I have always hated baseball. The standing around. The body-part scratching. The throwing and catching. Goofy socks.

There are so many ways to ridicule the game of baseball that it’s difficult to choose where to start. Difficult, but not impossible.

As a kid whose parents were from South America, I grew up with the notion that soccer (or fútbol, as we called it) was a far superior game. This was despite the fact that neither my parents nor my relatives in Argentina cared about soccer any more than they cared about bais-bol. My grandparents believed, and still believe, that it’s a sport for thugs and low-lifes. My mom worried about head injuries and tackling. Also drugs (Maradonna, cocaine, etc.).

And still, I made a point of treating the national pastime with contempt. I decried it as a non-sport. It required no physical fitness, I said, like golf or chess. It was the most poorly designed of the sports, in my mind, because the rules were strange and arbitrary.

So when the time came in gym class or on the playground to play what was, in the late 80s and early 90s, still The Nation’s Pastime, it was with glum satisfaction that I joined in the game. On one hand, I had to participate in the Sport That Crushed All Other Sports (like soccer). On the other hand, I could criticize to my heart’s delight, from the best vantage point: right field.

This happened throughout my childhood. Late summer nights spent watching wispy dead dandelions under the bright outfield lights. I even played on the rec-center team in a misguided attempt at cultural assimilation.

In the short term, at least, it didn’t work. I never fit in with the boys who collected baseball cards not because everyone else did, but because it was a fact of life, like breathing. These were kids who really did play catch with their dads in the back yard after dinner. My dad and I played multiplication tables.

But over time, baseball made a mark on me in a subtle, nearly undetectable way, like a painting on a sun-facing wall. I remember running up the stairs the night the Twins won the 1991 World Series. We’d just moved into our house.

I remember getting my first fitted ‘Minnesota’ hat, now trapped in a grave of dust behind a dresser in my little brother’s room.

And I remember the sun going down over a slow freight train out behind right field. The red coat of infield gravel on my shoes and my gloved hand raised above my head to draw the gnats away from me.

There I stood; for all anyone knew I was waiting for a fly ball.

Somewhere between then and now I learned to love baseball. Not for the game itself, which still bores me to tears most of the time, but for the way it burrowed into my memory. Uninvited, unwelcome and out of place, baseball made a place for itself in my life.

It is the end of summer. It is the Twins and the Braves. It the bright crack of a high fly ball, sailing into the summer sky.

Up, out, and into right field.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 8th, 2004 at 8:30 am and is filed under Minnesota, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.