Beginning baseball

Joseph, after playing a baseball game for Blessed Teresa of Calcutta.

Editor’s note: Joseph played on his first baseball team this summer, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, which is located at the end of our street. My dad went to school there long ago when it was called Sts. John and James. Anyway, Joseph shares his memories of his first baseball season:

It was my first time being on a baseball team. My coach’s name was coach Cliff.

When the team is in the field, there’s only one person who wears a helmet when you’re in the little league, and that’s the pitcher. There are two pitchers: the first one is the coach who throws a baseball. The other one is a kid player and he wears a helmet. I normally wasn’t pitcher, but a few times I did get to be pitcher. Once my dad thought that I was going to be batting when I was pitcher because I was wearing a helmet.

I did not have a favorite position. However, I did a least favorite position: shortstop. Because I’m not short and I don’t like stopping!

I wasn’t so good at batting [but he got better!].

I learned in baseball that when you’re throwing a ball, you throw it to first base and you always take a step with the opposite foot from your throwing hand. So, if you’re throwing with your right hand, you step with your left foot.

Love, baseball and losses

There’s something about that first love. Or maybe it’s that first loss.

I remember a girl I loved, and the spark of hope that burned in me until the day I found out there was no chance, that she would be with someone else. And I grieved the loss of something which had never come to pass.

It was a time of intense sadness and lament. But I suppose old hopes must die, so that new hopes might live — and be fulfilled.

New joys come, years pass, life transforms but in some long-forgotten place, that loss lingers. A sensitive place. A ticklish place that gets a reaction if you touch it.

In my case, music does it. I’m a sucker for really good break-up albums and songs. It’s not that they resurrect a memory. Rather, the raw pain of the songwriter resonates with me, taps into my own little vein of sadness. I empathize and feel their righteous anger.

Does it work that way with baseball, too? I guess that it does.

Just as someone can remember their first love, I can remember when I first followed the St. Louis Cardinals of my own accord. When I began to collect and trade baseball cards, clip out newspaper articles, memorize stats. It was the early 1990s, and the Cardinals were not very good — but that never matters.

Then came 1996. The year the Cardinals hired Tony La Russa as their manager. The year they got back into the playoffs. The year they were one win away from reaching the World Series.

But then the unthinkable happened. The team unraveled with successive losses — 14-0, 3-1, 15-0 — and missed their opportunity.

As a kid, you grieve. But with baseball hope arises again each spring. There would be false starts along the way, but ultimately the Cardinals did get back into the World Series. Three times. They won it twice, including last year’s mind-blowing comebacks.

This year, the magic somehow seemed to be continuing. A miraculous Game 5 comeback in the division series made me believe it was meant to be. I was excited because my kids were getting into it. Jadzia was beginning to get the arcane rules of the game; Joseph was swinging any bat-like object he could find. Ludi was drawing circles on papers and pretending to keep score.

So when the Cardinals went up 3-1 in the NLCS, just one win away from reaching the World Series again, my heart soared. This was my team, on the verge of winning it all. Destiny.

But tonight it came crashing down. The Cardinals lost their third straight game to the Giants, and their opportunity is gone. It was painful, physically painful to watch. The churning in my stomach would not stop.

I had seen it, lived it before. It was 1996 again, and I mourned the loss of something that never happened. The loss of a dream. It was listening to a breakup album, feeling a resonance with past pain.

A girl. A team. Young loves. Young losses. You get over them, even forget them.

“It’s just a game.” “She’s just a girl.” “There’s always next year.” “There’s plenty of fish in the sea.”

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. My heart has already moved on to next spring.

But there’s something about loss. “I need my pain,” a wise fictional character once said.

Maybe we do, Captain. Maybe we do.

When news happens

Working at a newspaper is still an exciting thing to do, even if the future of the industry looks dim.

In the last week, I have had to work during two big breaking news stories. The first was the horrible shooting at ABB in St. Louis. The second was McGwire’s admission yesterday that he took steroids.

My job each time was to design informative, compelling pages. In such situations, there is a lot of collaborative work with my bosses and other designers. Also, important editors are frequently looking over your shoulder. Deadline looms.

It’s an environment I still enjoy and still thrive in. Here’s to hoping that newspapers survive their current morass so they can continue informing the public and serving as a check against abuses by governments or businesses.

Also, check out the Post-Dispatch’s work on the McGwire confession on the SportsDesigner blog

Jadzia’s 1st Cardinal game

For her participation in the Ferguson Library’s summer reading program, Jadzia received two free tickets to a Cardinals game. Actually she has gotten these tickets for the last few years, but has never been able to use them (or know of their existence). This year we decided she was finally big enough to try sitting through an entire baseball game.

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