The Moment You Knew...

The Rocky’s started the year after I graduated from high school so I was hooked to baseball well before then. In fact I was a pretty die hard Cardinals fan. I have been a Bronco fans since I was 3 so it was natural for me to follow the Rockies also. It grew from there to the point that I moved to Colorado from southern New Mexico just so I would not miss any games. That worked out well because I met and married a fellow sports freak who went on to work at Coors Field, that drove it home even more.

I do remember the day I got hooked on baseball. I was 4 years old and we were living in Albuqureque, NM. My parents took me to a Dukes game. I was sure that I was going to get a foul ball, but it did not happen. I was visably upset. One of the Dukes players was signing autographs after the game and he asked me what was wrong. I told him I wanted a foul ball and one did not even come close. He said that the next time I come to a game, when he came up I needed to scream and yell and he would try his best to hit one to me. My parents brought me back a few weeks later and when he came up to bat I screamed my little head off. The first pitch was a called strike (horrible call I am sure). For the second pitch I screamed and yelled as loud as I could. He took a cut and the ball came right at me. It landed about 30 feet behind me, but I was certain that he had tried to hit it to me. (even 30+ years later I like to think it was more than just a coincidence) On the 0-2 pitch I sat quitly in my seat and started eating my hot dog. My dad asked me why I was not yelling. I told him, dad he is down 0-2 he needs to put the ball in play, not try to foul it off to a kid in the stands.

The players name was Marion White. I don’t know if he ever went on to play in the majors or not. What I am sure that he did do though was to get a kid hooked on a game that has brought me year and years of enjoyment, excercise and lessons in teamwork and the value of hard work. Now that I am older I coach little league and try my best to pass that on.

For a lot of poeple baseball is just a game played by over paid children. For me however it has been a constant through my entire life. Something that I could always count on, even as the rest of the world around me changed so fast that I had a hard time catching up.

I think this is a great topic and I look forward to reading other people’s stories.

I’m probably older than most people here (mid 50s) and life, school, and career have taken me to live in several states over the course of my life, with the result that I have to make a confession: I’m a baseball bigamist. Maybe even a trigamist. Like the original poster, I grew up in Ohio (south of Columbus). Unlike him, I was a Reds fan, because… well, because there really wasn’t much of a choice. Everybody was a Reds fan there. It would have been difficult to be a fan of another team, in those pre-Internet, pre-cable days. You were a fan of your local team, because you didn’t hear all that much about any others, at least not on a daily basis. It never even occurred to me that it was an option.

I moved to St. Louis for college, and fell in love with both the city – the first major league city I’d actually lived in — and its baseball team. This was in the mid-70s, so the Reds were at the height of the "Big Red Machine" era, while the Cardinals weren’t too good. No matter, I became a Cardinals fan that first summer (1976) I lived in St. Louis. I think it had something to do with establishing my own identity separate from my family and my small-town background. I had a minimum-wage student job but even with no money I had enough that most nights I could pay a quarter to take the bus downtown and $2 to get in the ballpark, then sneak down to a primo seat. Still am a Cardinals fan, helped by the fact that when I left college and moved to other distant states I could always pick up the mighty KMOX at night, even if I had to go sit in my car sometimes to do it.

Then in 1990 I moved to Utah, out of range of even the mighty KMOX. The only baseball I could pull in at night was KNBR out of San Francisco, but I never cared for the Giants, so I had no "home" team. When the Rockies were created in 1993 I was in from the beginning. Bought the cap that first spring, the local TV and radio stations picked up the games, I was a fan from day 1. Went to Arizona for spring training with my son in ’94 and several years thereafter and always spent the entire time following the Rockies. They were 500 miles away but they were still the closest team I had. Moved to the Denver area in 1998 and have been a regular at Coors ever since. I’m still a Cardinal fan, but the Rockies are neck-and-neck in my affections. When they play each other I just root for neither team to sweep.

I know a lot of people frown on sports bigamy and can never countenance changing teams but there you have it. I tend to get attached to the local team after a while wherever I’m living, although I made an exception when I lived in Texas!