Last week I wrote a few observations about some characteristics of football fans in the UK. Thank you for all your wonderful comments! Several of you shared your insights on the difference between US sports fans and those in the UK, Europe or elsewhere. Many people mentioned baseball as having a similar fanbase. I agree!
Baseball, a mainly US sport with a long and romantic history within the US, stirs the hearts of many, and is perhaps closest to the way football fans feel in the UK.
If you are lucky enough to live close to where the farm teams, or AAA teams play, these are the teams where the major leagues ‘park’ their almost-ready-to-get-called up to the major league players. These AAA teams have their own stadiums and league games, playing a full season.
In my adult years when I was still living in the US, I often went to the AAA Sacramento River Cats field to watch evening baseball games. Even though two big major league teams—The Oakland As and the San Francisco Giants—were closer to home, getting there through the crowds and paying for the pricey tickets made them more of a special event for me. Whereas, almost on a whim, I could pile my kids and friends in my car, drive an hour to Sacramento, be guaranteed a warm evening, cheap tickets for close up seats, affordable food and an intimate game.
The River Cats are currently the AAA farm team for the San Francisco Giants. Often you can see the major league players when they are recovering from and getting in shape after injuries. The stadium is so small, you can see the player’s expressions on their faces. And the players are close enough to hear what the fans are yelling and cheering. The fans can be pretty cheeky! Not just a “Hey batta batta batta, swing!” Comments about how they look in their tight uniforms are not uncommon.
In contrast, here is a photo of the much larger Major League Seattle Mariners Baseball Stadium:
My personal history with baseball started by listening to SF Giants games on the radio with my dad, when I was probably 7 or 8 years old. In my memory we were often washing the car whilst listening to the game, but in reality that probably only happened once or twice. Baseball is mainly a summer game, so my association with baseball is that it is played in warm weather, and I was always in shorts. When we were washing the car, the sound of splishing a dripping soapy sponge on the warm metal of the car is mixed with hearing the crack of the bat against the ball, and then pausing to hear the announcer say where it is headed. Once we are told the result, we go back to scrubbing and rinsing before moving around to another part of the warm and wet car.
Like many baseball fans who mainly listened to baseball through the radio, the same radio announcer narrated all the home games during my childhood, and it is Lon Simmon’s voice that I associate with my team. It is his voice that calmly explained the baseball terms as he used them, conveyed the game’s most exciting moments, and clearly narrated the game from start to finish. His is one of the most memorable voices of my childhood (after Walter Cronkite1, the Anchorman for CBS TV News.)
More baseball filled the next few summers. When I was 11 and 12, a friend’s father had season tickets to Candlestick Park, then home of the SF Giants. This park stuck out into the Bay just south of San Francisco and was notoriously foggy, cold and always windy. But every once in awhile, the winds were still, the fog was gone, and we had a gorgeous sunny afternoon at the baseball park. I remember watching my favourite players—Willie Mays and Willie McCovey—come to bat and we would yell ‘hey batta batta’ as loud as we could. The rest of the time, we ate bags of peanuts, cracking the hard shells open and throwing them on the ground, while popping the salty roasted nuts into our mouths. Later we’d get chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream cones wrapped in cardboard. The cool ice cream slid down our throats, soothing our salty lips.
The other important baseball activity at this time was watching the boys from school play baseball, or Little League games, after school and on Saturdays. I would go watch practice if I could, and especially the games against other teams. In my rosy memories, me and my girl friends cheered for all the boys on our team, but of course we cheered the loudest for the cute ones, and the ones on whom we had crushes. Not that we ever admitted it.
In my same memories, it was perfectly warm, I wore shorts or cute summer dresses, and I paid full attention to the game. I wasn’t distracted at all by watching the boys goofing around in the dugout. We sat on the splintery boards of the worn bleachers behind the players dugout, sometimes dropping down into the dusty dirt below to sneak around closer to the boys. We never sometimes got yelled at by the coach for distracting the boys. We always had red licorice sticks, bubble gum, and Big Hunk bars (a kind of taffy) from the nearby neighbourhood store to snack on during the games.
Perhaps this is why so many of us have rosy memories of certain sports: we grow up with the sounds of it, watching the games or playing them; they are embedded with our associated tastes and smells, all enhancing our memories of the best, most relaxed parts of childhood.
There have been myriad baseball movies and television series that are popular in the US. There are almost 200 baseball-related films listed in Wikipedia2, starting with a documentary of an 1898 baseball game. The most recent listing is from 2023, a biographical film made about Rickey Hill. I haven’t come close to seeing many of them, although I was surprised to see how many I had seen or at least heard of. In no order, my favourite baseball films include the following:
Field of Dreams3 with Kevin Costner, James Earl Jones
Bull Durham4 with Susan Sarandon, Kevin Costner, Tim Robbins
A League of Their Own5: a movie about the Women’s Professional League in the mid-1940’s to the mid 1950s starring Geena Davis, Tom Hanks, Madonna and many others; followed more recently by a Netflix Series6 with Abbi Jacobson, Chanté Adams, and D’Arcy Carden
MoneyBall7, starring Brad Pitt, Robin Wright, Jonah Hill; and of course
Fever Pitch8, with Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon, described last week.
Each of these films is about so much more than the game of baseball. There are plenty of other great movies about baseball; everyone has personal favourites. Many movies are true(ish) stories, others are a range of romantic styles, still others are comedies and also documentaries of the sport shown through less than rose-colored lenses.
Many of the movies follow basic storyline themes. One is to pursue your passion until you’ve given it everything you can, or else, something like this:
Every day is a new opportunity. You can build on yesterday’s success or put its failures behind and start over again. That’s the way life is, with a new game every day, and that’s the way baseball is.
-Bob Feller
I think those are both good lessons to keep in mind no matter what you are doing in your life. Even if you don’t like baseball OR football! 😉
Thanks for reading yet another sport-related essay this week! Let me know if you have a favourite baseball movie or TV show that you’ve enjoyed. Or any other thoughts about football, baseball, the food you ate whilst watching games, or other childhood memories.
Until next week,
xx Sabrina
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Cronkite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_baseball_films
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097351/?ref_=ls_t_1
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094812/?ref_=ls_t_7
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_League_of_Their_Own
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_League_of_Their_Own_(2022_TV_series)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1210166/?ref_=ls_t_3
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0332047/?ref_=ls_t_25
The memories run deep. This must be why I cry predictably every time I hear the Star Spangled Banner sung live at any sports event. I don’t even like the song. It is all the memories with dear friends and devoted family, many now gone, but no doubt somehow still cheering wildly through the ether for the home team and for us as well. One particular memory I have is my dad always listening to the commentary on his transistor radio while we were also actually at the game,in person, at Dodger Stadium. The organ music was played live at that time too and was marvelous. Thank you for your own commentary and the nudge down memory lane.
This is such a lovely tribute to baseball. I have parallel memories of listening to the Detroit Tigers on the radio. It was the soundtrack of my childhood summers. We sometimes watched the evening games on T.V. and those are associated with root beer floats on a flowered sofa. My brothers and I were obsessed with the players, and mimicked their batting stances when we played.
As an adult, my 2 favorite baseball-related books are Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir" and David James Duncan's "The Brothers K."