9/11/02
Never published

by Dave Payne

Fans these days are sick of baseballás ills and many say they will abandon the sport forever if they are again robbed of a postseason.
I want to say that, but canát. I said Iád walk after the 1994 strike and I came back. Baseball is too special to disown, even if its sins outweigh its good.  
Baseball has a special power, a unique magic that can bring men and boys together and make my grandpa buy cable. 
He didnát buy a color television until the mid 1970s. It will never catch on, he said.
Yet, when the first cable lines, carrying only a half dozen channels were first installed in South Charleston in the late 1970s, one of those lines went right into his living room.
Cable, with its TBS Superstation out of Atlanta, brought Bravesá action from Fulton County stadium into his living room, all 162 games worth.
Grandpa and I would hover around that color television, which was as tall as I was and be transfixed on every pitch of every game.
When the Braves played in California I got to stay up late. In his house, baseball was more important than a childás bedtime. 
Sometimes, he would take me to Charleston Charlies games at Watt Powell park. He bought me hot dogs, a hat with the cool Charliesá logo- a baseball smoking a cigar- and frozen custard in a little bowl shaped like a baseball helmet.
We ate a thousand hot dogs on those hot, stifling days, watching the Charlies take on baseball powerhouses like the Toledo Mud Hens and wiped dusty sweat from our foreheads with our shirt sleeves.
When my little league team, Southern Supply Company, won the championship in 1987, he was there, cheering me on as Iád cast off my catcherás helmet and knock a batter out of the way to cut off a runner stealing third.
For fifteen years, we sat by the television to watch the Braves. The fact that they got slaughtered game after game didnát matter to us. Bob Horner could still hit a ball to the moon and Dale Murphy could still throw it back to the cutoff man.
Every year, weád watch the National League Championship and the World Series, glued to the same color television, drinking RC Cola from glass bottles, even though the braves were noticeably absent from the postseason.
 Then, in the 1990ás, the braves started winning games. But 1994, the year I graduated high school, there was no baseball, only a strike.
We were robbed of watching the postseason that year and my grandpa swore heád never watch another game.
But he did, until he saw Sandy Alomar spit on an umpire. This time, he left for good.
For the next few years, he never spoke of baseball, only football. The Braves were dominating the NL East and making it to the World Series year after year. He was indifferent.
He never spoke of his Braves- it was as if they were unforgivable children disowned.
After I graduated college in 1998, started graduate school at Marshall. Grandpa lived within 45 minute drive of Huntington, so I moved in with him.
 I came home from school one day and he was slouching on the couch, chewing Skoal. I noticed a rekindled old sparkle in his aging eyes. 
He was watching a Cubs game on WGN. I sat down on the couch beside him, picking up where we had left off four long years ago.
He was excited about the home run race between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire as they inched toward breaking Roger Marisá single-season home run record.
 It was as if the strike had never happened, the World Series had never been canceled, Alomar had never spit on an umpire.
He was watching history being made, a special moment in baseball, like he listened to on the radio when he was a kid and watched on a black-and-white screen as a man- Dimaggioás hitting streak, Nolan Ryanás seventh no-hitter, Roger Maris and Mickey Mantleás home run race, which was now McGwire and Sosaás.
I rooted for McGwire. Grandpa pulled for Sosa. We were fans again. 
The bitterness was gone- the two sluggers had restored honor to baseball, atoned for its sins and righted its unrightable wrongs.
One day, I was getting a can of RC Cola, the 16 ounce glass bottles but a memory now, out of the basement refrigerator. Grandpa ran to the top of the stairs, his old joints creaking, "McGwire," he yelled, "is up."
I ran upstairs and sat down. McGwire made contact. We leaned forward. 
As that ball inched closer to the outfield fence, we leaned farther forward, teetering on the edge of the couch. It barely cleared, an unimpressive home run for one of baseballás most impressive moments.
Grandpa jumped up. He clapped his hands and ran in small, concentric circles. "He hit it. He hit it," he said over and over.
In a couple weeks, the season was over. McGwire had hit 70 home runs, a record, we were sure, that would stand another 30 years.
One evening in late September I came home from school. It was past 10 p.m. and he was waiting up for me. He had taped a cartoon, King of the Hill, and wanted us to watch it together.
"Braves are going to the World Series," he said. "They won 106 games this year."
We sat and watched the cartoon and laughed. 
While he fast-forwarded the commercials, we talked about the postseason, which was again a magical time for us, full of mystery. 
He jumped up out of his chair, looked at me and died.
 If playerás union boss Donald Fehr could have seen me breaking the manás ribs trying in a vain attempt to restart the heart baseball had broken so many times, he might just make some concessions to the owners.
The Braves lost the NLCS that year in six games.