Baseball

part one

[If you are new to First Light, Saturday Stories are a break from the usual Scripture-based daily devotional. Every Saturday I publish a brief story from life. Sometimes there is a “moral to the story,” and other times it's just a story. I hope you enjoy today’s Saturday Story.]

Grandpa Roberts lived in San Leandro, California which sits on the east side of the San Francisco Bay. Just north of San Leandro is Oakland, and that geography has a role in what I’m about to tell you about baseball’s place in my life. Since boys don’t keep records of such things, I don’t know how many trips we made to our Grandpa Roberts’ home in San Leandro. There were two or three trips when I was a boy that I recall for sure.

As an adult, around 1982 Mom wanted to go see her parents but Dad couldn’t make the trip. To help out, Monica and I went, and I drove. I know it was around 1983 because our oldest son Joshua was a toddler, and he was born in 81. I went back again when Grandpa died. Mom, my sister, and I flew out that time. Grandpa lived into his mid-90s. I always knew him as an old man with white hair, a thin build, and always neatly dressed. He was kind, gentle, quiet, and able to fix stuff. I loved my Grandpa. He was the only one I knew. My Dad’s Dad died a few months before I was born.

I’ve never given baseball a lot of attention, but if asked, I would call myself an Oakland A’s fan. And if you wanted to know why, I would tell you it was because, on one of our trips to my grandparent’s home in San Leandro, Grandpa Roberts set up a lawn chair in the yard, put a radio next to that chair, sat down facing north, looked toward Oakland, and listened the Oakland A’s baseball game broadcast.

I have two theories as to why Grandpa sat in the front yard to listen to the game. One possibility is he knew that if he tried to listen to it in the house, he couldn’t do it in peace. Let’s just say Grandma Roberts wasn’t the kind of woman to let a man sit around listening to a ballgame in the house in peace.

She was the kind of woman who stormed into the living room to turn off the TV when her grandchildren were watching Batman. “Too violent,” she said with that “tsk tsk” sound she was known for making. I guess it was all those “Bam” and “Pow” comic graphics they put in there. She was the kind of woman who cooked rice for breakfast, poured milk on it, served it with burnt toast, and insisted we eat it. I tried and then resorted to tears before Mom intervened and delivered me from Grandma Pharoah. I loved her, but mercy she could be a stern woman. So my theory is that Grandpa decided that it was better to listen to the game in peace outside in the dark than to attempt it in the light of the living room under threat of rebuke. I’m reminded of the Proverb that says, “It is better to dwell in the corner of a housetop than in a house shared with a contentious woman.” I don’t know, but that may have been Grandpa’s “life verse.”

My second theory is that Grandpa wanted to be outside to hear the cannon go off when the A’s won a game. They were winning a lot of games back then. The A’s moved to Oakland from Kansas City in 1968. By 1972, when we visited my grandparents, Sal Bando, Bert Campaneris, Joe Rudi, Catfish Hunter, and Vida Blue were leading the A’s to the first of three World Series titles. It was the best time in history to be an A’s fan. Grandpa lived out his last years in the glory days of A’s baseball.

[to be continued next Saturday]