Turn the radio on and play ball

I’m not an overly excitable sports fan. As I’ve said before, I can take or leave most sports. But, one game I really enjoy is baseball.
Even though I’ve always been lousy at it myself — I’m more like the dad playing catch with his son in that Volkswagen commercial — I like baseball. It may be because baseball was the main game I remember us playing in grade school and junior high. Ours were more pick-up games during recess than actual organized team sports, although while I was going to the country school at Hubbard we did play a couple of other country schools on Friday afternoons in the spring.
None of us ever were going to be professional players, although we had our daydreams about it. Actually, none of us expected to even be high school players. It all was for fun more than anything else. As noted, I wasn’t particularly good at it, although I did make an occasional catch and got the odd hit now and then. I still enjoyed it.
My favorite team then, as now, was the St. Louis Cardinals. (OK, I like their rivals the Cubs, too, because I got hooked on them after I moved to Mountain Home.) I suspect that’s because theirs were the only pro baseball games carried on KCMC out of Texarkana and the ones I got to hear. For a few years in the late ’60s, Dad and Mom ran a little store at Hubbard. It was a sideline for Dad, who was working at Red River Army Depot. We didn’t have TV at the store, but there was a radio in the back tuned to KCMC, a country station then as well as the local home for the Cardinals.
Those were the days when the Cardinal lineup included such players as Lou Brock, Curt Flood, Tim McCarver, Bob Gibson, even Bob Uecker and some guy named Roger Maris. It was fun on a summer afternoon to sit in the cool back room, or in the yard just outside the door, and listen to the game, sometimes with an icy Dr Pepper from the cooler and peanuts. Naturally, the peanuts went into the Dr Pepper, creating a cold, salty-sweet delight.
Sitting there, I did my best to picture the game in my head as Harry Caray described it. While it was fun to occasionally watch a game on TV in glorious black and white, I really enjoyed listening to them more. When things got tight, it seemed more intense having to imagine what the scene looked like as Harry Caray painted his word pictures. I think having to use your mind’s eye did more to put you in the picture as you visualized the hits, the races for the ball, the squeeze plays between second and third. I might not have played well, but listening to the game put me right in there with them.
It also was nice on a summer night when the Cards played on the West Coast. I could lie in bed with the windows open and a fan moving air through the room while listening to the game in far-off, exotic California. I’d drift off to sleep with dreams of hitting homeruns.
To this day, I still delight in listening to to the Cards on the radio and enjoy the game descriptions and chatter between Mike Shannon (a Cardinal himself in the ’60s) and John Rooney. Many nights when I leave work, I switch the Tacoma’s radio to a Cardinal station and unwind with the game on the way home.
Sometimes, it’s the best part of my day. I’m not sure if it’s because of being off from work, or being transported to a time of summer afternoons and Dr Peppers with peanuts in them. Either way, thanks, Cards.