Why I Love Baseball, Part 1 (of an open-ended series)

I love baseball, and I know it shows. I am not a "sports fan" -- I am a baseball fan. There is a dreadful amount of marketeers worldwide who continually fail to grasp this simple distinction.

One reason why I love baseball is that it has charm, a dimension of suitable silliness that simply does not exist in any other organized sporting competition. Today's exhibit: Dave Bresnahan. Some readers may know him better as "the potato guy".

In 1987, hanging on as a backup catcher in AA level on a cellar-dwelling team, Bresnahan contrived to break the tension of the end of a long summer. He decided to pull a prank play, throw something to third base, and deliberately miss the fielder, to trick the runner into breaking for home, where Bresnahan would have the ball and tag him out. He decided to use a peeled, carved potato as the doppelganger ball. The play worked, but when the potato was pointed out, the umpire awarded the runner home plate, and the game continued. The story has only grown in the 20 years since. The potato is now preserved by the folks at The Baseball Reliquary.

Great story, yes? It gets better. Bresnahan's old team (he was released the next day, and his baseball career was over), the Williamsport Bills (now the Crosscutters), recently gave away bobbleheads of Dave Bresnahan, throwing a potato.

Bobble Dave, spud in hand.

Last year, the Portland Beavers gave away bobbleheads of former Vancouver Canadians player Rodney McCray, in honor of his legendary crashing through the outfield wall (link to video) in Portland in 1991.

McCray crashes through a wall panel, just like in real life.

And you just don't get these sorts of things in other sports -- not the antics or events, not the legends afterwards, and certainly not the decade anniversary celebrations (no matter how silly or small; the point is, these things get remembered).

And that's one reason why I love baseball. Even the ridiculous bits of history are there to be looked back upon, and commemorated again later.

Namesake

Oh, lotta catching up to do. We were away nearly the whole of July, and there were many adventures worth mentioning. But I made a promise to do this one first.

We took a day trip down to the White Plains, NY, area -- still a bit familiar to me, even 21 years after I last co-oped for IBM there -- and visited our daughter Amalie's namesake.

My grandmother-in-law, Pauline, passed away six years ago this month, just before the great unpleasantness -- and while I would have loved her to stay longer, in some ways it was just as well, as she deserved to live in a better world than what we have today. I only met her the one time, on a trip with Val to Wisconsin in, oh, 1995 I think it was. She was delightful, and honest in that special seniors' way -- tell you to scoot, leave, she needed her time alone. No one minded.

Long ago, after she had her only child, my father-in-law Jack, she remarried to a man named Spiegel, who had a sister, Amelie. Pauline and Amelie were great friends as well as sisters-in-law. And, glad tidings, Amelie is still with us. She turns 102 right about now.

After Pauline passed, and Val was carrying our first, we thought to name her (we knew we were getting a girl) after her great-grandmother, but the name didn't quite fit. However, "Amelie" just sang to us both -- yes, there was the concurrent movie in release, but that had nothing to do with it -- and after tweaking the spelling (I thought a second "a" was more feminine), we had our daughter's name: Amalie. (To this day, she is still the only Amalie we have known, although there is a brand of motor oil, which was good for a chuckle when we found out.)

Amalie (age 5) meets her namesake, Amelie (age 102).

We drove down; Amelie and Amalie met. "Elder Amie" is still spry, gets around fine, sharp; has a morning helper but gets by otherwise. We showed pictures of some visits to various Wenner kin, and asked for some olde-tyme stories of Pauline when she lived on Park Avenue in NYC. Amelie related one anecdote -- Pauline's apartment had a balcony overlooking 34th Street; turn and look west and the Empire State Building is but blocks away, towering over everything. Pauline had been preparing for a fund raiser dinner and had set many fresh gardenias out on the balcony, among the many tasteful preparations for the evening. As party time approached, she went out to check the balcony -- and pigeons had descended and camped, utterly ruining the gardenias. Pauline was livid, her mood was ruined (along with the flowers), and the fund raising didn't come off quite as planned. (Amelie made this sound better than I have recounted.)

Junior and senior.

Time passed, and we had to leave. It was a good visit, we hope we can do it again.