Baseball
part two
[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.]
This is the second half of this story. Check out last Saturday’s First Light for part one…
It follows that I had a lot of reasons to become an A’s fan in the early 70’s. Grandpa in the lawn chair with his radio on in defiance of Grandma’s demands for more productive use of time, the cannons firing after a win, the warm, dark, California nights with a breeze blowing in from the Bay, World Series titles, and those names: Catfish Hunter, and best of all, Vida Blue. You have to love names like that. As a result, I became an Oakland A’s fan.
Loyalty is in my DNA. I don’t change teams. I’ve been a Green Bay Packers fan since I was in grade school (a story for another day). Although baseball isn’t high on my list of things to pay attention to, if I could be called a fan of any baseball team, it would be the A’s. But I will soon be free from any obligation I feel to remain loyal to Grandpa’s team. They have announced a move to Las Vegas. They have initiated divorce proceedings, and I will soon be free to remarry. Since I have friends and family who are Texas Ranger fans, I just might join them.
Back in Colorado, where we lived during that stage of my life, there were no Major League Baseball teams to support. We did have the Denver Bears though. The Bears got their start back in 1885 when they were known as the Denver Grizzles. The 1911 Grizzles made the National Baseball Association’s list of the 150 greatest Minor League Baseball teams of all time. They came in at number 22.
Summer nights often ended with me lying on the floor of my bedroom in the basement of our family home. I would temporarily confiscate my mom’s brown wooden tube radio with the woven brown cover and the darker brown Bakelite knobs and set it on the floor and turn it on. The tubes took a while to warm up. Eventually, I would begin to work the tuning knob back and forth, trying to find the sweet spot where the Bears’ game could be heard over the static. This required constant readjustment, and the later the time of night the more difficult it was to hear. Often, I would be lulled to sleep while lying on my back, my head next to the radio, listening intently to what little play-by-play I could hear, and then waking up not knowing how things ended.
The Bears changed their name to the Zephyrs in 1984. It was a strange move for a historic franchise until you understand they did it to prove to Major League Baseball the city would accept a radical rebranding without losing support. This was a part of Denver’s strategy to lure a Major League team to the city. It worked and the Colorado Rockies were born.
The Zephyrs (formerly known as the Bears) moved to Metairie, Louisiana, and became the New Orleans Zephyrs. Their name was changed to the New Orleans Baby Cakes in 2016. Attendance numbers didn’t increase. To me, that seems like a given with a name like Baby Cakes. It doesn’t sound like a team destined to fight their way to a pennant championship. So, in 2020 they moved to Wichita, Kansas, and in 2021 they became the Wichita Wind Surge. Grizzlies – Bears – Zephyrs – Baby Cakes – Wind Surge… Did you follow that?
It’s hard to be a loyal fan in today’s sports climate. Moving from one city to another, the transfer portals, the player trades… I still think loyalty is a good trait, but it’s hard to be loyal when everything is shifting so much. In sports, the only loyal people are the fans. The owners, the players, and the teams aren’t loyal to anyone, any city, or any player. That’s a reality one has to accept if you are to remain a sports fan.
In the end, I realize that it wasn’t the Oakland A’s that were important but my Grandpa sitting in the front yard on a July night in San Leandro waiting for the thundering echo of a cannon exulting in a win. And it wasn’t the Denver Bears that I loved but it was that old radio humming the voices snatched from the air and speaking them into my bedroom to lull me to sleep. And it isn’t the Green Bay Packers that attract me but the ability to discover the history of men like Vince Lombardi and the mythological stories of “Frozen Tundra” through reading books that draw me in. Those teams are mere connections to other things and other people that I love and have loved. That, in the end, is where my true loyalties lie.
