Baseball, You're Beautiful

In pursuit of the home run ball, how a national tragedy made my dreams come true, and why sunflower seeds need to make a full-scale comeback

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: baseball, my favorite pastime.

Ingredient List

🎵 : My favorite baseball-ish songs: “My Oh My” by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis (trust me on this one), “Apple Cider, I Don’t Mind” by Modern Baseball, “‘98 Braves” by Morgan Wallen, “The Boys of Summer” by Don Henley, “Catfish,” by Bob Dylan, “All the Way” by Eddie Vedder, “Barry Bonds” by Kanye West, “Mrs. Robinson” by Simon & Garfunkel, and more

Listen to the playlist on Spotify

📖 : My favorite baseball book of all-time: “The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It” edited by Lawrence Ritter // Via Wikipedia: In the 1960s, Ritter travelled 75,000 miles to interview his subjects, sitting for hours listening to them tell their tales into his tape recorder. The book retells their stories in the first-person, as they were told to Ritter.” It’s amazing how many parallels exist from back then and now (i.e. players blowing their money on fancy new cars).

Still reading: “A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them” by Timothy Egan // Almost finished it but my e-libary loan expired and I have to wait another two months to get it back 😩

Course 1

A Word of Gratitude: Grass Fed

Last weekend, I took my kids outside to play wiffle ball in the parking lot beside our house. It’s the kind of parking lot where if either boy ever became a professional sports player (they won’t), a camera crew would come back and say: this is where it all started. There’s a lot of dirt, broken pavement and cement, wind-blown trash, unruly weeds, one abandoned car, and likely a disintegrating condom. 

Despite this abundance of junk, there’s nothing good to use for a base. This has been an ongoing problem because it’s hard to remember which random spots on the ground to run towards every time someone gets a hit. As I was walking out the door, trying to figure out what we were going to use that day, I looked, and there– along the wall of the parking lot– was a rolled-up section of artificial turf.

Not the garbage plastic grass of old, but a really nice strip of solid, thick grass implanted on a rubberized mat. So much artificialness that it looked really bad for the environment, but really good for baseball. It was also big enough that I could cut out four solid squares for bases and still have a whole big section to use as a pitcher’s mound. 

So that’s what I did. And now we have a baseball field that we can roll out on a moment’s notice.

And for that I am grateful.

Course 2

Appetizer: Wonka Whipple-Scrumptious Fudge-Mallow Delight

I’ve been to many baseball games over the course of my life, and throughout that time, my white whale has always been the home run ball. Even a foul ball. Catching it, grabbing it, stealing it from a little kid. I was always more than envious of anyone who could catch– bare-handed– a ball hit 430 feet from one place to another. I had daydreamed, many times, of catching a home run or foul ball in a beer cup and pounding the beer with the baseball in it. I thought it was an impossibility, a “what if” scenario waiting to become a legendary party story (it did actually happen to this guy, eventually).

I wanted to feel the infinite scarlet seams, smell the dirt from the infield, see the mud from the Delaware River embedded deep into the ivory rawhide.

The years passed, and still nothing. No matter where I sat or stood or moved around, nothing came my way. Until a crisp September night in 2022.

We went to see the Orioles as a family and, as the cheapest baseball fan around, we bought the cheapest tickets we could in the upper deck at Camden Yards. (Side note: You can bring your own food and drinks into the Orioles stadium, which of course we always do.) At the time, my kids could last about three innings before the Kids Zone playground called their name, so in the top of the fourth we headed down to the first level.

The Orioles were playing the Houston Astros that night and it felt like a playoff vibe because we were still in the hunt for a wild card berth. The vibes were high. Of course, it was a scoreless game until we stopped watching it, at which point the Oriole started scoring runs. 

Like any good baseball fan, I left my family to walk around the stadium, catching the game as I went along. As I got to the flag court in right field, Orioles center fielder Cedric Mullins was coming up to bat with one man on base. Mullins is a lefty and he’s not known as a power hitter, which meant that if he did hit a home run, chances are it would be short and on the flag court. I stood a few feet off the foul line, behind the rows of fans watching the game in the standing room only section.

