Would this guy take a punch for me?
Most avid sports fans dread the long months of summer right
after the NBA and NHL. The
excitement of the playoff season results in sports euphoria for everyone. However, most sports fans will say the
summer months following the playoffs tend to leave us less satisfied than Jenna
Jameson after a date with Mr. Chao. I feel the exact opposite; I love
summer. What is it about a Padres
single in a meaningless midsummer game that makes me go crazier than this Jonah Hill look-a-like? I spend countless hours every summer
sitting in a half filled ballpark (that’s a generous estimate, it’s more like a
quarter filled) cracking peanuts, wolfing down hot dogs like Kobayashi, and
drinking more beer than John Belushi in Animal House. I know most of you readers are thinking “yeah, yeah, we pig
out when we go to the ballpark too buddy,” but the hours that I spend with
friends pigging out at the ballpark and having fun, don’t compare to the amount
of time I put in watching the games as alone as Tom Hanks in Castaway. And I love it.
I don’t really know how or why I started to love
baseball. My first baseball
experience happened when I was six years old. In my first tee ball game I crushed the ball a whopping five
feet, and when everyone yelled at me to run I sprinted straight out to left
field, and stood there more confused than Jose Canseco after this littleincident. Needless to say it wasn’t the game for me. So I went through my childhood in a
town that looked something like this, avoiding baseball at costs. I couldn’t understand it. Why would someone ever watch something
so slow and monotonous? How could
the games mean anything? There
were 162 of them for God’s Sake!
However, as I got older and started to appreciate the finer things in
life, like a bottle of wild turkey and a nice set of legs, baseball started to
draw me in. It wasn’t fast and it
wasn’t glamorous, but slowly and surely I started to understand just a little
bit of why baseball has captured America’s heart for the past 125 years.
I started going to Padres games when I was a freshman in
college at the University of San Diego.
My freshman roommate wanted to spend every Friday night at a Padres game
instead of getting drunk and chasing chicks. At first, I didn’t understand it. I quickly learned that college girls have a tendency stay up
a little later than 10:30 (when the games got over), so they weren’t exactly
conflicting interests. I jumped on
the bandwagon and started going to as many games as possible. The padres did well that season, but
lost in an extra innings one game playoff to an unbelievable Colorado Rockies
team that finished the year 23 for their last 24 games. I didn’t care. It was just baseball to me, and to be
honest there were a lot bigger things out there. Sophomore summer that all changed.
I decided there was no way I was going to spend another
summer in my hometown of Las Cruces, New Mexico. So I decided I had to find a summer internship. After a little bit of work, I was able
to get hired on in San Diego, and along came the summer that changed my
life. The summer of 69’, was what
my best friends and I commonly refer to that summer as, because it had
everything. It had late night
binge drinking, countless summer flings (alright maybe not countless), and barbecues
galore, but the constant throughout the summer was Padres homestands. We would salivate like a dog in heat
for the next time the Pads would come into town. I probably only saw four wins that summer. In the famous words of GhostfaceKilla the Padres “made lambs look
dangerous,” but it didn’t matter.
I had the Padres, and the Padres had me.
My junior year something interesting happened. The San Diego Padres were the best team
in baseball. It made no
sense. The second smallest payroll
in the whole league and these guys refused to lose. Buster Olney himself
couldn’t tell us how it was happening.
If Lebron James’s Harry Houdini disappearing act is the biggest mystery
in sports today, then the Padres 2010 season is a close second. We couldn’t lose. We were 20 games over five hundred half
way through the season, and it couldn’t be real. I started pinching myself every day just to make sure it
wasn’t some sick twisted dream. Is
this what heaven feels like?
That’s the thing about baseball it permeates your everyday life like no
other sport. So what if I hated my
job or just spent an entire day with a hangover that David Hasselhoff would be proud of? I knew that come 7:05 I would be joined by nine adopted
family members, and everything would be ok. That’s the thing about baseball that makes it so amazing;
it’s always there. Sometimes you
need it and sometimes you don’t, but it’s always there waiting for you with
open arms. It was obvious that the
Padres were going to make things difficult after a 10 game losing streak. When
Mat Latos gave up three fatal runs to the Giants in the last game of the year
to lose the division I thought I was going to break down. I thought I was going turn away from
baseball. Why would I inflict so
much pain on myself for something that was ultimately meaningless?
A very wise man once told me “Why do you get so worked
up. It’s not like Miguel Tejada
would take a punch for you or anything.
He doesn’t give a shit.” I
know he’s right. Miguel Tejada
doesn’t give a shit. Miguel Tejada
doesn’t care about me, but every time I needed him he was there for me. He was out there on the diamond doing
his best to help me get over that fight with my girlfriend or drown out the
bitching voice of my boss. The
2010 San Diego Padres were there for me day in and day out for 180 days, and
I’ll never forget that.
So now in 2011 as we are mired in mediocrity (which is a
generous adjective) and 10 games under .500, you’ll still find me at the
ballpark every home stand. Day in
and day out the Padres were, are, and always will be there for me. Sometimes I like to think they need me as much as I need them.
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