Going back to elementary school from Kindergarten all the way through 5th grade I LOVED baseball. I think I loved all sports as a kid, but baseball definitely took the cake. We would talk about baseball to death at the lunch table in school, and many summer days were spent playing baseball in a little open field by the railroad tracks with several of the same neighborhood kids. The summers of 1992, 1993 and 1994 I have great memories of playing summer little league baseball.
Up until that time too I was huge into collecting baseball cards. Whenever I was brought along to the weekly trip to the grocery store, the only solace I would take in after being dragged around the store for a couple hours was a pack or two of cards awaiting me at the end when we got home and instantly scouring through them in hopes of getting a valuable card. I still got a little stack of my most valuable cards, even though they have greatly gone down in worth over the years.
Then a few things happened within a year to turn me off from baseball. The first big thing was the family started spending the first of several summers in a row at a farm. I did not mind the summer farm life, as a matter of fact I think I was the only one of my siblings that enjoyed it when I think back on it, but an unfortunate tradeoff was not being able to take part of summer league baseball and neighborhood pick-up games anymore.
The second of the three deathblows to baseball for me was by 1994, and within the span of a couple years the average price of a pack of baseball cards went up from around 50 to 75 cents to $2 due to Upper Deck taking over the market with their premium produced quality cards and everyone else following suit and upgrading to more expensive material to produce their cards out of. This had a crappy ripple effect to where my parents would no longer pick me up a pack or two of cards to shut me up at the grocery store and before I knew it my baseball card hobby went up in smoke.
The last blow to baseball capping off the hat trick for me was the baseball strike of 1994. As a kid in those elementary school years, I always greatly looked forward to the World Series, even doubly more so than the Super Bowl. At the playground and lunch table, our sports talk went through the roof regardless if the Twins were in the postseason or not. Of course they won the '87 and '91 World Series at the time so it definitely helped they were an awesome team in my impressionable years, but every year we would thoroughly dissect every game of the World Series. In 1994 MLB cancelled the rest of the season with the strike and as a result World Series was cancelled too, and as a then 11 year old kid getting that taken away from me felt atrocious at the time and I just could not go back to baseball. For nearly two decades, I only kept up with baseball from the occasional highlights or big news stories like the Sosa/McGuire home run race and Ripken and Bonds chasing down records. All the big steroid and PED scandals from the past decade helped refrain me from getting back into it too.
So what got me back into baseball? Well, it was a gradual process that started about a year and a half ago. My dad retired in the beginning of 2011, and started going to the local senior center with his newfound free time. They were putting together a bus to go down to the Twins game and back for only $50 a person, which included the ticket. It was my first time ever at a Twins game at the new Target Field, and I loved the experience. Even though there were no announcers and we did not have the greatest seats in the world, I was still easily able to make out what was happening and the atmosphere just got me into all the small little intangibles that took place over the course of a game. The 2012 season came and went and I found myself actually making a little bit of an effort to look into baseball scores on my own and occasionally see what was going on in the league. My mom's boyfriend is a huge Twins fan, and whenever I came over to visit, he was usually in the living room watching the Twins game and I would usually go over and watch a few innings with him. I ended up catching about a dozen or so Twins games this way. I also ended up having an awesome BBQ last year with a couple friends, one of which was a huge Twins fan and the other a huge Cubs fan and when they met in Interleague play we drank quite a bit, and when the Twins won in a nail biter in extra innings I celebrated by drunkenly ordering a throwback Paul Molitor Twins jersey I was debating on for a few months.
Baseball has been back in action for a month now, and I have been keeping up with it on a daily basis now in ways I have not since I was a child. Technology has made it easier, instead of grabbing the morning paper or waiting for ESPN or local news highlights to see if the Twins won, I take advantage of the MLB app on my phone for instant access to the box score and AP write up of the game. I found an awesome Twins podcast, Gleeman and the Geek to help keep me up on all the latest Twins news and analysis and other happenings around the league. I also promised myself to try and catch at least one Twins game a week and I have been making good on that promise so far.
I have caught about six or seven games so far either watching with my mom's boyfriend or at various sports bars/restaurants in town. A new sports bar just opened up a couple weeks ago within a few block of me and I made it there last weekend and loved the place. They had plenty of televisions and they quickly turned it to the Twins game I requested; it was also nice they had 30 beers on tap too.
So yes, a month into the season I have considered myself back on the baseball wagon and enjoying it like I have not in 20 years. Go Twinkies!!!!
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