Take Me Out to the Ballgame. Please

I was born and raised in the Detroit area. I went to college in Michigan. I am a serious lifelong Detroit Tigers fan. They are forever my #1 team. I was at the last three games of the 1984 World Series. I live, all year long, in Tiger gear. I belong to the Mayo Smith Society. But, I haven’t always lived in Michigan, so sacrifices have had to be made. When you love baseball, you make do. You find your people. You expand your interest to other teams based on your geography. You get in the car and drive. And, back in the days before MLB TV and cable television sports stations, you even tried tuning in to late night broadcasts on AM stations, hoping to pick up your team’s games.

I lived in Washington, DC, when there was no baseball in the nation’s capital. But, it’s only an hour to Baltimore’s old Memorial Stadium, so I became an Orioles fan. And just over the bridge into Virginia, I could catch the Alexandria Dukes, a single-A Pittsburgh Pirates affiliate that played in a ratty field next to an elementary school, whose proximity meant no beer at the ballpark. (In steamy ninety-plus degree heat—with no beer—you know you’re sitting with hardcore baseball fans.) When I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, in the mid-80s, I had the Class A Charlotte Orioles to enjoy. They played in an old wooden ballpark in the Dilworth neighborhood, where the sound of a car windshield getting pasted by a foul ball was a real thing, not a sound effect.

We moved to Pittsburgh in the late ’90s when my husband went to work for a bank there. The recruiting had been conducted very seriously. His future colleagues learned I was a big baseball fan and waved primo Pirates tickets around as inducement. The seats were on the field, just a couple rows up from the front. I could hear everything catcher Jason Kendall said to the batters and umpires. And, I met a great baseball buddy in Pittsburgh, too. Diana was writing sports for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and I sent her a fan letter about a baseball column she’d written. We ended up fast friends and hung out at many a Pirates game at Three Rivers Stadium. Years later we edited a book together: The Love of Baseball: Essays by Lifelong Fans.

In the last couple of decades, I’ve followed a minor league team in the Frontier League in Traverse City, Michigan, and made a point to visit friends in Washington, DC, to catch the Nationals, now that baseball is back in that town.

In April of 2019, I moved back to Charlotte, North Carolina, after more than twenty years of gallivanting around the country. I’d honed my skills as a long-distance Tiger fan, of course subscribing to MLB TV, where you can get every game you ever wanted with a few clicks of a trackpad. Just as exciting to me is the access to all the radio broadcasts. Putting a baseball game on your cell phone is surprisingly reminiscent of the old days, when baseball fans like me would tune into the game on our little transistor radios.

Before my boxes were unpacked last April, I had the internet up-and-running getting ready for Opening Day. What’s more, and not by accident, I had moved into a building mere blocks from the Chicago White Sox AAA Charlotte Knights ballpark. Minor league baseball had certainly come a long way from the old single-A Charlotte O’s days.

We’d driven from our home in the mountains of North Carolina the last few years to get a baseball “fix” at the new park, and it is a beauty. I can remember sitting in the stands there thinking “if only I could come here all the time I would come here all the time.” I even recall looking up at some of the apartment buildings that have a view into the diamond and checking out the...