kotori
Fool of Fortune
- Joined
- Oct 9, 2001
- Posts
- 28,474
Tonight, was wonderfully cool, no humidity, quite unlike August in Kentucky. I took Jim Henson to his first professional ball game, the Triple-A Louisville Bats against the Toledo Mud Hens. On the grass. In the late afternoon, early evening. Young men with big dreams and big bats and grass that will be forever green. We sat close enough to hear the crunch of spikes striding across the warning track to the on-deck circle. Endless summer. A game of old men and boys.
We won, but just. After taking a 5-0 lead in the second, the Hens whittled away, tying the game in the top of the 9th on five pitches--a walk and a homer. Come the bottom of the inning, Henson says to me, "How long do you think it'll go? Ten, twleve innings?" I say, this guy will knock the first pitch out, and then we'll be done." It was the third, and only inside the left field foul pole by feet.
As the Louisville duggout emptied to greet the hero home (how Homeric), Jim Henson leaned over the rail and helped himself to the bucket of balls the bat boy had hitherto been guarding. Souvenier.
A Bartlett Giamatti, the late Commissioner and former president of Yale said baseball "is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, you rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops." Oh yeah. Would you want it any other way?
We won, but just. After taking a 5-0 lead in the second, the Hens whittled away, tying the game in the top of the 9th on five pitches--a walk and a homer. Come the bottom of the inning, Henson says to me, "How long do you think it'll go? Ten, twleve innings?" I say, this guy will knock the first pitch out, and then we'll be done." It was the third, and only inside the left field foul pole by feet.
As the Louisville duggout emptied to greet the hero home (how Homeric), Jim Henson leaned over the rail and helped himself to the bucket of balls the bat boy had hitherto been guarding. Souvenier.
A Bartlett Giamatti, the late Commissioner and former president of Yale said baseball "is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, you rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops." Oh yeah. Would you want it any other way?
