One is NOT Only

April 1st is often one of my favorite days of the year – not because I am a prankster, but it is often Opening Day of Major League Baseball. Baseball has remained my friend and companion in many stages of my life especially during these last two summers of Covid-19 isolation and as the end of the regular season approaches I feel ennui pulling up a chair beside me.

There was no baseball for girls when I was Little League age, but I was seen by the boys in my grade as “one of the guys” so I cheered them on at Avoca Little League every summer evening. My best friend, Blake Neyland, played for Hills department store and other good pals played for Hayes Amoco. Each team nominated a girl, usually a sister, to be “queen” of their team for the league’s July 4th celebration. There was a shortage of sisters on Hills team so Blake nominated me and I was voted to be Hills’ queen. Woo-hoo! I walked to the field from our home in the Tennessee Hills neighborhood and listened to the chants of “hmmm baby, hmmm baby – rock and fire” or as it sounded with our East Tennessee accent, “rock and far, rock and far”. My father who was geared for relating to sons, but only had two daughters, spent his summer evenings umpiring at Avoca Little League, so baseball became my way of relating to him. He took his umpiring very seriously. I would ride home after the games with him and we discussed baseball. He was strict and tolerated no cussing, had a signature foul ball call, a series of crescendoing “no, No, NO” while gesturing theatrically toward the appropriate baseline. Schoolmates enjoyed mimicking this call as they passed me in the hall at school. I may have been embarrassed by him at times but I also knew he was always on my side.

I tagged along when he went to umpire district tournaments in Virginia. One game ended in chaos after my father called a boy out looking at strike three to end the game and that team’s championship hopes. His mother felt Daddy missed the call, charged the field, grabbed his shirt and ripped it from the back – these were still the days of the external chest protector – and knocked his glasses off. One policeman corralled her, but she had instigated a group of fans now screaming that the game had been stolen. My dad gestured for me to follow him and grabbed my hand as another policeman took us to our car and said we needed to get out of there and that he would escort us back to the Tennessee state line! Daddy must have been a really good umpire though because he was invited to umpire at the Little League World Series my junior year in high school and he and my mother left me home and went to Williamsport, Pennsylvania for the event.

I didn’t realize at the time that it was also my father’s way of knowing every boy that might someday show romantic interest in his daughters. As I got older he moved up from Little League to Pony League and then Senior League. He showed up at the homecoming football game my senior year in high school. I didn’t understand why he was coming. I wasn’t nominated for homecoming queen, but as a member of the student council I was tasked with crowning the winning girl. When I asked my mother why my dad was going to the football game, she told me he was proud of me for being on student council – more than being a homecoming queen nominee. My mother had been homecoming queen of her class and she always seemed embarrassed by it. Both my parents believed in doing things rather than standing on the sidelines cheering. I wish now my dad had taught me how to throw a baseball and spent time together that way but it never occurred to either one of us back then. I still have his tiny broom used for sweeping off home plate. It now goes with me on camping trips to sweep out my tent and to remind me of the special connections baseball has brought me through the years.

Baseball was also my way of relating to my mother, Tressie. She was a very private person who would not discuss anything about her personal life – even with her own daughter. She went to work at top-secret Oak Ridge after high school working on the Manhattan Project building the first atomic bond. This was where she would meet my father. She would have loved to go to college but she was second youngest of seven and it was not a consideration for her family. That was her primary goal for me. “You will go to college”. I heard that phrase constantly growing up so I never doubted I could or would. She took to heart the admonition for all employees working on this secret war effort, “loose lips sink ships”. My father said they never discussed, even at home over dinner with their family, what they might be working on. When I was a young teenager, not knowing that we would lose her in a few short years to early on-set Alzheimer’s, I asked how she and my dad met at Oak Ridge. She responded, ” that’s personal”. I still find that a strange response to your own daughter. Especially when my dad told me that her roommate in the women’s worker dormitory went to church with him and that was how they met.

