This Sunday is Easter. It will also be opening night of the 2010 Major League Baseball season when the world champion New York Yankees meet the Boston Red Sox at historic Fenway Park.
Not to sound sacrilegious, but we recognize two resurrections then this Sunday, one sacred and one secular: Christ’s triumph over death and the promise of eternal life; and the beginning of another baseball season, with its own kind of eternalness. It feels like baseball has always been and always will be.
My life is full of baseball memories. The sport has followed me as much as I have followed it. I can remember watching the famous game five of the 1975 World Series huddled around a fuzzy TV set in a tiny fishing village in Ecuador.
And then there was my mom back in Michigan, a baseball fanatic if ever there was one, sending me the Detroit sports pages wherever I wandered so I could keep up with the Detroit Tigers.
My finest memory, though, is of one soft summer evening when I was a college student working as a deckhand on one of the big boats that hauled iron ore across the Great Lakes.
My ship, the Roache, was drifting down the Detroit River headed for Lake Erie from Lake Superior. Sitting on a hatch cover, I felt a restless yearning as the Motor City skyline swept past. I’d been on the boat for most of the summer and I missed home. I missed the Tigers.
Tiger Stadium stood not far from the river. The lights were on. The evening was perfectly still and the Roache’s captain had cut the engines back because of the swift current.
All at once I heard the stadium crowd roar, though it sounded more like a collective sigh at that distance, and a speck of white, like a tiny moon, arced above the rim of the stadium, through the wash of lights and high into the dusk, hanging suspended for an instant in the sapphire sky before falling back to earth, a routine fly ball.
For that one simple instant I felt part of the crowd at the ballpark instead of alone on the deck of a freighter headed for Cleveland, and it felt good. And even today there is nothing like a baseball game to take my mind off my troubles.
So happy Easter to you all. And to baseball fans, happy opening night.
P.S. Last week I asked you what your favorite stories were from the April GUIDEPOSTS. Seems I may have jumped the gun a bit since not all of you had finished reading the issue yet, and some of you hadn’t even gotten it. But I’m still interested. What was your favorite story?
Edward Grinnan is Editor-in-Chief and Vice President of GUIDEPOSTS Publications.
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