Pop’s Baseball
I don’t know what it is about baseball. I crave it all winter. I bust with anticipation from the final out of the World Series, to spring training, then can’t wait for the real games to start. Baseball has always been there. I played baseball some as a kid. Whiffle ball and backyard ball were constant activities. The memories I have throwing the ball with my dad will always be with me. Dad threw the ball long past when he should’ve. God bless him. When he couldn’t throw over hand, he threw underhand. He told me it was the same technique the referees use in football games. He could’ve kicked it back at me, I enjoyed every single moment of havin’ a catch with my Pop. Baseball is more than a game. And for me it’s the greatest sport ever.
When the Reds made the World Series in 1990, Pop came home with tickets to the game that night. He’d won the raffle at work and got 2 seats. I was jumping up and down. I was 20. I’d moved back in for a few months to get my life back on track. But my joy was cut short when he announced that he was taking my mom instead of me. I was heartbroken. So I watched the next 4 games on the TV and of course they won all 4.
I would call Pop sometimes just to chat, and a chatter he wasn’t. But then I’d ask if he watched the game last night, and he’d get to talking for a few more minutes. He loved to talk about Sean Casey and Dimitri Young, Danny Graves and Pokey Reece and Jose Rijo. I’d bounce things off him, rumors I’d heard, just to get his reaction. He could talk about baseball. Not stats and geek stuff, mostly just how he enjoyed attitudes and playing the game right. He knew baseball, he knew what he liked. He believed in and loved every hometown player.
I have a picture of me and my Mom and Pop at I believe the last game he ever went to. I was hosting clients at GABP in a luxury suite. He was amazed and told me how different it was watching baseball in such royal digs. I love that picture.
I remember when Mom called and said that Dad had fallen. They were at the hospital and he was ok. I was watching a Red’s game at the time she called. He was ok at the time. I raced there from about 20 miles away and he was up and talking just fine. He wanted to know about the score. The Red’s had won on a homerun if I recall correctly. He was more into that than the bump on his knee. He went home with Mom an hour later.
Then a few weeks later he fell again and they admitted him for tests. His battle started then, but the war was already coming to a close. There would be no more battles as there was no fight left in his body. And when he went to assisted living a few days later, I’d go to him in the middle of the day. We’d watch the Cubs day tilts and Sportscenter. He would drift in and out. But he seemed to be awake and watching when the 7:10 game started each night. We did this for a few weeks. But then the games would start and he would still be sleeping. I’d field some comments from his roommate about the game, he was much more alert than Pop. I’d make the drive home, listen to Marty and Joe, and try to make mental notes for Pop, if he had some questions about the game. He never did.
And when he was moved to hospice, they had no TV’s in the rooms. But I remember telling him about the game from the night before and reading the sports page to him. He rarely reacted but at times, he would give me a slight fist pump or squeeze my hand then drift back off, probably without a memory of the moment. I remember them all to this day. Luckily this only went on for a day or two. I can still picture me reading the sports section to him, the paper folded neatly into quarters so I could hold it in one hand. He’d taught me this technique decades earlier, said it was how you read the paper on the subways in New York. And so I read and read. The baseball season was steaming along and Dad was fading. Aloud I would read from the paper in one hand, and with my other hand, I’d hold his. I told him I loved him and always left the paper by his side when I left the room. “In case you wanna read this before I get back” I’d say to him.
And the night he died, I went to use the phone in the nurse’s station at that wonderful hospice unit. And the game was playing softly on a small radio on the counter. I called everyone close and told them that the time to say goodbye was upon us, maybe a day, no more. My sisters came to take over the vigil and I went home for some much needed rest. I watched the rest of the ballgame from my couch that night, and prayed. I prayed to God that this would be over soon. He wasn’t coming back, so please, let this be over.
Amy called around 11:00. It was over. She said, “He’s gone”. And so I got into my car, listened to the postgame show while I drove. And went to see him for the last time. The whole trip I was comforted by familiar radio voices, discussing a game that me and Pop loved so much.
Today I watch the Reds as much as I can. With a growing family and young girls, I don’t get to see the games as much as I’d like, but I can usually catch the end of the games. And with every game, there is a minute that makes me think about Pop. But for most of those moments, I don’t feel sad. I just wish he were enjoying it at home, in his chair with a brandy.
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