do my best to appreciate it while I still can and take solace in the knowledge that certain elements of the stadium experience are universal.
Take the food, for example. Yes, every ballpark has its own unique dishes celebrating each particular city’s identity. Oftentimes, these items verge on the ridiculous. Sometimes they pass right over that line and keep going. But no matter where you go, you can count on finding certain staples. And as long as you can buy an overpriced souvenir cup, a hot dog, nachos, funnel cakes, and ice cream served in a mini-baseball helmet, you can be assured of a good time.
And perhaps that is baseball’s magic in a nutshell. I think we can all agree, with the possible exception of my lactose-intolerant readers, that ice cream makes everything better. Baseball, on the other hand, is so great that it actually makes ice cream better.
Thanks for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. What are some of your favorite little things about baseball?
Worth a couple of chuckles and a laugh. "Totally Tubular" and your reaction was priceless! Hope I can get to the K in the next couple of years. Have a great week Patrick!