By: Jim Kulhawy
There are families who LIVE for sports. They build their days, weekends, vacations, etc, around their sport and/or team. Some choose football, others basketball or possibly hockey to be passionate about, but for my family it’s baseball. It’s imprinted in our DNA, it runs through our veins and makes us who we are. So, what does baseball mean to me? Quite simply…FAMILY.
It all started with my dad, who was a die-hard Brooklyn Dodgers fan and grew up during the Golden Age of Baseball (1947-1957) when a New York Team was in the World Series every one of those years. How did a kid from Guttenberg, New Jersey, became a Brooklyn fan you may ask? Probably to piss off the rest of his family, who all rooted for the Giants or the Yankees. Regardless, he rooted for his “Bums” and had his heart broken many a time over the years…the toughest time being 1951 when the Giants won the pennant on Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” but more often than not by the dreaded Yankees. He certainly hated those Yankees teams, so much so that he chose to not follow the only “hometown” team left after the Dodgers and Giants moved to the West Coast after the 1957 season.
After a few years of not watching or following the game, he asked himself a simple question: “What the hell am I doing? I love baseball, so why am I punishing myself because the Dodgers and the Giants fled to California?” At the time he was dating a young lady whose father had Yankees tickets, and he found himself at The Big Ballyard in the South Bronx on many a night watching the Mantle/Maris home run race play out in 1961. At that point he realized he could never give up the game, it was too ingrained in him, so he did the unthinkable…he became a Yankees fan. Now this was no small thing for a die-hard Dodgers fan and many a friend tried to shake him to his senses when the Mets were “born”, but he would have none of it. “Why the hell would I ever root for the National League again after they abandoned me?”, was his continuous reply, and he stuck to his guns staying a rabid Yankee fan to this day.
Of course, that meant my brothers and I were going to be Yankees fans, but my dad made sure we were more than that. He insisted we become fans of the game first, and Yankees fans second. Don’t get me wrong we LOVE our Yankees, but he taught us to see the beyond the Yankees pinstripes and enjoy every aspect of the sport. We spent days, nights, and weekends at Yankee Stadium, as well as other MLB and MiLB parks. We spent countless hours not only watching the game, but playing it, collecting books, cards and magazines as well. We lived, breathed, and slept baseball, with my dad by our sides at all times.
In the end I would say baseball captured me more than it did my brothers. Don’t get me wrong they loved the game, but I don’t know that they ever LOVED it…at least not like I did. Even when the Yankees frustrated me, throughout the entire decade of the 1980s and into the early part of the 1990s, I would watch on TV, listen on the radio, and could be found at Yankee Stadium on many a night. I was there for the highs, the lows, and everything in between. I was there as Stick Michael and Buck Showalter rebuilt the team, starting with the trade for a right fielder from Cincinnati (Paul O’Neil), and continued towards the dynasty they would become in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It certainly was an amazing time to be a Yankees fan again, and I was loving every minute of it.
In the midst of this rebirth, I became reacquainted with a young lady from my past, who would eventually become my wife. We started dating in that magical year of 1996, when the Yankees, under the leadership of Joe Torre and the youthful exuberance of a rookie shortstop named Derek Jeter, captured the hearts and minds of the New York area by winning an improbable World Series Championship over the heavily favored Atlanta Braves. Nicole and I got engaged in 1997 and married in 1998, in the midst of the most incredible year of baseball I had ever seen. The Yankees went 125-50 (playoffs included), won another Championship, and two more the following two years as well.
By 2000 Nicole and I were ready to start a family, who, of course, would be baseball/Yankees fanatics…there was no doubt about it. Now, I say “we”, but I am of the utmost certainty that my wife humors me most of the time. She’ll watch a game with me from behind a book, with her nose poked out from under the covers or, most likely, as far as she can get from me as I sit in front of the tv and try and convince everyone around that I could manage better than the yutzes in the dugout. In all fairness, she did grow up a Yankees fan, the granddaughter of a Bronx baker who made the hot dog rolls for the Yankees and delivered them to The Stadium…so she knows more than a little about the game. She just tends to be a little more reserved than I am when it comes to rooting.
My two sons, Ryan (21) and Brendan (19), grew up on, around, and with the game. I started them early, teaching them the finer points and learning how to watch for the little things that others may not see while casually paying attention. They played rec ball, travel ball, went to many, many games, and collected magazines, cards, and books just as I did so many years before. They also added baseball video games to their list of likes, and to this day make sure they have the latest version of MLB The Show as soon as it’s released.
My youngest, Brendan (now 19), very much enjoys the game…. but only to a certain extent. He will watch a few innings with me, then come in and out of the room to keep seeing the score. He likes to go to games, both MLB and MiLB, but has many other interests as well. He keeps me grounded, he talks sense into me when no one else can, and tries to make me understand it’s a long season and I shouldn’t get all spooled up with each loss.
My eldest, Ryan (now 21), however, is JUST LIKE ME. Those who know him, know exactly of what I speak. He scans the sports’ pages in the mornings, checks his computer for the latest scores, standings, trades and rumors, and has an app on his phone that is constantly going off with the latest news and notes. When it was time to go off to college chose Sports Management as his major, with a minor in marketing and the ability to get a nationally recognized coaching certification. When he was younger I always half-joked that he was me, just smaller, cuter and had a slightly earlier bedtime. Nothing has changed over the years…except the bedtime, which is now much later than mine.
