Old Time Baseball

Tonight the Yankees won 3-1. It was the perfect night for a ballgame. The weather was comfortable and cool and my 7th inning hotdog made me think it was summer.  Ahhh yes, the perfect Tuesday night.  As we sat at the game, we marveled at how fast-paced this slow-paced game has become.  If there is even the most minuscule lull in on-field action, the giant, blaring television screens blast music, games, and spectator quizzes. Music plays when each new player takes the field and, at the end of the 6th inning, when the grounds crew enters the stadium they transform into the YMCA boys.

In our attention deficit culture filled with millions of distractions fighting relentlessly for our attention, baseball has transformed to compete.
As I sat there tonight with a hotdog vendor yelling "Getcha hotdog here!" in one ear and Jay-Z in my other, I thought about my poppop.  While this seems like the antithesis of what might make one think of their grandfather, for me, I had a pang of missing a man who grew up in Queens, loved the Yankees and loved the old Yankee stadium.  I wondered what he would have thought of this perversion of his favorite sport.  That said, my poppop was a man who loved a good read as much as a good baseball game and who probably would have still loved baseball even at its accelerated pace.
I am sure that part of my love of reading comes from him.  Just as I remember his love of a good Yankees game, I also always think of him sitting on the porch reading the newspaper, or in his later years, as his obsession with biographies grew--whatever the latest biography was would rest on his lap as he sat, wool-sock-covered feet propped on an ottoman intermittently reading and "snoozing" in the living room. So while this post really recommends nothing in particular, I hope that you will all pay a silent tribute to those who have instilled a love of reading in you...

Happy Reading!