The sun is lowering over the trees on the horizon, and the sky is lit orange here in Birmingham. The world is filled with daylight. The birds are chattering.
Opening Day of Major League baseball is here. Hallelujah. Tonight, the Atlanta Braves will face off against the Cincinnati Reds. But right now, I am catching a game between two Little League teams in the park near my house.
It’s an unofficial matchup. These kids are young, they’re just practicing, and they’re still unclear on the rules of the game. But they’re trying. God love them.
A child hits a ground ball.
“RUN!” the parents in the bleachers cheer.
The kid drops the bat. He sprints straight toward the pitcher, runs over the mound, leaps over second base, and keeps going until he collides with the centerfielder. And I love it.
When I was a boy, my father and I listened to ball games on his Philco radio, or watched them on an old Zenith television. Almost every night of the summer we kept a scorecard
beside the wooden radio and a bag of parched peanuts nearby.
When we weren’t following baseball, we were playing catch. When we weren’t doing that, we were at Little League games, like this one. When we weren’t doing that, we were in church daydreaming about Glenn Hubbard.
Of course, my childhood baseball career was cut short. My father died in a terrible way. It was the kind of death that makes everyone in a small town gasp when they read it in the papers. It was though someone had erased the sun.
And something else bad happened on the same day of his passing. And I mean the ACTUAL DAY of his death.
It was an announcement on the national news. The commissioner of Major League Baseball stood at a podium and proclaimed that there would be no World Series that year.
It was the…