By: Jason Hallmark
When I think about the place the sport of baseball holds in my life, the result is always strikingly clear.
Baseball was my first love.
From as young as I can remember, baseball was the primary game the kids in neighborhood were always playing. Early on, it was wiffle ball. Later, it was Little League. We routinely had pick-up games at any of the dozens of baseball diamonds littering my hometown. If we didn’t have enough people to get a game going, we would often invent other games that used baseball as its basic concept. And if we weren’t playing a game, we were practicing our skill sets, which usually involved trying to throw a baseball at various targets. It’s not an overstatement to say, we were obsessed.
Growing up in Western New York, we didn’t have nearby Major League teams to go to any games. WPIX 11 out of New York City would reach us with a nightly broadcast of a Yankees game. For live baseball, we had a couple of minor league teams, the Buffalo Bisons and the Jamestown Expos. My first professional game was seeing the Bisons at the old War Memorial Stadium, and I can’t remember who they played. I wouldn’t see my first Major League game until our Little League organized a trip, loading up three buses full of kids and heading down to Cleveland, to see the Indians play the Minnesota Twins at the now nonexistent, Cleveland Municipal Stadium.
I really couldn’t tell you much about either of those games I attended. What I do remember most about them was the atmosphere. It was the architecture of the stadiums; the beauty of the field; the concessions on the concourse; checking out the souvenirs for sale, among many other things. But mostly, it was the sharing time with friends on a beautiful summer afternoon.
Over time, my relationship to the game changed. I quickly learned that didn’t quite have the athletic talent to play past Little League. For each game, I was usually the substitute right fielder (where very few balls were ever hit), getting two innings in the field, and one at-bat (typically ending as a backward K). Additionally, my teenage years found me finding other interests and pursuits. Baseball slid down the scale of things that held my attention.
But the game never disappeared entirely. As I track different phases of my life, as I moved to and from different cities and different jobs, I found the game of baseball was always a point to which I would keep returning. After a few years of not paying much attention, I would suddenly rediscover the game, and it would be like new, all over again. This fact was driven home by the observation that every time I attended a baseball game, it seemed that I came away having seen something I had never seen before. Even after 40+ years of baseball fandom, the game is STILL showing me new things. I can’t say that any other sport – or any other pastime, for the matter – can do that with the regularity that happens on the baseball diamond.
Today, what baseball means to me is a transcendent connection to time and place. As the elder statesman of the major sports, baseball is the American game for a reason. Its geography and history provide a link to the past, both personally and culturally. Now, the game affords me an excuse to visit towns and cities that I otherwise wouldn’t ever think to visit. As many old friends and extended family members are spread out in other areas of the country, taking a baseball road trip is a convenient reason to catch up with those I haven’t seen in a long while. And now, with the arrival of younger generations in the family, it is an opportunity to connect with the future and pass on this wonderful tradition.
There are lots of things that give life its spice, many things that bring us joy. I’ve always had many different interests and pursuits, and things I truly love. But nothing ever quite occupies the same space as the sport of baseball.
Baseball will always be my first love.