Baseball Ga-Ga

We were just reading a piece about the decline and hopeful destruction of Rolling Stone. The author went into the usual recital of how music was a refuge during a rough adolescence. Queen got plenty right in Radio Ga-Ga

We were nodding our head in agreement until we realized that music wasn't really a refuge for us in the years from say, 1987 to 1993.

We found refuge in baseball.

Our first season as a fan was 1987. Here were The Boss's Yankees, always good but not good enough. They won 89 games that year. Our man was Dave Winfield, rightie to rightie. I mean, come on:

That was a 14-13 epic slug match in which the Yankees took first place from the Jays, and our first moment as a baseball fan.

We had our Dave Winfield batting practice T well into college.

Back then we could watch any baseball game. TBS was in our cable package so we watched a lot of bad Braves baseball. So was WGN.  We saw a lot of the Cubs. And of course the Mets. We loathed the Mets for a long time, jealousy we guess. It was sweet when the Cubs took the division from them in 1989. That was a fun, scrappy team.

One of our favorite pastimes was remaking rosters. We loved to do deals in our head and on paper and remake a team into a contender. We always made fair trades, of course we also knew how said players were going to do the next season, so heh.

We also played a game called Statis Pro-Baseball. One could play a game in half an hour or so. We did entire seasons.

As Queen might sing, our only friend through teenage nights.

Baseball kept us warm. We saw the Yankees go from good, to god-awful to good again just before they established their 90's dynasty. We missed part of that because we were furious about the '94 strike. Besides, in the spring of 1994 I met a girl.

I'll ask her what she thinks about all that later today.