Where's My Baseball!!!!

On the bookcase facing my desk there is a shaped glass piece with dirt in it from Fenway Park, 2004.  That was a piece of merchandise celebrating the Red Sox championship that year, their first in 86 years.  It was a gift from someone who thought I'd like it, and they were right.

There are two baseballs as well, one positioned atop a "Hole-in-One Mug" I got for my hole-in-one in 1987.  That baseball is signed (although faded a lot) by Carl Yastrzemski, the Hall of Fame outfielder for Boston I met a few times back in my anthem-singing days.  It's also signed by Bill Lee, the oddball left-handed pitcher from the 1970s, who grabbed the ball and signed it for no specific reason.

The other was signed far more recently, that one by Trot Nixon, the Red Sox outfielder who is from Wilmington, NC, where my son is general manager of a brewery.  Nixon went there for an event, and when he heard that the GM's dad (me) was a Sox fan, he signed a ball for me and gave it to him.  That one is also mounted on that bookcase.

What I don't have, now in Day 4 of four, is actual baseball.

We are in the All-Star break, which means that for four straight days the only activities in Major League Baseball are the Home Run Derby on Monday and the All-Star Game on Tuesday.  The Derby is just a skills competition, especially if no one you care a lot about, is competing.  The All-Star Game is certainly baseball, but when the players are taking selfies on the field while the game is in progress, it is not ... well, you get the idea.

I used to watch the All-Star Game and root for the American League, except for when I rooted for the National League for some years for reasons that escape me.  Now, however, the game is fairly meaningless -- who is actually named to the team (and not named) is far more important, it seems, than the actual outcome.  I find myself barely reading the box score the next day to see if any Red Sox players did anything.

My disinterest in the All-Star Game is really what drives this.  There was no baseball of any kind last night, and there will be only one game tonight -- that I don't care about.  That makes four days in the middle of the season where a game, that thrives because of its daily ability to recover from the previous day's success or disaster, is off our consciousness -- at least mine.

I get it -- the players need a break to recharge; the non-All-Stars go home for a breather while the others are not doing very much.  Well, I don't care ... I do not like it.  The team I root for ended the break winning 12 of its last 13 games, and 16 of 19.  They are 4.5 games up in their division, are winning seemingly every day, and I just feel that they needed four days off like they each needed a third nostril.

I'm being immensely selfish, but I like baseball precisely because its rare days off watching are followed by a bunch of days "on."  I like the game; it does not bore me, and is a huge vent for my competitive juices and basic hatred of the Yankees.

Friday night cannot come soon enough.

Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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