Osler's Razor

There's a lot to love about Waco, but sometimes there are things I dearly miss. One of them is major league baseball.

The last years in Tiger Stadium, before the move, I shared season tickets with some people from work. I sat in a section full of old-timers, the people who bought a scorecard and brought their own pencil, and genuinely cared what happened. Lou Whitaker would fall, maybe hurt, and a lady behind me would gasp. Ernie Harwell would lean out of the broadcast booth and wave, and they would tell a story about the day they met him, when he was walking out of the park with Al Kaline. People bought the same thing to eat every time, and I did, too-- a bag of peanuts from the corner outside Nemo's bar. The Tigers were good and bad, but the experience was the same, with dusk coming down at the edge of downtown in the old city.

I did see Mark Fidrych pitch once, in 1976. I was thirteen years old. He was having an amazing year, acting like he didn't care what anyone thought. He patted the mound, he talked to the ball, he said crazy happy things to the press. You could tell what was going on by looking at the batters-- Carl Yastrzemski, looking at the mound like he was watching a river flow backwards. And then, a few minutes later, Yaz was walking back to the dugout with a little half-smile on his face as Fidrych smoothed out the mound. At that moment I jumped up when I saw that my Dad did, reached up to slap his hand and happy to be next to him, still a child just like The Bird.