By Robert P. Lockwood

At the old ballgame

Baseball -- that quintessential Catholic sport -- conjures up fond memories

I'm a displaced New York Mets fan living in Southwestern Pennsylvania. So I'm sitting there a few weeks back chatting it up with an acquaintance when I mention that it's Opening Day.

"You might have missed it," I said. "It actually began at 6 a.m. [Boston Red] Sox versus the A's. Sox won it in the 10th. Opening Day and they played it in Japan. Funny how nobody thinks of starting the European soccer league in Des Moines."

I'm about mid-babble when I noticed that my buddy was looking right through me, as if I said three straight sentences without any vowels.

"Don't follow baseball?" I asked.

"No," he said, "and I don't follow the ebb and flow of the soil in my neighborhood."

I have never been able to understand people who find baseball boring, including my own flesh and blood. My daughter once begged that I never take her to a ballgame again after sitting through nine innings of the Fort Wayne Wizards.

"Dad," she said, "I always thought that dying of boredom was just an expression until about the sixth inning of that game."

I argue every year that baseball is quintessentially a Catholic sport -- the rubrics of the rules, so simple and intricate, that create their own liturgy; the hagiography of those who played the game long ago; the timelessness of each game that could theoretically last for eternity; the appeal to all the senses, from the taste of a hot dog to the smell of the outfield grass; and the continuing conversation from the stands that surrounds every pitch.

And each year I get letters and e-mails with the ugly phrase, "watching paint dry."

Trying to explain why I love baseball is like trying to explain to my mother when I was 9 why I tore up my good school pants sliding into a chalk outline of second base on a gravel playground. "But I was safe," I whined, as if this summed up the meaning of the sun, the moon, the stars and all creation.

People tell me about season-ending strikes, steroids, human-growth hormones, snot-nosed million-dollar players and snot-nosed multi-million dollar owners and ask why anyone would follow the game.

Stan Isaacs once wrote in Newsday that, "I don't love most of today's players. I don't love the owners. I do love, however, the baseball that is in the heads of baseball fans. I love the dreams of glory of 10-year-olds, the reminiscences of 70-year-olds. The greatest baseball arena is in our heads, what we bring to the games, to the telecasts, to reading newspaper reports."

I love to hear the way-back ballplayers talk, even if most of what they say was made up by writers. Here's Babe Ruth in an article he allegedly wrote 75 years ago in a magazine that doesn't exist anymore:

"I knew an old priest once. How I envy him. He was not trying to please a crowd. He was merely trying to please his immortal soul. So fame never came to him. I am listed as a famous home-runner, yet beside that obscure priest, who was so good and so wise, I never got to first base."

When I go to the ballpark I'm never alone. That 9-year-old sliding into second in the playground at Christ the King School in Yonkers, N.Y., comes along. And so does my son, leaping over a catcher 20 years ago in an impossible slide into home; or even my bored daughter, all 4 feet and10 inches of her, smacking a game-winning home run for her seventh-grade softball team.

The Pittsburgh Pirates are facing their 16th losing season in a row. It would tie the record for consecutive losing seasons. But I'll go to the ballpark every chance I get to cheer them on.

Except when they play the Mets.

Robert P. Lockwood writes from Pennsylvania.