HOW DID IT COME TO THIS?

by Meredith Linden

My wife and I took a trip up to lovely Redding this weekend.  No, it wasn’t to escape the heat.  In fact, when it was planned, we had hoped the heat would have dissipated.  Of course, this weekend was hotter than last. Damned September in the valley. Our purpose was to steal our 6-year-old granddaughter (hers biologically, mine by marriage) away and stay in a gifted hotel room doing fun things like playing games, going swimming, and the like.

Little did I know how much Baseball Diary has affected me.  As many of you may remember, I am not a baseball person.  So I’m pretty sure you have asked yourself, or the computer, “Why the hell is she writing blogs about baseball at all?”  I may have reached a consensus among my selves regarding that type of questioning.

While in Redding, we ate out for every meal because, although our room was good, it did not have a kitchen.  For dinner the first night, we had a gift of a meal at the 3 Shastas Bar and Grill, a sports bar.  A long booth stretched along the side wall of the restaurant underneath some black and white photos of the building of Shasta Dam.  Of course, the historian in me thought that was way cool.  I sat across the teensy table from my wife and granddaughter in a high-level bar chair.  As I scanned the photos, I noticed they didn’t have captions and they didn’t seem to be in any particular order.  Hmmm.  I would have to sort them out for myself.

Then I scanned upward and right above my wife’s head was the Giants and Padres on a 36” flatscreen.  Another hmmm went through my mind.  A flatscreen to the right of me showed college football.  The one to the left, all within peripheral vision, was again the Giants and Padres.  Our TV was on mute so I found myself reading the commentary, full of vocabulary I didn’t know, words put together into strange contortions called sentences.  For some odd reason, I started following the game and wondered how the commentators knew Vogelsong threw a fastball.  My wife wondered when I was going to converse with her, then gave up and watched football.

In the morning, we went to our complimentary breakfast. There must have been some sort of convention going on as I noticed teens walking around in baseball uniforms.  There were no TV's so I was not as distracted as before and we finished our meal as a family.

Lunch was from Guadalajara, but this time it was the Tigers versus the Twins.  The TV's were too far from us to get either a good look at the game or to hear it.  But I began marveling at my desire to know what was going on.  My desire to write, my willingness to try something new, and my need to prove myself wrong have gotten the better of me, I decided.  Watching the university players practice in their strangely attractive uniforms last week hinted at it, but I pushed it aside. Things were surfacing a little more forcefully now.

I unsuspectingly walked into Outback for dinner Saturday.  I was playing I-Spy with our granddaughter when my wife mentioned UT was playing.  Heads-up, my Alma Mater was on, and I wondered if it was the OU game.  Yeah, I used to be a sports nut, going to all the home games in college.  I even made it to one OU game in Dallas with all my buds.  Road trip!  But on this particular road trip, I was glued to another game as my head swiveled to the other TV playing the Giants/Padres game.

So I speculated.  Hmmm, I know the World Series is coming up soon because it’s the end of September.  So they must be in the playoffs now.  And some text from the game the night before rolled across my brain: the Giants have to beat Washington and the Reds if they want to be number 1 seed.  Right now, they’re going for number 3 seed.  You may be laughing at me on how little I know, but I know what playoffs are and I know what seeding and wildcards are.

Again, our table was too far away to hear any commentary on either game but that was ok.  I had made peace with my new found desire to contemplate why baseballers chewed tobacco or gum so much.  It was because they could.  You can’t really do that in any other sport.  Really bad news in football, basketball would be a messy sport with chew or gum, and soccer?  One hit on the head with that ball…

Our final morning at breakfast I was thinking about other things.  Baseball had again left my immediate existence, or so I thought.  Then I heard someone say, “He was standing right behind the catcher when it happened.”  About six men in identical hats started laughing.  I looked over.  Oh yes, their hats outed them as part of the Contra Costa Umpires Association.  I did have to wonder what Redding held for all these baseball people, but for me - well I’d have to say I was visited by Uncle Charlie.