An Ode to Minor League Baseball

exploring a localized phenomenon

just a picture I took of the minor league stadium at sunset (after a summer rain). I mean, come on. it looks like this.

When I was twenty-one-years-old, I had — what I now understand to be — a mental breakdown. Up to that point, I’d spent my life as an athlete and, three years into my scholarship, my knees blew out and my ribs separated from the cartilage. So I came home, tried to piece together a personality.¹

That summer, the summer I came home, I worked in a warehouse making air filters on a line with ex-cons and took an unpaid gig covering the local minor league team for a Fox Sports offshoot’s offshoot.

The team I covered was/is called the Delmarva Shorebirds — a triple-A affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles. It was/is my own childhood minor league team. For a few years, we lived so close to the stadium that I could see the Saturday night fireworks from our house.

The first game I covered that summer (according to old email correspondences) was on July 10th of 2012. And, though I was familiar with this 5,200-seat stadium, there was a magic in the press box. The wideness of it. The layers of hulking old cameras and the table of all-you-can-eat cold cuts in the back. The clean view of the lush green field and the players moving around like figurines on an opera stage. The announcer right there. Right there. And when the mascot walked in and took off his big orange bird-head, well, it was like watching Santa Claus casually peel off his beard.

And that magic never dulled. I went to every home game, wrote up them up in a style half-lifted from Ring Lardner (who is a pretty handy guy to read if you’re sad more now than you used to be).

It turned out that my editor only wanted the box scores and occasional quotes from scouts. But I wrote like Ring Lardner, put the box scores at the bottom of my emails and the magic never dulled. The crack of the bat, the reliable baseball jingles, the way the announcer — the very voice of my childhood stadium — was right there.

I don’t remember much of that summer. It was, to be honest, pretty damn hellish. But the bright spot was the baseball games. Though I was decent but never much good at it, there’s a magic in baseball and in the whole macrocosm of the game. The behaviors and the comforting familiarity. That’s why everybody loves The Sandlot. It’s not really about baseball, it’s about vibes, how baseball makes you feel.²

This is the section where I should probably expand on experiences; and I could go on. Taking a girlfriend there after my freshman year of college. Mansplaining to her how it feels when four-thousand people are watching you play a game. Interviewing Manny Machado, the time I went there to see Michael Phelps — the most decorated Olympian in history — sign autographs and then, between innings, go onto the field with a microphone and publicly apologize for his local DUI.

How the trees outside the stadium go crisp and shed their leaves in the fall and the treeline goes from summer soft to the jagged teeth of approaching winter. The way it looks after a rain, all fresh and tender and the way it smells after a rain, like empty happiness.

I did not edit in the rainbow. this is a real picture from after a summer rain.

But enough mush, let’s push for practicality here. A minor league baseball game is cheaper in both beer and tickets. The concession lines are, at worst, three minutes long. The stadium is half an hour away and you park in a big dirt lot right outside. They have fireworks after Friday night games and after Sunday afternoon games, they let the kids down on the field to run around the bases.

It’s actually easy to take my son there. And we’ve been five times this summer. The minor league baseball game is a kid-friendly outing worth doing. And this isn’t a dad-blog, but then again, it is. Because I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to take a two-year-old to a professional sports stadium but it’s a bit like climbing Everest without oxygen while a Yak screeches at you the entire time. Like yeah, you climbed Everest — a once-in-a-lifetime experience — but you did it with serious risk to your sanity.

But I think the main point, the point I’m trying to make here is this: minor league baseball games are a romantic reality of rural America. The stadiums exist outside the claustrophobia of cities. They stand along roadsides, under the lights like giant produce stands. And like produce stands, they’re loaded with all the glimmer of respondent wholesomeness. Maybe that’s why I went there to reframe life, maybe that’s why minor league baseball helped me put together a personality. It wasn’t as much about building a new one as recovering the better things, which, for some absurd reason, were contained and processable there, in the movement of orange-jersey figures around a field and the crack of yarn wrapped in cowhide.

1. Oh, and on the way home, I had my first panic attack. And while it has a baby’s first panic attack sort of vibe to it now; looking back, it’s still about my least favorite milestone.

2. This is also probably the part where, in a more formal personal essay, I would explore why minor league baseball got me through a tough spot. What that says about the person I became. Off the top of my head, I can argue that it was A.) the warmth of childhood rekindled or B.) a pleasantly numbing trick of coming to terms with sitting in the press box as a spectator after spending so much of my life dedicated to the other side of the equation. An exchange of archetypes.