But my mother loved baseball and followed the Cincinnati Reds. So, baseball was something she would talk to me about and a way we could bond. I can probably still name the starting line-up for most of those early 70’s teams. For my 10th birthday she gave me a transistor radio, with white faux leather cover. I would lay in bed with the radio on my pillow, antennae raised so I could pick up the radio broadcast over the airways all the way from Cincinnati to the hills in Bristol, Tennessee. Most people in the area followed the Atlanta Braves but for an unknown reason (I had learned not to ask her many questions) she loved the Reds. Joe Morgan was our household favorite. We would listen to, talk about the games and cheer on the Big Red Machine together.

Tressie also loved Roberto Clemente, outfielder for the Pittsburg Pirates and humanitarian. When he was killed in a plane crash going to do earthquake relief for Nicaragua it was one of only two times I ever saw her cry. I have an iconic picture of Roberto Clemente in my office standing on second base tipping his hat to the fans after making his 3000th hit. It reminds me of my mother.

During my high school years she became increasingly distant and unreliable. She was an amazing seamstress and had made my sister and I matching dresses for many years. I would grumble when I had to wear the same dress, my sister’s hand me down, again three years later.

She had put off starting the sewing project for my high school marching band uniform and I ended up stapling the hem and using safety pins for the buttons. I was so mad at her not realizing these were the first symptoms of the looming early onset Alzheimer’s disease that would finally be diagnosed my sophomore year in college. She was only 54 when diagnosed and had been showing symptoms we didn’t recognize for years. She could not remember how to do things like operate the sewing machine or turn on the washer. She started getting lost when she drove in the town she had lived in over 30 years. I spent college weekends going home to help look after her and went home to live for two years after my college graduation to help be a caregiver. By then she has not recognized me for many years and needed constant supervision and care. No one had heard of Alzheimer’s then. She was the first person we knew with this disease and like her I remained silent when my friends asked if I was OK. She has been gone over 35 years and it is a struggle for me to remember her before she was ill. Baseball is still a connection that helps me find my way back to that part of my mother that provides a happy memory.

I moved to Boston in my mid-twenties for a job at the Arnold Arboretum. I had never lived outside of Tennessee and we spent all vacations visiting family at my grandparents’ farm. I arrived smack in the middle of downtown Boston to share an apartment with 5 girls who I met through my father’s church friends. There was a huge, brindle, Great Dane – Max, who lived downstairs and had his own bedroom in his owner’s apartment. Max was a downtown dog. I was not a downtown girl. This was a huge change for a small town southern girl to live in the middle of a busy city, hop on the subway, take the Green Line to work every day, then walk to my job at the arboretum from the Jamaica Plain T-stop.

A new friend had grown up with one of the Red Sox pitchers and announced one day he could get tickets in players’ seats and did anyone want to go? Big league baseball game- pick me, pick me! I quickly accepted the invite. It only took that one outing to the shrine that is Fenway Park, sitting behind home plate no less, with a view of the Big Green Monster to convert me to a Red Sox fan. A Red Sox fan I remain.

Baseball, like all things, has been impacted by Covid-19. I could sign up for the MLB-TV package and have all the baseball I want, never leaving my own living room, which is is convenient for isolating in uncertain times. But, with fond recollections of my little transistor radio, I only sign up for the MLB audio package which gives you access to every team and you can choose the home or away broadcast. What a deal! So many options for only $2.99 a month! Baseball has been a companion to me throughout Covid-19. I also follow the San Francisco Giants in solidarity with my sister who is a long time Bay City resident and have happy memories of taking my children to the then new park when visiting her. You don’t even have to like baseball to enjoy going to beautiful Oracle Park and watch eager kayakers wait for a homer to be hit into the bay beyond the outfield walls. So, I have a team in both the National League and American League to pull for.

