Baseball Tragic

When I was a callow youth of 15 or 16 I adored both winter and summer sports. May I modestly confess that I was slightly better than the average bloke at both Aussie Rules football (first love) and Cricket. Baseball, which some may be surprised to learn was a pretty big deal in Melbourne c.1950s as its premium grade teams used to play 'curtain-raisers' to VFL (fore-runner of AFL) football 1st grade games while the footy club 2nd 18s used to play on 'away' grounds. My younger brother was very good at cricket (and not fond of footy at which he was good but suffered a serious injury early in his teen years). During the winter, he played baseball with the dual purpose of avoiding body-contact injuries whilst keeping his small ball skills sharp for cricket. I kinda liked watching his baseball exploits and could easily have followed his lead... except for my abiding desire to push my footy talents as far as
I could manage.

In the event, I made it to VFL reserve grade status with the famous Collingwood club, but a combo of injuries, work, national service, marriage and age curtailed further likelihood of advancement... so I drifted out of active sports participation altogether. But not interest. Among other things I pined over not playing baseball when I probably could have followed my brother's lead. (BTW, he also abandoned sports for academic betterment... achieving a first class honors civil engineering degree at Melbourne Uni. and later worked in that field in both Australia and France).

By the 1990s my interest in baseball almost became an obsession. A 1974 work associated trip took me to San Francisco where the locals imbued me with Giants (the local MLB team) lore even tho' the trip coincided with the baseball off-season. Being an avid fan of the Giants from that near encounter led to a post retirement trip to SF in 1993 for the singular purpose of seeing the team play a 6 game home-stand.

It was, and remains one of the most enjoyable experiences of life... exceeding all my long-held imaginings completely.

Yesterday, the Giants notched their third World-Series championship in the last five years. Nirvana!