I’m not much of a baseball fan. When I was a kid living in Flushing, NY, three of the sixteen major league teams were in New York — the Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the New York Giants. We were Giants fans. My dad took me to see games at all three of Yankee Stadium, Ebbets field, and the Polo Grounds.
I never saw Babe Ruth. I did see Willie Mays and Yogi Berra play. I probably saw Jackie Robinson also, but I was pretty young, his historical significance was lost on me at that age, and the Dodger players didn’t make as much impression on me as the Giants we rooted for or the Yankees that most of my friends were fans of. When my family moved to Lexington MA my dad and I went to Fenway once just so he could say he had seen Ted Williams play.
But I do feel that when the Red Sox are in the playoffs I need to at least turn on the games. We listened to the first game against Cleveland on the radio on our way to Maine. The only station we could find that had the game was from Cleveland. We watched most of the last few innings of the last playoff game, up to Pedroia’s big hit in the 8th. At that point I said, “If they blow a lead this big, they deserve to lose,” and turned the TV off.
So with that background, here’s the pennant fallout:
First, on Monday at work, two Japanese women were sitting in the kitchenette/lunch/break area having an animated conversation in Japanese with a man wearing a Red Sox cap. I thought, those must all be big Daisuke fans, and it’s a great day for Boston’s Japanese community.
Second, on Tuesday at klezmer band rehearsal, at the very end, when I had packed my baritone horn away and was stowing my mute and valve oil in the trumpet case, Barry started playing one more piece on the piano — Take Me Out to the Ball Game. I picked the trumpet back up, asked what key he was in, and found half the notes by ear.