I love baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Zen

GF has been writing some about baseball recently. He was a very good player when he was young. I loved baseball, too, and grew up with it with my father teaching my brother and I at a very young age the basics  of the game.I was not the athlete by a long shot that GF or my brother was, but my love for the game was probably every bit as much. It still is. I cannot wait for the late days of February  and Spring training starts.

There is new hope. Maybe this is the year that my team wins the World Series. I can dream, because on opening day, all thirty MLB teams start with the same clean record.

I love the smell of the grass, and when I was a kid going to AAA games in Spokane, I loved the smell of the cigar smoke wafting up in the twilight at the Fairgrounds baseball park, and the cry of he vendors selling overpriced ice cream and hot dogs. Yes, it was heaven.

I suppose that because Spokane was an LA Dodger affiliate, I grew up a  Dodger fan since there were no MLB teams in the Pacific Northwest at the that time. Of course, now I am a die hard Mariner fan, but I still can cheer for the Dodgers because they are in the National League. Anyway, on those clear, crisp October days, the World Series was a huge event. I am sure that GF remembers that we even got to go to to Miner Hall and watch the games on television during school hours. Baseball Was America, America was baseball.

I cannot imagine schools doing that nowadays. Too bad. It is our culture.

The greatest thing of all is that baseball is more than a game. It is a microcosm of life, and when you can master the nuances of baseball, you will understand life. I will write more on this another time.