Playing baseball as a shy child was my savior so to speak. It over the years helped to bring me out of my shell and become the person, I am today. I have often argued with others that baseball compared to all other team sports is the hardiest game to play. Though I guess for now, I’ll leave that as a topic to be written about more fully on another day. The playing of baseball as a kid in little league and then on school teams in the little one light town called Freeland I grew up in was a big deal. If you played it, everyone from child to adult knew who you were and kept track of how well you played. As I recall, I can remember while playing baseball in high school, kids that were four or five grades younger than me, would say hello to me and then giving me that game well done acknowledgment. Those who became some of my best childhood friends played the game of baseball with me or on teams against me. It was this social bonding component that is the game's most powerful force of all; and to me, why baseball at that time was in America the true national game and social pastime.
Back in the year of ‘68 the little league teams of Freeland, MI were blessed to go to a baseball game at Tiger stadium in Detroit, MI. As our bus drove by certain areas in Detroit, there were ample signs of the riots of ‘67 that has left an everlasting impression on this person’s empathic heart and mind. As an eleven year old kid, who loved to play the game and watch the Tigers like Kaline, Stanley, Northrup, Horton, Cash, McAuliffe, Oyler, Wert, Freehan, Lolich, McClain and Brown play, the happenings of that era took time for me to comprehend. Of course we all had fun that day sitting way out in the bleacher seats of the old Tiger stadium. We took fully into memory all the sounds and the smells of the ballpark it had to offer us (My love and I went to the 11th to last game prior to the old Tiger stadium being closed in ‘99. She and I wanted to experience once more those sounds and smells of our childhood days in the ballpark before being lost forever).
Those of us who are ardent Detroit Tiger fans know how the ‘68 season ended. My mother became way more than just my parent that year. She became the coolest person in the world when she wrote a note to the school that I had a doctor’s appointment. She then came and picked me up from school, doing so, so I could go home and watch the Tigers play game seven and win the World Series. My mother is my hero in life, but I’m starting to digress a little too much from the point I’m trying to make about the social bonding component of baseball. It was this game called baseball being played during the year of ’68, out of the old Detroit Tiger stadium that as a social event morphed to become more than a game; it, this playing of baseball became a force, a positive focus to start the process of healing among its fans. The true national game and pastime showed why it was, yes by helping the people of Detroit and the rest of Michigan to come together and to act as one in support of a baseball team. Through all this focus on the winning ways of a team working together on the field located at 2121 Trumbull Avenue, the social turmoil surrounding the ‘67 riots was for awhile at least set aside to let all the emotional unrest settle a bit. The ills of the times were dampened just enough through distraction to allow the social bonding force of my favorite sport baseball to bring about and work its magic.
This is why I say baseball at that time was in America the true national game and social pastime. However, time does change even the game of baseball. What baseball was, the game back then to an eleven year old kid, isn't what it has become, will be or how it's perceived by others in America today. Even so, I still have my fond memories to cherish of a game called baseball, I love to play.
~Keith Alan Hamilton~
http://www.keithalanhamilton.com/
