By the Way Ah, Baseball! "Baseball Continues to Hold Sway as My Favorite Sport Regardless of Whether It's Still "America's Pastime."

In spring a young man's fancy turns to.... Actually, I'm not quite sure how to finish that sentence with regard to the men of today's younger generation. Back in the days when that description might have fit me, I seem to recall it was love that was supposed to grab our attention. That never did work for me. Nope, for me spring always meant the same thing: baseball.

When I was about nine or ten years old, a group of us neighborhood scrubs put together a team we called the Blue Jays. This was before the Toronto Major League franchise and I have no recollection at all why we'd have named ourselves after a bird and an annoying avian at that. But we did. I was the starting first baseman owing to three harsh realities. First, I was far and away the tallest kid and we were pretty sure that a first baseman had to be lanky. Second, the only other position for which I was considered qualified was catcher but my stark terror of being hit in the face with a ball or bat made me somewhat less than proficient at that important position. Third, I owned the bat, so they couldn't ignore me.

In a turn of events that stunned every one of us in that bunch, we managed to beat a team from the local YMCA two out of three times. That team was made up mostly of older kids who wore real uniforms. Our "uniform" consisted solely of the fact that we all had dark blue hats with the letters "B" and "J" emblazoned in white athletic tape. To this day I don't know how we managed to beat an actual organized team. We had no coaches, a single bat we all shared, and occasionally suffered from the fact that our center fielder, a runny-nosed kid named Alvin, often had to run home to go to the bathroom in the middle of an inning. The "Peanuts" comic strip probably didn't exist yet but if it had, we'd have been easy pickings for Charlie Brown's pathetic band of losers. As life went on, I moved away from playing baseball -- if indeed what I did could be so characterized -- to becoming a real fan. I would play "stoop ball" literally for hours at a time. I'd throw the ball against the steps at the front of the porch of our house in suburban Detroit, pretending I was my childhood hero, Al Kaline of the Detroit Tigers. I played complete with crowd noises and a running radio commentary.

Later, I became a sports writer. I showed a real flair for it, I was told, and I was a sports editor and columnist for many years. I covered such momentous events as the Masters Golf tournament at Augusta, Georgia, the Indianapolis 500 and thousands of absolutely crucial high school basketball and football games to say nothing of a stint as bowling editor. But baseball was always, for me, the Supreme Sport.

The highlight of my sports writing career was covering the 1968 Detroit Tigers in the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals. Denny McClain won 31 games that year, eclipsing an ancient record in baseball, and Mickey Lolich won three World Series games when McClain inexplicably went south in the Big Games.

Today, I enjoy watching youth baseball in Monterey even as the aging of the local population and the cost of housing here continue to drive or keep young families out of town, with a resultant downturn in local baseball activity.

During the last few years, I've whiled away many an hour watching Travis and Kyle Elder, the baseball-playing sons of my best friends, Revs. Vicky and Rory Elder about whom I wrote in the February issue of this magazine. That article appeared a few days before Rory, my true best friend and spiritual mentor, died unexpectedly. That death hit me harder than I yet know.

This spring, I'll sit in a place near where Rory would have been if he'd still been on this earth, rooting for Kyle while his older brother Travis, destined to become a sports broadcaster, coaches along the sidelines. And with each crack of the bat, each raucous cheer, each disappointing sigh of the world's greatest sport being played out, I'll move another inch out of my grief. By the way, I'll be feeling Ro beside me the whole time, hearing his cheer, loving his laugh. I really miss him.

Dan Shafer
Associate Editor
dan@65mag.com