On an unrelated note, did you last two guys come in together or is the baseball thing just co-incidental?
I have no connection with Keith previous to being a poster on this board recently... but early spring is when each of us seem to have joined and baseball starts then, so... its not such a reach that two Americans joining in the early spring might have baseball on their minds.
In my case, the Little Falls Mets were a minor league baseball team in the town I grew up in, in northern New York State... until they moved to Western MA when I was nine. They were the lowest level affiliate of the New York Mets, the team where Keith's namesake attained his greatest succees, so yeah, that's a little bit of a coincedence but not a huge one. Said namesake has been in the news lately, anyway, for commenting that he considered the San Diego club inappropriate for having one of their on-the-field doctors, such as working in the dugout and the lockerroom during play, being a woman.
My affection for my hometown's former team is more metaphoric than just sporting, however, as... you have to understand... there were 6,000 people where I grew up, it was kind of an Insane Idea to put a professional sports team (even in the lowest minors) in a town that small in history as late as the late 1970s. Towns of 50,000 were considered small for that level of baseball, even then, and thirty years later, towns of 100,000 are smallish for that. It's crazy that we had a pro ball team for two seconds, let alone eleven years, nine of which were the formative years of my life.
They were literally the only thing to do on summer nights, going to those games, and even the players sort of couldn't believe that they were actually playing there, in this little town where there were more cows than people... that these 18 or 19 year old kids from the Deep South or suburban Los Angeles, a year or two of playing a children's game away from being millionaires living in Manhattan skyscrapers, sleeping on piles of loose women and tightly-packed cocaine... were in this town for four months of the summer, whatever it meant.
It was a weird kind of magic, that something so Big City and Important could be happening in a place known primarily for cheese, paper mills and the majority of the population being on public assistance. It was Strictly Impossible but here it was, from middle of June to middle of September, we were Somewhere and Someones. Everyone has an aunt or an older sister that were so unbelievably impressed by the idea that they... uh... got to service these strange fellows who had a half a shot at being Rich Men and Gods.
And then, just as I was getting old enough to really understand how Weird and Amazing this situation was, a larger small town lost THEIR team and a rich man from there bought ours and moved it there... and in the middle of the night in the winter, the magic disappeared and our sense of being Important and Special disappeared like candy floss in a sunburst of rain. Like it had never been there at all, maybe we just imagined it.
Anyway, I didn't mean to write a book here, just saying, my screenname's origin is just sort of my personal symbolism for mouring the longshots and celebrating outrageous fortunes in life, it sorta... encapsulates the funny sadness of life to me, even as I live in Los Angeles trying to make it in entertainment (a longer shot than becoming a New York Met from being a Little Falls Met, that's for sure) with my little hoarde of baseball pennants and cards and pins and programmes, trying to remind myself that it Did Happen and so on, that Big Pointless Miracles can be just around the corner and et cetera.
As for baseball, the key is to imagine cricket...
except awesome.
But you probably knew this. You're the Doc, Doc.
Author
Topic: Didn't they show you that video in the sixth grade?- 1 May 2006 (Read 14613 times)