My Life-Long Love Affair with Baseball - J. A. Menzies
Sitting here thinking about the Toronto Blue Jays and hoping they clinch the Division today got me thinking about my life-long baseball fandom.
It started when I was very young, following Major League Baseball as much as one could from a small town in Manitoba, Canada. I devoured the newspapers and bought any magazines I could find that had sport stories. Baseball in summer; hockey in winter. But baseball always came first, and the Yankees were my favourite team, with the Dodgers and Tigers right behind. I knew the name and stats of most players in both leagues.
Why I picked up on baseball this way I really don�t know. None of my friends were into sports. My mother certainly wasn�t. The only game I ever saw my dad play was golf. Of course, he was 37 when I was born, so he may have played other sports when he was younger. What I do know is that he was a baseball fan. And I expect that had more than a little to do with my interest in the sport.
Although Canada didn�t have an MLB team until the Montreal Expos came into being in 1969, baseball has always been very popular across Canada. In fact, some people believe the first official game of baseball may have been played in Ontario in 1838. Years later, I would read Prairie Hardball, by Alison Gordon. Set in Indian Head, Saskatchewan, where my parents lived when I was born, it documents a mystery set against the backdrop of the women�s baseball leagues during World War II. At one time, nearly a quarter of the players in the league were Canadian.
Baseball was very popular in our small town. And since I was an only child, Dad sometimes invited me to go with him to see the local Souris Cardinal games, and I went whenever I could. My mother could never understand why we wanted to go.
In high school in the mid-1960s, I was a good student who was always terrified of getting into trouble with my teachers, yet there I was hiding my small Sony transistor radio in my desk, threading the ear piece up through my shirt so I wouldn�t miss a minute of the Yankees, in yet another World Series.
I never understood why they played such important games in the afternoon when it was so tricky to listen.
My teachers never knew I had my radio on, although a few of the boys in my class were alert for updates on the score.
Flash forward to 1992. I was in my parents� home in Brandon, watching the Toronto Blue Jays in the World Series, with my 80-year-old father, who was dying from lung cancer. Dad and I had both cheered for the Jays from the moment the team was born. Not neither of us believed they could actually pull it off. When Joe Carter caught the ball to make the final out of the last game, we both yelled aloud, then sat quietly, shaking our heads in disbelief, savoring the moment, feeling we�d witnessed a miracle. A team from Canada had actually won the World Series!
Within weeks, my father was gone, but I had one last, unforgettable memory of sharing my love of baseball with the man who had let me be both son and daughter to him.
One day, while sitting in the stands, I turned to my husband and announced. �The bullpen! That�s a perfect place to find a body!� I could just see my new homicide detective, Jacqueline Ryan, trying to figure out why there would be bulls in a pen at a baseball stadium, and my other detective, Paul Manziuk, who�s a big baseball fan, rolling his eyes at her.
But I had no plot. What body? Why was it there?
Then came my �Ah ha� moment.
Since the FAN 590 came into being, it�s been my go-to station. So while driving on Toronto�s 401 highway, I was listening to the FAN 590 sports radio station�s Prime Time show with host Bob McCown. Bob and his guests started talking about a player (I think it was actually a hockey player) who was being a jerk. One of them said, �Somebody needs to take him outside and knock some sense into him.�
Whoa! I thought. What if somebody actually did? Would the talk show host be charged with instigating the assault?
Keeping my eyes on the heavy traffic, I managed to extricate my notebook from my purse with one hand and scribble a few sentences onto a blank page without crashing into anyone.
Some years earlier, adhering to the old saying about writing what you know, I�d made a list of topics I knew something about. Although it might have surprised many of my colleagues and friends, baseball was high on that list.
What if a sports talk show host suggested taking a baseball bat to the head of a jerk, and someone did?
After that, the fun began�first deciding that the body in the bullpen belonged to a new Cuban pitcher with a bit of an attitude, then creating my own baseball team, from owner and GM to manager, coaches, and players. Designing my own stadium�the Diamond Dome. Adding an agent, a Marilyn Monroe clone, a couple of radio talk show hosts (one of whom would instigate the murder), two newspaper reporters, wives and girlfriends, and so forth. And then I mostly let them tell their story!
Of course, in addition to the mystery whodunit, I managed to get in a few of my own observations on baseball�partly through the story and partly through the words of my two newspapers reporters, Ginny Lovejoy and Kyle Schmidt.
I have to say it was a delight to be able to combine my love for mysteries with the sport I�ve enjoyed all my life. What more could any writer ask for?
Well, maybe another Blue Jays World Series win.
And the potential for that is what got me thinking about my dad and sharing his love of baseball.
And yes, that love has been passed on. My oldest son has four tickets for game 1 of the Blue Jays� first home playoff game.
Source:
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