I do love listening to the local radio announcers. I much prefer them to the TV announcing crew. I sometimes think the TV announcers think they get paid by the word and fill up the air time with everything but baseball. The radio announcers are kept busy describing the game, the plays, and the accuracy of the umpires. They know baseball. They don’t spare the umpire for the sake of the home team. The Red Sox radio crew call the umpire almost like a separate game. “Well he is totally consistent tonight by his inconsistency with the strike zone! All night, hitters on both teams are well justified in their frustration. There is no explanation for his strike zone tonight. And now the pitcher for the Orioles is mad at him and rightly so – that was definitely strike three but instead it is ball four, but the Red Sox gladly accept the gift.” When a player broke his bat, without hesitation the long time Red Sox announcer, Joe Castiglione, took the opportunity to plug a sponsor, a local lumber company, “that would not have happened if that bat had been made with wood from CCL Lumber, that’s Cape Cod Lumber for all your building needs.” The announcers keep you updated about the scores of other teams battling the Red Sox for a playoff berth. When the announcer shared that the putrid Yankees were getting beat 10-1 by Cleveland he said “those words just role off your tongue, Yankees losing 10-1”.

You learn lots of local trivia from the radio broadcast. When the Red Sox entered a downward spiral after the All-Star break this season I became convinced it was due to Shaw’s Star Market changing their weekly special from tuna for $1 a can. “that’s right folk, tuna – 5 cans for $5”. This was mentioned several times during the broadcast of each game. This always made me snicker picturing everyone jumping up from their radio and rushing to Star Market to fill up a buggy with cans of tuna. Star Market had made a huge impression on me when I first moved to Boston. Driving into town on the Mass Pike there was a Star Market built across and over the freeway by the exit to my new apartment. In little Bristol, Tennessee there was plenty of real estate space and no need to put a grocery store over the interstate! Baseball fans are without a doubt superstitious. I noticed as the Red Sox suddenly (well, really historically) found new and unexpected ways to lose games now that tuna was no longer being advertised as the weekly special. I went so far as to looking up who I could contact in the Red Sox organization to report this valuable observation to suggest that tuna must go back on sale at Star Market! Fortunately, the team started to win again before I could find anyone to share this astounding solution with and have white coats sent to check on my sanity. But it has been a year for baseball strangeness and easy to become unhinged with double headers only going seven innings and the sacrilege of the “zombie runner’ on second base in extra innings. Another reason I listen rather than watch is I don’t have to endure seeing the new and appalling display of a logo on the pitcher’s mound! When did the pitcher’s mound become a billboard!?? My personal new pet peeve.

I listen to baseball as I cook, as I fold laundry and even soaking in the tub. I thought I had to be hearing wrong when the announcers described the Red Sox wearing shocking yellow uniforms. But I looked online – indeed it was true. The yellow and blue uniforms were part of the “City Connect” series and were chosen by Boston to honor the legacy of the Boston Marathon. They swept a three games series wearing the yellow uniforms with this years struggling Baltimore Orioles to hang on in a three way battle with the Blue Jays and Yankees for the AL Wildcard playoff berth. No baseball fan was surprised when the Red Sox showed up in the next game against the New York Mets still wearing the yellow uniforms. You don’t change in the middle of a winning streak.

Baseball has been a common bond with many friends. Some new acquaintances, Tom and Stephanie, and I became fast friends as Tom told stories about Stephanie’s uncle being a ball boy for the Red Sox when Ted Williams was a Boston all-star. My dear friend, Kay, and I have seen each other through many of life’s changes and our love of baseball was an early bond even though she is a devoted Yankees fan.

I always find a team to root for in the post season. Last year I pulled for one of my least favorite teams, the Los Angles Dodgers, because of former Red Sox player and Nashville native, Mookie Betts, now being a Dodger. Red Sox fans are still muttering about that trade. My children can quote whole scenes from the Sandlot and still remember getting to stay up past midnight on a school night to watch the iconic seventh game win of the 2004 ALCS series against the Yankees leading to the reverse the curse World Series win against the St. Louis Cardinals. I will be sad when the last out is made for this season and a new team is crowned World Champion even in the unlikely chance it is the Red Sox …and as a true Red Sox fan, I will whisper to myself, “next season”.

 ©Michelle Bradley Campanis 2021