There was the pitch, the crack of the bat, and a ball arcing high into the night. It was on a missile-like trajectory aimed directly at my chest. I knew the people in front of me were all going to reach up to grab it, and knowing there was a good chance they would not, I took a couple steps back hoping it would bounce off. Sure enough, the ball hit their hands and dropped right in front of me. I dove for it and grabbed it with both hands before anyone else could react.

I triumphantly stood up with my prize, and let me tell you– aside from the entering Hogsmeade at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, there was nothing in the world that made me feel like a kid again. I high-fived everyone around me before taking off through the stadium to show my family, like Charlie Bucket running through the streets of London after finding the final golden ticket.

When I made it back to the playground, I excitedly showed my kids the baseball, relaying the important news of the night: I just caught a home run ball from Cedric Mullins!

They pretended it was cool, but really it looked like every other baseball they’d ever seen. They ran back to the playground to go down the slide for the 43rd time that night. I tossed the ball to myself, still not believing what just happened.

Just kids being kids.

Course 3

The Main: Cap‘n Crunch

If anyone reading this knows me, even vaguely, you know of my love for the Baltimore Orioles. And if you’ve known me since elementary school, you know of my love for a singular Baltimore Orioles player: Cal Ripken, Jr. As a kid, I imitated everything about the man– his batting stance, his fielding style, even his autograph. I used to rehearse his handwriting in my class journal (it was middle school, don’t act like you weren’t just as weird) and I can still do a flawless imitation to this day.

To save you the same fate as the rest of my friends and family who have dealt with my obsessive fandom for decades, I’ll skip to the important part. When Cal Ripken, Jr. broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games streak in September 1995, I would’ve given my whole life, my entire baseball card collection (which Beckett Baseball Monthly estimated to be somewhere between $52 and $946), and certainly my siblings, to be at that game. I felt viscerally connected to The Streak.

It began exactly one week after I was born and kept going when I learned to walk, then to run, when I moved houses, when I played backyard baseball with the neighbor kids, and when my dad went to work every day at Hershey’s Chocolate factory. Cal kept playing games, literally all of them– every day in the spring when I bounced a ball off a wall for hours on end. Every day in the summer when I read the sports pages and saw his name in the box score while eating Cap‘n Crunch for breakfast. Every day in the fall when I stepped on the bus for a new school year. Every year of my childhood when I made friends and lost friends and found new ones.

It was a thread through all of our days, showing us how to show up for the next day of life. Yeah, that’s a bit syrupy and pie-in-the-sky, but ideals and truths could be one-dimensional in the nineties. This is a thing and that’s how it is. Hard work was respected, idols were larger than life, and there was no one to tell you otherwise.

But when Cal tied the record, then broke it– punctuated by home runs in each game for good measure– I never got to see any of it, not in person or out of person, even though it was broadcast on network TV. Instead, I had to go to church on a Wednesday night. As a parent, there are few things that I haven’t forgiven my parents for, but that is one of them. Which I guess is proof that whatever I learned in church that night wasn’t as valuable as watching the Ironman take a victory lap around Camden Yards.

Of course, I would go to my fair share of Orioles games in the future.

I’ve been to playoff wins, pennant clinchers, and a whole bunch of walk-off wins. I’ve seen Josh Hamilton hit four home runs in one game (one of the rarest feats in baseball) and Mike Trout rob J.J. Hardy over the center field wall.

But of the now-hundreds of games I’ve attended, there is one that stands out to me the most: another game scheduled for September, aligned by strange circumstances and morbid fate that combined to put me in a seat for which– to this day– I almost feel guilty for having.

That year was a special year. I had just wrapped up my freshman year of college, finally finding my place and my people at school. I had recently purchased a CD burner, Kazaa had replaced Napster, and mixed CDs were being produced at an almost breathtaking rate. Things were looking up and the world seemed limitless.

