Baseball, North of the Border

I’m in Washington, DC this week and since summer is the oppressive season here, people are bemoaning the 90-degree weather, much as I might be enjoying it after a cold spring in Vermont.

This town not only swelters with heat but also with passion for the Washington Nationals, who have (for now) the best record in baseball and are commonly suspected (too early for expected) to go deep into the post-season this year.  My loyalties are up the road with the Baltimore Orioles

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, but at least I’m close enough that I’m not the only person wearing the black-and-orange O’s cap, as I am back home.

Sharing my enthusiasm last weekend with my Canadian friend Rob, I realized many of the significant moments in my baseball life involve Canada.  Since I’ve lived most of my life within 100 miles of the US/Canada border – a fact I share with 75 percent of Canadians – this shouldn’t be a surprised, but still.

First major league game – July 3, 1985, Toronto Blue Jays 3, New York Yankees 2.  Forty-six-year-old knuckleballer Phil Niekro was denied his 296th win on a Wednesday afternoon.  Toronto’s old Exhibition Stadium was a pit.  A football stadium by design, our cheap seats were so far out in right field, I wound up with a stiff neck from staring hard left for three and half hours.

In 1988, the Orioles lost 107 games, a disaster of a year.  In 1989, a miraculous team rose from those ashes and finished second in the American League East, eliminated on September 30th, in the penultimate game by those Blue Jays.  I watched that game in a bar on the coast of British Columbia, endearing myself to the locals neither by cheering for the American team (Rob: “Gee, you think?”) or by wearing a Greenpeace baseball jersey (unpopular in logger country).  The O’s loss was likely good for my health.

In 1992, I was far from Canada, in Dallas, Texas watching the Blue Jays win game six and the World Series with a bunch of executives from the Kinko’s copy shop chain (long story).  In 1993, I watched the Boo Jays beat (again in six games) the Philadelphia Philles.  This time I saw the final game from the Press Club (yet another bar) in Windsor, Ontario.  No loggers and no chance of enmity, because if I can’t cheer my team, I cheer my league.

My crowning Canadian baseball memory – so far – occurred October 11, 2003, game three of the American League Championship Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Yankees.  Pedro Martinez versus Roger Clemens, in what then was expected to be his last appearance at Fenway Park.  Adrienne and I were in Montreal for a weekend getaway but there was no way I would miss this.  As she napped in the hotel, I ran frantically from bar to bar, only to see soccer on every screen until after ten blocks I found the game on a big screen in an Irish bar on Peel Street, filled with raucous Red Sox fans (four guys in Yankees caps sat demurely at a corner table).

When the Martinez/Clemens head-hunting contest turned into a bench clearing brawl in the fourth inning (with 31-year-old Martinez tossing 72-year-old Yankees coach Don Zimmer on his butt), the Canadian province of Red Sox Nation was on its feet – on the tables – and screaming for joy and blood.  As things settled, I ran to a pay phone in the corner and called the hotel.  “You’ve gotta get over here,” I screamed through the din.  Adrienne arrived for the seventh inning but it was history by then.  The Sox won the fight; the Yankees won the game (and the series).  The Yankees fans remained uncharacteristically (but wisely) demure to the end.

So here I am in Natsville.  The Nationals used to be the Montreal Expos, but they were never this good north of the border but then I don’t think any fans clad only in a sequined jockstrap run onto the field, as I once witnessed in Montreal.  Something lost, something gained.  After all, it’s only a game.

© Mark Floegel 2013

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