Road Trip
By Karlsie
I am currently in Baltimore, waiting eagerly to see the Sox play in Camden Yards against the O's. I keep thinking that maybe I'll go to the Babe Ruth museum instead of batting practice. but I'm not sure. I mean batting practice is always cool. Of course, so is the museum (I suppose) and I can always catch batting practice at Fenway next week before the game.
Earlier, at the museum of American History, I was looking at Stan Musial's bat. Just a plain old Louisville Slugger and yet it drove his 3,000 home run. I think about my bat sitting in the trunk of my husband's car and wonder if it dreams of driving in homeruns instead of hitting meatballs tossed by the pitching machine in the batting cages when I'm frustrated.
Then there's Mo Berg, who was a spy. How is it that the Europeans never caught on that a guy from Princeton and going into law school, as well as a third rate player at that point due to his ligament tear was also a spy? Hello people, wake up! He sure as hell wasn't doing a great job in front of or behind the plate. Did they really think the "home movies" he was taking were about vacation memories? Of course, to be fair, we had no clue that the records being burned at the Japanese embassy just before Pearl Harbor were significant.
Ah for the good old days.
Because it's a vacation - I'm on a light load and only reading two books at once on this particular trip: "Faithful" the King/O'Nan book and "Fever Pitch" by Nick Hornby.
For months I've picked up "Faithful," read a page or so, chortled and put it down. I've been meaning to read it all the way through since my husband gave it to me for the holidays (along with my official away shirt with my name on the back and a classic Sox cap - which I wear constantly). "Fever Pitch" is Hornby's memoir about being an Arsenal fan. While I'm not much on soccer, I do know that the Arsenals are the Red Sox of England and they won it all last year as well. It struck me that the things I'm stumbling over in the Hornby book are the exact details I'm eating up with a spoon in the King/O'Nan book. I mean, I don't get soccer. Well, I do, just not at that level.
So when Hornby goes into details about players and plays, I glance through it looking for the meatier human quality of the story. In "Faithful," I can relive every play last season in a Technicolor jumbovision view of the season. I'm willing to bet that there are soccer fans that can do the same in the other direction.
It seems that everywhere I go in the Washington area with my Red Sox cap I get a reaction. People from Boston down for the school vacation are excited to see it. Everywhere you turn you see World Series caps or team t-shirts. At breakfast there was a family from Maine, also here for tonight's game as well as the family vacation in our Nation's Capital. It's like an epidemic.
My son is upset though. He wore his Yankee Haters hat - the one with the YH on there designed to look like the Bankee's logo. Someone in Yankees gear and his kids sat down next to him yesterday, saying he was relieved to find a sympathetic face.
"Um buddy, take a closer look, will you?"
It seems to be a problem for him. Everywhere we go people don't take that close a look. He's had museum guards either high five him or say to me, "How could you let your son wear that when you're wearing a Sox hat?" One guard at a museum high fived my son and then turned to me to say, "We let you have one."
My son told him "You didn't let us have anything. We won because you didn't get away with cheating last year." My son is no fool; he knows that last year's call against A-Rod was the type of thing that would have been missed in the past. It was then he took a good look at the hat.
My son thinks that if he colors the "H" in with a red sharpie, people will get it. I told him not to bother. Like Nilsson's Rock Man: you see what you want to see and hear what you want to hear.
Still, it amazes me that halfway down the Atlantic seaboard where people are getting excited about the Nationals (you should have seen the traffic around RFK stadium last night), that there are more people that no longer see an evil empire - or an empire of any type. They ignore the folks wearing the "New York Spankees" (or, considering the payroll, the Bankees) and open the door for the woman in the Sox hat.
