For the past two decades I’ve taught in Cracow every July. I’d not trade the experience for anything, but it’s had one drawback: I haven’t seen baseball’s All Star Game in a long time. The game itself is no big deal. But the sight of so many great players gathered in one place is an annual reminder of the pastime’s remarkable capacity to renew itself, generation to generation. The rancid steroid era ends; the era of Josh Hamilton, Matt Kemp, Stephen Strasburg and Justin Verlander begins. Tell me baseball isn’t divinely inspired.
My grandfather Weigel taught me the game during steaming hot Baltimore summers in the late 1950s. There wasn’t much fancy about old Memorial Stadium in those days: a brick horseshoe with two decks; a non-exploding scoreboard; plank benches against whose splinters we armored ourselves by buying an Evening Sun on the way into the park. Tickets cost less than $10; I doubt that my popcorn and Coke set my grandfather back by a buck; there were neither mascots, nor ballgirls, nor ear-splitting rock ‘n’ roll between innings. Uniforms were honest baseball flannel and outfielders’ gloves didn’t approximate the circumference of peach baskets. It was a simpler, ruder environment, to which you didn’t come for an “entertainment experience”; you came for baseball.
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