Just as Well

One of life's little pleasures for me is going old school and listening to baseball games on the radio in the garage of our place when in Hessel, in Michigan's glorious Upper Peninsula. There's something about the anticipation of waiting to be told what's happening which adds excitement to hearing my Detroit Tigers in action. In certain ways, it's better than actually seeing the game. It sparks the imagination. Radio is a book for the ear.

Imagine, then, my consternation when the power went out in the third inning of yesterday's game. Zach McKinstry had just aggressively took third on a Riley Greene single. Dan Dickerson, the play by play man describing the actions, had just called McKinstry safe when the radio clicked off. 

Hitting the on button did not turn the thing back on. I checked the power box in the garage and the breakers were on. Trying the house itself, I found the breakers all on in the electric panel in the back bedroom closet. Flipping lights throughout the house with no response told me what I had by then presumed: there was a power outage. I looked up the local power company on my phone (for of course I had no other Internet access with no power), Cloverland Electric for what that's worth, and reported the issue. Their site told me that around 1300 people in my area had no electricity but they were working on it. So, as the afternoon had bright sunshine in a cloudless sky, I settled into a lawn chair under a cedar tree and read a book.

A couple of hours later as I was in the kitchen, the light came on. Racing out to the garage, I turned the radio on just in time to hear Dickerson proclaim, "...and Texas beats Detroit in the the first game of this series, five to nothing."

I guess it wasn't the worst time for the power to go out. It saved me a bit of anguish.

The damage is done

I feel much better this morning. That's good, because I felt lousy yesterday.

There's not a lot of doubt in my mind that yesterday I did in fact have a reaction to my COVID shot. Tuesday I had my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Wednesday, I certainly hope, let me know its working.

Headachy, nauseous, weaker than I've ever been in my life (quiet Ron), and hotter than blazes. I don't mean warm, I mean hot. Fiery hot. I had never felt like it before. Ever.

But, the bright side. Two Tiger tickets and two $10 off an entire purchase at Meijer coupons. And the Tigers game I chose has a free floppy hat giveaway for the first ten thousand adults. I will be in that number. I guarantee it. Oh, and I'm safe from the corona virus. That's good too, right?

The Tiger game is against Toronto. Would I be too much of a twerp to, ah, sell one of the tickets to a Canadian baseball fan? At face value of course. Then I would be really ahead on the whole thing.

It's only pasteboard

The little things in life, right?

I went down to the Comerica Park box office yesterday to get Tiger baseball tickets. As so many tickets now are electronic I fully expected they would be such. That's not a big deal as I have MLB app on my phone. I needed it for tickets at the last ball game I attended, way back in 2019. I don't like it but it seems the way of the future.

Yet I was given actual physical tickets. My heart truly jumped with joy, as absurd as that sounds. Walking away from the ticket window with honest to goodness pasteboard tickets, holding them in my hands like gold, made me immensely happy, almost childlike with glee. I have baseball tickets, not just an image of tickets on my phone.

I was nearly more excited about that than having the freedom to once again actually go to a game. I don't have a mere picture, I have the real thing.

I think that's pretty cool.

Ernie

Thank you Paul and good evening everyone. Here's the first pitch of the ball game and it's a strike, and we're under way at the corner of Michigan and Turnbull.

That's an approximate recreation of how Ernie Hartwell typically began a radio broadcast of Detroit Tigers baseball. His on air partner, Paul Carey (who had a good baritone voice) would open the game and hand the reigns over to Ernie, who would take it from there. Facebook reminded me yesterday that my son and I had went, along with thousands of others, to pay our respects to the late broadcaster as he lay in state at Comerica Park after his passing in May 2010.

Eleven years after his death and nineteen since he called his last game, Ernie is still remembered fondly by the Tiger faithful. Perhaps I'm simply caught up in the sentimentality of the moment, but I don't know that anyone can ever match his vocal association with the Motor City Nine.

