Spring training games are always festive occasions, a time when local fans meet up with fellow baseball nuts who are likely to spend the summer at TD Ballpark watching our own Dunedin Blue Jays play the likes of the Jupiter Hammerheads and the Clearwater Threshers.
The short exhibition season also allows out-of-town fans to re-acquaint themselves with their old favorite players as well as the can’t-miss youngsters who hope that maybe, just maybe, this will be their chance to make the big-league club for good.
Spring training season lasts just over a month, and thousands of Toronto Blue Jays fans migrate to Dunedin from Ontario and other Canadian locales to see their blue-black-white-silver clad Blue Jays get some rehearsal time before they head back north for the start of the Major League season, which begins in full on March 27. (It should be noted that the Major League season technically opened two weeks ago when the Chicago Cubs played the world champion Los Angeles Dodgers in the all-American city of Tokyo, Japan.)
The idiocy of Major League Baseball’s scheduling notwithstanding, a recent spring friendly between Toronto and the Tampa Bay (for now) Rays that took place on a splendid Dunedin afternoon with high clouds providing shade from the merciless Florida sun was an opportune, if overdue, time to take in the game with dear old pal Jerry.
Jerry, who spent more than three decades in Madeira Beach before Helene and Milton forced him and his wife to find higher ground in Seminole, has been a best man, drinking partner, amateur shrink and beloved comrade since the late ’70s at the University of Wisconsin’s Daily Cardinal student newspaper.
Jerry is also a baseball devotee, and there’s nothing like a visit to the ballyard with a fellow baseball aficionado as the unbearable summer temperatures approach to assure that all is right with the world — at least within the confines of the park.
After all that time together, the stories of the wild years at Wisconsin had been reviewed and shared time-and-again, so there was little need for further reassessment.
Baseball stories, however, can never be recounted nearly enough, and when sharing the glory days of the Milwaukee Brewers of the early ’80s — both Bambi’s Bombers and Harvey’s Wallbangers — the conversation can be wistful. Old timers get misty speaking of the greatness of Duke Snider and Willie Mays or Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan and Pete Rose of the ’70s’ Big Red Machine. The same sort of reverence in Milwaukee is paid to Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, Ben Oglivie and other demigod.
As the Rays played ground balls with skillet hands and air-mailed throws to first base, naturally talk of the old Brew Crew was bound to come up. And it did.
There was the time that Hall of Fame shortstop/outfielder Yount hit three home runs in a crucial late-season game against Earl Weaver’s Baltimore Orioles. Or did he hit four? Fading Boomer memories embellish. More than 50,000 fans at the old Milwaukee County Stadium chanted “M-V-P, M-V-P” over 200,000 beers or so as The Kid went on to earn the Most Valuable Player award and the Brewers outlasted the Orioles, graduating to the 1982 World Series. Sadly, for all of Brew City, their heroes lost the Series to the hated St. Louis Cardinals 4-3. No Brewers fan has ceased to wonder what would have happened in that Series if future Hall-of-Fame closer Rollie Fingers hadn’t been hurt and replaced by a former pitching prospect/prison guard named Pete Ladd.
And who could forget bumping into the Brewers’ slugging outfielder Gorman Thomas in the parking lot of an Arizona spring training game back in, what was it? ’84? ’86? Memory fails. Stormin’ Gorman was at the end of his career and had been shipped off to the Seattle Mariners. But getting an autograph and a photo with him was a high point.
Then there is the aforementioned ’82 Series, which represents both the joy and the pain of Milwaukee. With Jerry as seatmate in the left-field bleachers, the Brewers won Game Four before succumbing in seven games. It seemed that every time the lyrics to Bob Marley’s “Rastaman Vibration” went up, the Brewers scored another run.
Meanwhile, on the field this March day the Rays and Bluebirds played a game full of painful miscues and magnificent fielding plays that Toronto won 4-1. The game was a pleasant diversion, but the fond memories of teams of long-gone were loaded with melancholy.
The Blue Jays game was a game.
But in the end, it was just two old buddies watching baseball.
And telling stories, as old friends will.
