I Love Baseball!

I have lots of baseball hats with all kinds of different logos and slogans on the fronts of them, but my favorite is my Atlanta Braves hat. I wear it out in public even when the Braves aren't playing well. Lately my idea of a really great evening is eating "camp-out" style dinners in the living room with my husband, Bob, and our 4 cats all gathered around the television set, watching a Braves game. I LOVE baseball...now.

I haven't always liked baseball. I was only indifferent to the game until my early years in high school when I was asked to go to a baseball game by a boy I had never been out with before. I don't remember that boy now, but I sure do remember that baseball game: It was a double header played on one of the hottest afternoons I can ever remember. One of the games was 17 innings and I think the other one was 12 innings...both games had 1-0 scores. It was an excruciating, interminable nightmare. I felt the sun burn my face to fuchsia leather and my brain to pudding. I thought I would literally expire from the mind-numbing booooooooooooooredom. I went home hating the boy forever and baseball for a long, long time.

I managed to avoid contact with baseball for decades. I got reintroduced to major league baseball by of way of doing a favor for my son who was stationed overseas in 1992 when the Atlanta Braves got hot and had made the playoffs. He asked if I would mind video-taping the playoff games for him and sending him the tapes. Neither Bob nor I was VCR-literate enough to do anything more than poke the tape in the machine and record, so we ended watching the games while taped. We became hopelessly hooked—the Otis Nixon catch, the Francisco Cabrera hit, the Sid Bream slide over home plate to win and the Braves "pile-on" that followed!!! Wow...that was it and has been ever since.

I just LOVE baseball!

Barbara Golding
St. Simons Island, Georgia (where they DON'T have Turner South)