Kids today have Sony Playstations and Internet porn and MTV in their bedrooms, and I don't think they play baseball anymore. I don't think they read the box scores either, but neither do I. I just read the headlines.
I read four words about home runs and that's enough. Or, I read a sentence about the League's newest stadium, and then I'm done. But that's what kids go for these days, and that's all the more baseball anyone wants.
I think I'm the only person who still wants to see Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn playing. And maybe that's just because I remember pretending to be Tony Gwynn in neighborhood pick-up games'but that was only when Kirby Puckett was already being portrayed by someone else.
I hope kids today don't pretend to be Barry Bonds, but, if that's the case, at least they're playing baseball. I don't think kids know who Kirby Puckett is anymore.
Last Friday night, my brother and I went to one of the last Twins games of the season, and for $5 we sat in the best seats I've ever had. For a while I even thought we were sitting among a group of kids who still really played baseball.
We were sitting in a place where foul balls are hit every inning, and in the second inning I let a ball go so that a 10-year-old in a Little League cap could have it, but I would have had it different now. I would have ripped that thing right out of that kid's little hand.
'I don't even know what I'd do with a ball if I caught one,' my brother said. 'I would have been so excited before, but what is it now? It's just a ball.'
And I'd been thinking the same thing, and I didn't chase after it because I thought it might be more than just a ball to the kids sitting behind us'but I was wrong.
These kids played Little League because their parents made them, just as their parents had made them go to this baseball game. These kids were not yet a year old when Kirby Puckett and the Twins won the World Series in 1991. They would never understand.
When I was 11, I would have killed to have met Kirby Puckett, and then I met him when I was 18 and he was already a fat old man at not yet 40. I told Kirby he was the greatest, and he still is to me, but something's gone.
At Friday night's game I saw Kirby, forgotten in the press box, and I felt sorry for him. My brother, though, said he liked to think Kirby was having fun, and I hope so. I don't think a lot of people find baseball fun anymore.
I don't like many sports, but I've always liked baseball because of a few men who really played. For me, it was Kirby and maybe Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn, but I don't know who plays anymore, or who sticks with one team, or who wants hits and not home runs. And sometimes I don't know what's going to happen.
Sometimes I wonder, 'Who are these kids going to become'? And sometimes I worry that someday I'll be buying my own kids a Playstation and begging them to play baseball.
andrewmiller@students.wisc.edu