The boys and I spend the spring, summer and early fall months, each year, religiously watching baseball (mostly the Yankees) on tv, listening on the radio, going to the games and talking non-stop about them. We want to build weekends around them, taking in games at Yankee Stadium, as well as at Single, Double and Triple A ballparks to see the players, learn who is coming up through the minor leagues and determine who “we” think will be the next great Yankee players.
It all culminates in October, when the leaves change color, the air gets a little cooler and only the best teams are left standing. We throw parties, invite friends over to watch and sit in front of a tv, or a radio, if need be, for hours, devouring the games. We watch them all and have an opinion on each and every one. Especially our Yankees.
Before going on, I must tell you that I should have been the next great Yankees’ second baseman, but Chuck Knoblauch STOLE my place in the pantheon of Yankees’ greatness. Just ask my wife, she’ll tell you that as well, but she’ll do it with a roll of the eyes and more than a slight hint of sarcasm in her voice. There are some nights she wouldn’t even want to be in the same room with us, as we go through the machinations of watching another playoff game. Personally, I think she’s hiding under the bed as things go flying across the living room (one year a kid’s sippy cup somehow got lodged in the wall, which eventually had to be patched and repainted) and four-letter words flow like water from a faucet…and that’s just Game 1 of a series. You can’t even imagine an elimination game.
One day in 2011, while at a Yankees game, Ryan overheard some guys talking about visiting every MLB ballpark and asked if we could do that. “Sure,” I told him, and quickly forgot about it. He, however, never forgot, and called me on it a few weeks later. “When are we going to start?” he asked me. “Start what?” I replied, not knowing where this was going. “Start visiting all the ballpark, remember you said we could.” After determining he was serious, we started planning this grand adventure, and decided it would begin the following summer at the most logical place…Yankee Stadium.
We quickly came up with some “rules”:
1) You can only root for the home team, except if the home team was the Red Sox, or the home team was playing the Yankees.
2) We would only eat food which was indicative of the ballpark we were visiting.
3) We would make friends with the home team’s fans, and have as much fun with them as possible…unless the home team was the Red Sox.
4) We would visit as many of the host city’s historical places, restaurants, and cultural centers along the way.
5) We would score each game and buy a hat from each home team and have the final score embroidered on that hat.
6) We would make as many friends as possible along the way.
First, though, we had a stop to make.
You cannot start a journey of this magnitude without first paying homage to the Baseball Gods, and THE Baseball God was buried just a few miles from our hometown. So, a few days before we were to start our journey, we made a trip to the Gates of Heaven Cemetery to visit Babe Ruth. We brought him some hot dogs and a bottle of beer and left them at his grave as a way of asking him to look over us on our journey. It just so happens that Billy Martin is buried about 100 yards from the Babe, so we left some beers for him as well. I suggested a hot dog, but Ryan was convinced Billy would want two beers.
On June 30th, 2012, we began our “tour,” and kicked it off with a win over the White Sox. Over the next seven years we managed to visit every MLB park, and 79 MiLB ones as well. We saw the footprints of long-gone ballparks, visited a lot of historical landmarks across the country, paid our respects to some of the game’s legends (Satchel Paige, Buck O’Neil, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Thurman Munson, Ty Cobb, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and many others), ate at some great restaurants, swam in both oceans and the Gulf of Mexico, played catch on the Field of Dreams, ingrained ourselves in local culture, and made life-long friends whom we consider family.
We hit a different part of the country for ten days every summer, and while Nicole and Brendan didn’t join us for every trip they did manage to come to about half. As I said earlier, we spent seven years on the road (with our friends Tony, Nick, and Rob as our constant companions) and finished the last ballpark (Oracle, in San Francisco) less than two weeks before Ryan went off to college. At the beginning he INSISTED on Yankee Stadium being the first and San Francisco being the last, and we made it happen just as he wished.
Today Ryan is a junior in college, and Brendan is a freshman. Ryan goes to school three-and-half hours north, in Massachusetts, while Brendan is commuting to a local school for now.
Brendan and I watch games together and discuss as much as interests him. He does play the video games, joins fantasy leagues with his friends, and goes to the ballpark with me as much as possible. He loves the game and all its fun, but it doesn’t consume him…and that is more than okay with me. We still bond over it, talk about it, and laugh, cry and joke about it, cause that’s what dads do with their sons.
Ryan is studying Sports Management, with a minor in marketing, at a school in Massachusetts…far behind “enemy” lines. He wears his Yankees gear all over campus, sets up watch parties for other Yankees fans, hosts gatherings when the Yanks and the Red Sox play, and texts/calls me every chance he gets to discuss what’s going on in the game. He has attended a meet and greet with the Red Sox front office (through the school) at Fenway Park, he has interned for the Hudson Valley Renegades (Single A affiliate of our New York Yankees) and is hoping to be offered a position with the Steele Internship at the Baseball Hall of Fame this summer. He wants to land a job in MLB, preferably with the Yankees, and that’s what he is working towards.
Nicole and I still sit and watch the games together…well I watch, and she keeps an eye and ear on the action. We go to a game at Yankee Stadium every now and again, but she prefers minor league ball. She says I am “saner” at those games, but I think she just enjoys the more laid-back atmosphere, overall, at the MiLB parks. The four of us go to at least one game together every year, and even though he is now going to be 80 we still get my dad (Grandpa Crazy) to at least a few games each year as well.
Yes, baseball is a game. Yes, some people don’t understand how it can be more than that…and for them I feel sorry. Baseball is so much more than just a game, it’s a way of life, a connection between grandparents, parents, children, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins, and friends. It is part of the glue that holds this family together, and when we are having trouble communicating, we know we can always talk baseball and everything else will eventually fall into place.
That is why baseball will always mean FAMILY to me!