While I was beginning a new chapter of life, Cal was winding down his epic baseball story. That year would be the farewell tour for his illustrious 21-year career. As such, I wanted to be there for his last homestand in Baltimore. I had to be there for the last homestand. However, tickets for all three games sold out six months in advance. Of course, I didn’t have the foresight to buy them early in the season– I was a 20-year old who wasn’t even sure how college was paid for (trust me, I soon learned how, along with the magic of interest).

To get my hands on a ticket was an issue. Single tickets were going for minimum $150 each on eBay, an unfathomable sum at the time. All summer, I tried, hoping something would happen to get me to that game, an errant eBay listing or a friend of a friend I didn’t have. Nothing came through. I had no choice but to not have a choice. 

I headed back to school at the end of August, and around that time a friend told me that he had two tickets for an Orioles game in the middle of September. They were only $15 each and were decent seats in the overhang section. Even though it meant driving four hours back home to central PA then down to Baltimore, I was in. I’d visit my family and take my little brother to the game. The game was scheduled for Saturday, September 15, 2001.

And then four planes crashed into two towers, an open field, and a government building.

When 9/11 happened, the last thing on my mind was baseball. For starters, the Orioles were terrible that year. But also, I was just hoping not to get drafted, because for whatever reason, that seemed like a really plausible thing to all of us. I don’t even remember what we did that week, I think we just sat on balconies talking and wondering, watching some news and hoping George W. Bush would bomb the hell out of whoever was responsible. Dig up some WMDs. None of that ever happened, and neither did the baseball game.

Well, kind of. 

Because of 9/11, the Major League Baseball season was put on pause. The Orioles were set to play the Blue Jays the night of the attacks, as well as the next two. Obviously those games were canceled. That weekend, they would play the Red Sox (the series I had tickets for). That series was also suspended. But because those series were regular season games, they needed to be played. And because there was still three weeks of baseball left in the season, they couldn’t just domino all the games forward– it would be a logistical nightmare. So instead, MLB took the two series that were suspended and tacked them onto the end of the schedule. First, the Blue Jays series, then the Red Sox. 

Meaning, because of the tragic events of 9/11, in which the loss and upheaval of our country was immeasurable, because of all that– I had just landed tickets to Cal Ripken, Jr.’s second-to-last game of his career. For $15 each. Thanks, Osama.

Even now, I feel an unsettled guilt in reminiscing on what it meant for me to be in the stadium on that day in October. A sold-out crowd going absolutely wild every time the hometown hero came up to bat, holding up the orange signs they gave to us at the gate. Me and my little brother, a part of it. My childhood hero, saying goodbye. Us, waving back, knowing he’d never see us but hoping he’d feel it.

Also, my childhood, saying goodbye to me, knowing that after the events that brought me to this game, nothing could be the same. And really, just look around – it never has.

The Red Sox swept the Orioles on that final homestand. It didn’t matter and I didn’t even remember. I assumed we won. Because for that night in October, baseball kept us in the moment before everything changed.

Course 4

Dessert: Sunflower Seeds

Last week, I was at the grocery store and saw a bag of David sunflower seeds on the top shelf and thought to myself: “You know, it’s been awhile.” As an adult, I’ve had a couple relapses into the salt life of sunflower seeds, but– like most people– the act of cracking and spitting belongs to the realm of little league baseball. 

Growing up, our coaches either smoked cigs or had a back pocket full of Redman right below their ass cracks the the horizon of their jeans where their ass cracks stuck out a good two inches. Those addictions were off-limits for a few more years. And while Big League Chew did a good job of replacing nicotine with a sugar high, it still seemed a little too kid-like.

Sunflower seeds bridged that gap. Part chaw, part nutrition, and part puzzle-solving, the art and style of chewing seeds depended on the person. Some liked to take a whole handful and create a wad in the cheek, letting that sodium do its thing as it surely gave us all mild cases of hyponatremia. Others would put a few in, chew ‘em up and spit ‘em out. The real artists were those who could individually crack each one, extract the food and spit the rest. Bonus points if you could spit it down the coaches crack from five feet away.

That, of course, is the only way to eat a sunflower seed.

End of Menu

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Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.

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