The Ride We're All On

An update inspired by Bob Uecker & the Fighting Irish.

We’ll get ‘em next year…

I’ve been incommunicado for a while. The last post I made was to celebrate the Royals clinching their first postseason berth in nearly a decade back in September, and aside from a few sporadic posts tracking their progress over the second half of the season, I haven’t posted regularly since the All-Star Break. If we’re equating publishing to on-base percentage, my stats have been dreadful lately. There were a few reasons for this lack of production, however.

I changed jobs for the first time in nine years in July, and I wasn’t sure how that would affect my writing schedule. But the real reason was I took some time to edit and polish the crime novel, Boris, I wrote during my last hiatus. I have gone over that book so many times I’ve lost track of what draft I’m on, but it’s finally ready to submit. I’m quite proud of it, and hopefully, some publisher will think enough of it that you’ll get to read it eventually.

In fact, I had so much fun writing fiction, I immediately wrote the first draft of another crime novel. I feel good about it too, though it still needs a lot of work. For now, the best thing to do is let it sit and get some distance from it, which is good, because I’m feeling the itch to write about baseball again.

Two things have motivated this change of direction. One, ironically, is a football team. And the other is the recent passing of baseball icon, Bob Uecker. I’ve written about Mr. Uecker before, and I’ve even written about death, so I’m not going to eulogize him here. I’ll get to how he ties into this in a moment, but first I want to talk about the football team.

I came to football and basketball a few years after baseball got its hooks in me, but my introduction to each sport shares some similarities to the latter. I went to my first baseball game in 1985 when I was six years old, and while I didn’t have a great grasp of the sport as a whole, the experience was enough to make me a fan for life. Of course, it didn’t hurt that my hometown team, the Kansas City Royals, won the World Series that year.

In 1988, at the age of nine, I watched Notre Dame beat Michigan on TV. Unfortunately, we didn’t live close enough to South Bend, Indiana for the in-person experience. Raised as an Irish Catholic, I suppose I was predisposed to be a Notre Dame fan, but watching stars like Tony Rice and Rocket Ismail win a dramatic rivalry game on their way to an all-time great undefeated season and national championship cemented my lifelong loyalty.*

*A few months before that ND-Michigan game, Danny and the Miracles did the same thing for me and KU basketball with their Cinderella NCAA tournament run. I know some people will bristle at my divided college sports loyalty, but if you’re old enough to remember the state of college football in Kansas in the late 80’s, I don’t think you can begrudge me the split.

But while I do have some memories from that magical 1988 season, I was still learning the sport and very young, and my experience was far from complete. It was over the seasons that followed that my connection to the team really developed, and while they were a great program, they never won another championship in those formative years when it really mattered the most to me.*

*I’ll spare you my rant on how they were screwed over for the title in 1993. Maybe I’ll write a book about it someday.

Since then, Notre Dame football has had its ups and downs, but it’s never reached the top of the mountain. As a relatively well-adjusted grown-up, I have plenty of things that are more important to me than how a group of eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds I’ll probably never meet perform on Saturdays in the fall, but I’m still a devoted fan.

Football is very different from baseball, but I believe the reason it’s surpassed America’s pastime in popularity is because you only watch your team for one game a week. Each game is an event, and there aren’t nearly as many of them, so they mean more. Don’t get me wrong, I love the marathon that is the MLB season for many reasons, but the importance of each game in football is special.

I try to watch every Notre Dame game with my cousin, another lifelong Irish fan, and we still cling to some of the same dumb superstitions we followed as kids. I know they don’t affect the game, but they’re part of what makes watching fun. I get very into baseball games as well (ask my wife), but the only time I get that wrapped up in a game is when the Royals are in the playoffs.

Fortunately, I got to experience that this season, watching the Royals win their first playoff series in nine years in Baltimore. That was tense, believe me, and then they went to the ALDS against the Yankees, and I got to attend my very first postseason game. (More on that in another post.) It was amazing, especially after such a long dry spell, but that’s football’s secret weapon. Because of the nature of the sport, I can count on that feeling for at least twelve times a season with the Irish, unless they massively underachieve.

This year, they didn’t. They reached the championship game, only to come up short. When it comes to sports, there are two things I’ve wanted most as an adult. A Notre Dame national championship and a Royals World Series title. I experienced the latter in 2015, and hopefully, I’ll get to see at least one more before I die. But I’d trade every championship my teams have won in every non-baseball sport, as awesome as they were, for an ND title. That’s how bad I want it.

I had hoped to write about how the Irish finally accomplished that today, but it wasn’t meant to be. (And just like that, many of you retroactively became Ohio State fans, because that post probably would have been ten-thousand words.) That’s where Bob Uecker comes in, believe it or not.

Like most baseball fans, I was a massive fan of Ueck. I’m not sure anyone embodied a love for the game of baseball and the sense of fun that should always be at the heart of it better than Mr. Baseball himself. Uecker won a World Series as a player for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1964, so he reached the mountaintop, but as anyone familiar with his schtick knows, Uecker was not a great player. But he was an outstanding broadcaster, and that is how he’ll be remembered best.

Uecker was the Milwaukee Brewers’ play-by-play man for fifty-four years, and over the course of five decades, he was the voice for some outstanding Brewers teams. But none of them ever won a championship. Hell, only one of them even made it to the World Series (1982). The poor guy couldn’t even win a fictional championship in the Major League movies! And the last game he ever called was a heartbreaking postseason collapse against the Mets.

None of that ever sucked the joy out of baseball for Uecker though. Even towards the end, with failing health, you could always hear in his voice that he was happy to be at the ballpark, watching the game he loved. I was even lucky enough to make it to a Brewers game in 2023, and hear his call over the speakers in the concourse whenever I made a run to the concession stand.

So that is how I’m approaching both Notre Dame football and the start of my third season of writing Powder Blue Nostalgia. I want to focus on the aspects of the game that bring me joy.* I don’t want to miss out on the fun that is right in front of me at every game because I’m looking down the road at a championship that may or may not be in sight. At the same time, I don’t want to get bogged down in the tiresome and repetitive arguments that always seem to invade baseball discourse, or worry about whether my newsletter is getting enough hits.

*This could be a challenge. I consider myself to be a pretty positive person when it comes to sports, but it’s telling that my post on the beauty of baseball received roughly a third of the views that my post on baseball heartbreak did a week later. Deep down, you all might be more pessimistic than you think. Haha.

Writing Powder Blue Nostalgia has been more rewarding that I can express. I didn’t know if anyone would want to read my unique blend of memoir and baseball history, so the fact that I have a few hundred regular subscribers and even more reading each post is mind-blowing, to be honest. And the fact that I’ve actually been able to connect with some of you is by far the coolest part.

So I hope my absence has made the heart grow fonder, because I’m ready to get back at it. I’ve done the research for a bunch of topics, and now I just need to get busy writing. If all goes well, we’ll be back to regular weekly posts for the foreseeable future.

I promise to focus on the things that matter most, in both baseball and life. Championships are great, and they should be the goal, but this ride we’re all on is more important than the finish line, and it can be a blast if we have our heads screwed on right. Bob Uecker understood that, and I can think of far worse people to model ourselves after than Mr. Baseball.

Remember, whether you’re currently in the first row or the Uecker seats, you’re still in the ballpark.

You might as well have some fun while you’re here.

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Thanks for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. If you’re already a subscriber, I appreciate your support. And if you’re just stopping in, I invite you to subscribe now. This is a great time to jump on the ride. I’m really excited about what’s on tap, and I hope to see you along the way.