A few days from now son Lucas and I will take our seats at the Oakland Coliseum, cheer on the A's, have a long, last sentimental look around and go home.
The stadium is maybe the worst in baseball, the A's are in last place and at the end of the season are leaving Oakland forever; it could be a melancholy affair.
Bart Giamatti, a former Commission of Major League Baseball and once an Ivy League academic, wrote "Baseball is designed to break your heart."
I always took those words and sentiment to mean baseball is a game where defeat is likely; even the best hitters in the game, today and a hundred years ago, fail two out of three times to the plate, and even the best pitchers will get beat on a weak, broken bat dribbler that sneaks through the infield and scores the winning run in the 13th inning.
Or the umpire will miss a close play at home in the 14th. You lose. Again.
But baseball's heartbreaking essence includes more than what happens on the field and which produces sufficient despair by itself. Baseball is a game that, learned young, takes hold of a heart and clings to it forever. And forever means baseball has a lot of time to break a lot of hearts.
Take the Cleveland Guardians. Please.
The Cleveland Indians, the team I grew up with and to which I gave the best years of my life, one fine day decided to chuck its history and checkered glories, give all its fans their unconditional release, and rebrand itself. It was a decision by the team's corporate owners, guided by the misguided Wokester fad.
With the "Indians" eradicated and Chief Wahoo lynched from a light pole behind home plate, I've adopted the Athletics as my designated team. In response the team will duck out of Oakland (hard on the heels of the city's Raiders and Warriors) leaving broken hearts scattered around the East Bay, just as the arrival of the A's in 1968 caused moaning and despair and bitter tears in Kansas City.
So, it's Oakland and the A's in an afternoon game. Lucas the kid was a fan back in the Giambi—McGwire era but pays no more attention to baseball in 2024 than he does the S&P 500.
But the sun will shine, the game's choreography will dazzle, the strategy will unfold and we will be rewarded as opera fans are rewarded with a grand and lively performance, with the added benefit of not knowing how the game will end.
It will be nice to walk the cool concourse again, smell the hotdogs, eyeball the game-worn jerseys, grab a beer and go sit in a different section than your ticket allows.
Except when it's over and the game, the A's, and the Coliseum are additions to the memory bank. They'll join the list of letdowns and heartbreak baseball has delivered me in over the past 70-plus years.
But the game, truly, has been good to me.
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And how will you celebrate tomorrow's anniversary of one of the more celebrated sports moments in local history? It will be exactly 40 years since Redwood Valley's Kelvin Chapman, second baseman for the visiting New York Mets, stepped to the plate with the bases loaded at Candlestick Park and delivered a grand slam that sealed an 11-6 win over the Giants.
Heartbreaking? Well, yeaahhh. But thrilling too. Mike Krukow had started for San Francisco, but it was reliever Mark Davis that delivered the fastball Chapman rocketed over the left field fence. A grand day it was, as Local Kid Makes Good!
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How is it working out for the Cleveland Baseball Organization, Inc., following its bold masterstroke of killing off the team's emblem and name?
Right now it looks as stupid as it did back then. The Cleveland team, Inc., has been in first place all season long, but is near the bottom (among 30 MLB teams) in average home game attendance for 2024.
This is the same city that, when the Tribe was winning in the 1990s, filled the ballpark to capacity every day, selling every single seat for every single game, 455 games in a row.
But those were the Indians, led by Chief Wahoo. So the smart people in the Cleveland, Inc., baseball team intervened and made the necessary corrections.
Choke on Woke, you geniuses in the marketing division.
TWK and Tom Hine team up to write the 'Assignment: Ukiah' column. Whether in NorCal or NorCaro we use the same Underwood typewriter.
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