the game or cheer on the Orioles. He’s never been the kind of guy who knows or cares about baseball history or statistics. He didn’t really care about keeping score, or the Orioles winning or Brooks and Boog and all of that. He grew up around all of my heroes, not his. He even got to meet the San Diego Chicken, who was birthed in an egg at a baseball game. (Yeah, he’s the short guy in the picture…)
It’s just not him, and that’s cool.
But part of that is baseball’s fault as well. He just has never thought it was particularly worthwhile or interesting or fun to watch baseball games every night all summer.
But he likes to go to a ballgame now and again, and I usually don’t find out until a week later.
And, even though he’ll turn 22 the day after tomorrow (if you see him at The Rally tomorrow, wish him “Happy Birthday”!) and hasn’t been a baseball lifer like me, he HAS something in his pocket that I don’t have.
I raised my son alone, as a single parent with a major assist from my Mom as the “drop-him-off-anytime” babysitter, especially when he was little. His Mom was in his life, but just not in that day-to-day, pick him up, drop him off, get him ready for school, get him ready for bed kind of way.
That was my job.
Believe me there were more people involved in raising that child than I can possibly list, probably because I was a child when I was raising him. My parental influences and advice givers were the same ones he had.
But the older listeners will all remember talking with him or meeting him or having him answer a phone call to the station or have seen him on the street helping me with promotions. He’s even done some ballpark reports over the years, but he just didn’t think it was tremendously cool or particularly rewarding or fun to be in a locker room full of naked, rich baseball players.
On April 4, 2001, we were living in White Marsh like some updated version of “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” when he called me on my cell phone to see what I was doing that night. He was 16, had a driver license and he was manning the “Official Nasty Van” at the time.
I was going to the Recher Theatre to see The Alarm. It was the second game of the season for the Orioles, and they were hosting the Red Sox on a chilly night.
The Alarm was one of my favorite bands in Hammerjack’s heyday of the late 1980’s and Peters and I struck up a friendship born of pure innocence. And I always HATED going to the ballpark in April and freezing my ass off, probably because my Pop wouldn’t take me when I was a kid. Even though he was always excited that baseball was back early in the season, he was NOT excited by cold-weather baseball after a childhood in the mountains