Having a sportscaster who almost is your team seems rare these days. It wasn't only a Detroit thing: there was Vin Scully with the Dodgers, Harry Caray with the Cubs and so forth across the land. Here in Motown we even had Bruce Martyn and his distinctive voice calling Red Wings hockey over the radio as well. Such associations, such distinctive voices, don't seem to be the case anymore.

I'm not going to make the mistake of the reactionary sentimentalists and try argue that sportscasting today is bad. But too many play by play callers are bland and Midwestern. It does, I think, take a bit of the intimacy away. Although I do like the current Tiger radio man (Dan Dickerson) he is in the unfortunate position of not being Ernie. 

To be fair I don't think even Dickerson would put himself in Harwell's class, and at the end of the day I'm not talking moral imperatives but merely differences. Still, no one filled the baseball airwaves like Ernie. Perhaps one day, but I don't see it.

Banking on it

It's not easy to feel bad for a bank. I'm not exactly overwhelmed with grief about it either. It isn't actually even closing, but rather moving into new digs a few blocks away. So it's getting a new building, that's all. Still, my bank, the building I've went to for over forty years, is closing.

In a bit of serendipity the new place is actually right smack on the corner of Michigan and Turnbull, the site of old Tiger Stadium. And I mean smack on the corner, right where the old ticket office was where I bought literally hundreds of tickets to Detroit Tigers baseball over the years. That part is kind of cool.

But the bank building I've went to is closing. I still have accounts there; at least one of my children still does, and they all live out of state. Just the same, when I walked out of it yesterday I thought, I've been coming to this bank a long time. Me Pops actually met Sparky Anderson there: it was the old Tiger skipper's bank.

Yes, I have had many more many worse changes in my life. This one obviously pales compared to those and I don't want to draw too fine of a point. It's more a shaking my head type of reflection: everything eventually changes, right now down to the mundane and trivial in life. 

Why we even think of such things as ours is perhaps the really interesting question. I'll leave that for another day.

Live Tiger baseball. Really.

It isn't quite normal, but it feels close to.normal. I'm watching baseball on a Saturday. Sure, it's Korean league baseball. But it's new, it's baseball, and the quality is pretty good.

The stadium is empty of spectators. That's something which feels weird even watching on TV, when the camera offers a wide angle and you see nothing but seats. Yet we saw a lot of that from Comerica Park last season as it was anyway, eh, Tiger fans?

Oh, be quiet. I'm just seeking a bit of levity here, and we should be able to laugh at ourselves, right?

Interestingly, from another Detroit standpoint the teams playing this morning are the Tigers and the Lions. The Tigers vs. the Lions. Even I won't touch that one.

Yes I will. The Tigers over the Lions all day long.

Take Joe out to the ball game

Me Grandpa Joe didn't care much about sports. I've written before about that. One of his most famous lines, one that I essentially agree with (although I struggle with its full implementation) was, "Drop the ball for all it matters." He's right, quite frankly. Sports and games really aren't particularly important. What's important are matters of real right and real wrong. When he could do something to affect such matters directly (and his own frail humanity didn't get in the way), he did.

Once me Pops, his oldest son and a big baseball fan early on, was promised by a neighbor that he'd take Dad to the Tiger game the coming Sunday. Pops was excited, as a kid and baseball fan would be. He was maybe 10 at the time. He looked forward to Sunday, to see Tiger Stadium and watch his beloved Bengals play in person. We've all been there, all felt that rush of excitement when as kids nirvana was promised. Dad was really looking forward to that game.

Sunday came, and the neighbor backed out. He had decided that he just didn't want to go after all. Pops had approached the guy on the street that morning, who told him, basically, some other time kid. Pops was crushed. So ya know what Joe did?

He took his son to the Tiger game that day. You know why he did that? Because you don't promise something like that to a kid and then back out for no good reason. You. Do. Not.

To my knowledge, that was the only baseball game, and likely the only sporting event ever outside of a rodeo (he took my older brother and I to one of those one once), Grandpa Joe attended. He did that because he was a bigger man that day than that jerk neighbor. You don't promise a kid something important to him and renig. You just don't. Joe knew that. And I don't doubt his son's respect for him grew from such things.