Why I'm Finally Worried About the Pirates

The men on my paternal side of the family love baseball. I cannot tell you how important the game is to males with Simons blood. I'm honestly not sure that my Dad and Grandfather would be able to spend an extended period of time together without the sport, and all of it's facts, history, statistics, weird rules and 4 World Series Pirates teams. (This is not to say that the two of them wouldn't get along, it just seems to be their default topic of conversation.)

i'm the black sheep of my breed. I like Hockey, and i LOVE football. Where my dad and grandfather and cousins can sit and watch any baseball game on television, i can watch any NFL game, and most college football games. They seem as though they could care less about football.

And, you know what? That's fine. It doesn't offend me. Being brought up in that environment, I certainly have a soft-spot of baseball in my heart, but really only in going to actual games. As a kid my dad and grandfather would load the car up with bags, and we set out for a 2 to 4-day trip each summer, and see as many baseball games as we could. It was usually three or four minor league games, and then one major league game in a nearby city like Cincinnati, Cleveland, Baltimore, etc.

Aside from the trip to Chicago (which was by far my favorite) i couldn't tell you a damned thing about any of the games we saw. Not a thing. Not who won, who played (although based on the city I could make an informed guess about one of the teams in each game), not whether it was a night or day game. Not if it was a double header, or if we left early. The one exception to this is that when we saw the Orioles play in Baltimore, Cal Ripken Jr. was in the midst of his famous consecutive games streak, and by the 5th or 6th inning he had two or three errors. The only reason i remember this is because the guy in front of us stood up and shouted "Ripken... YOU NEED A VACATION!" and sat back down.

What I DO remember from these games is spending time with my dad and grandfather. Frankly, a lot of the time spent in the car was pretty awful. And my grandfather would take a hotel without a roof over one with a roof if we could save five bucks. However, spending time with my father and his, was worth it all.

I remember a trip to New York State where we didn't even see an MLB team play (i only know that cause the only MLB team I can think of is the Yankees, and I've never been to New York City). We saw a few minor league teams, and might have visited the Hall of Fame but I don't really remember anything about any of that. What I do remember, is going to Sydney. My grandfather grew up in Sidney, and we spent a day driving around this small town while my grandfather recounted memories from his childhood. It was amazing. That will stick with me forever.

My favorite trip was the one to Chicago. I was a junior in highschool, and I was looking at Colleges, although I was pretty overwhelmed by the whole process (that lead to a general feeling of apathy and resignation resulting the following exchange My Dad:"Could you be any more passive-agressive?" Me: "I'll try."). This trip was by far the strangest and most memorable. We saw a Cubs game and White Sox game. The cubs game was an afternoon game, and when we got to the stadium (Wrigley was gorgeous, by the way) four of the starting Cubs had been Pirates when we left Pittsburgh. It was also the Chicago Air Show, so there were jets and bi-planes doing aerobatics out past Center Field the entire game. And, as if that weren't enough surrealism, this was the game that became infamous for Ozzie Osbourne singing (singing? more like slurring and grumbling) "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during the seventh inning stretch. They still show that on ESPN today.

The next night was saw the White Sox win on a Frank Thomas walk-off home-run. Quite a couple of games.

Again, though, the things I remember from these trips are not so much the baseball itself, but the time spent with my Father and Grandfather. I remember leaving the Sox game in the midst of an AMAZINGLY dense crowd of drunken Chicago natives, all trying to get to the L, me walking with my Grandfather and his bad hip, and my dad frustratedly weaving through the crowd getting ever farther away, like Hannibal Lechter disappearing into the masses at the end of "Silence of the Lambs"... except not in a mass-murderer kind of way. As we began to lose him, i said "Uh-oh... Jim... main-man Jim. J-I-M" in what I didn't quite realize was an inappropriately good Rainman impression. What was even better, was my grandfather (a man who isn't one for antics) joined me. So here are two guys, each around 6-foot tall, one shuffling from a 78-year-old bad hip, the other shuffling from what can only be assumed by other as autism, in the middle of a crowd, saying over and over "very crowded.. very...very unsafe in this crowd." and "where did jim go? mainman jim." The problem with this is that while it started as an inside joke between my grandfather and myself, it was fast becoming a part of everyone else's reality around us. And you cannot suddenly come out of that impression because people will think you are being insensitive. So... yeah... we had to commit to the premise.

The great thing, is that as people in the crowd around us started to notice, they started to take pity on us, and move out of the way. It was like Fezzik parting the crown in The Princess Bride. People just sort of started to move out of the way, and look at us, and give us that "you can do it!" smile. All the time I'm thinking "i'm gonna have to answer for this one when i die" but still saying "Uh-oh, jim. J-I-M, jim."

And then, as the crowd parted, we began to once again see my father... still weaving through the crowd, now moving even faster, trying to get away from the scene we were creating, doing his best (if unintentional) Angry-Tom-Cruise imitation. And somehow, making him mad was only encouraging my grandfather and me as we kept up our Dustin Hoffman impressions. That, was a moment I will never forget, and I owe it all to baseball.

So the reason that I am worried about the pirates is this: I may lose all that. And while I'm not a huge baseball fan, I do LOVE going to games now that I am an adult.

Two years ago I offered to take my grandfather and grandmother to a game in may. It was like pulling teeth. I said "there is bus that stops a block from your house in Sewickley and will drop you off at the gate to the stadium. I'll buy the tickets, I'll meet you there, and I'll drive you home after the game. They didn't want to sit in the sun. I got tickets in the shade. They complained it was too cold.

Last year, my father didn't get season tickets with the group that he usually does. No one cared enough, so they didn't do it. I was talking to my dad this weekend as we were driving out to buy my new car (a story that deserves a blogpost of its own) and he said "you know, I only made it to one baseball last year, and that was the one I went to with you where they had their worst loss in franchise history."

That is what scared me. This is the guy who's said the benediction at Willie Stargell's funeral. This is the guy who would throw me in the backseat of a jeep for three days and had his father teach me how to keep a box score for fun. This is the guy who went to every season opener he could, including the one where EVERYONE in the stadium threw their free pirate flags on the field after an inside-the-park-home-run but KEPT his to give to his only son... this guy is now apathetic about the team?

That is why I am worried about the Pirates. One of their most loyal loyalists has given up. And what's worse... I might lose the glue that bonds the Simons men. The Buccos better get it together.

A Slightly More Accurate Nursery Rhyme

So, I was watching Jeopardy and the answer was "this was the number of birds baked into a pie and placed before the king... what a dainty dish indeed!"... or something as weird. The answer, of course, was "4 and 20".

This got me thinking about the absurdity of this nursery rhyme. Seriously...

Sing a song of Sixpence
Pocket full of rye
4 and 20 Blackbirds
Baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened
The Birds began to sing
Now wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the king.

Dumb. That is not at all a realistic portrayal of how this story would have gone down. And, maybe its to keep the harsh realities of the world from our children, but i think that makes kids weak and, frankly, dumb. If I had a kid who knew this rhyme, and i came home and found him or her baking birds into a pie and expecting to present it to some king I would be ticked, but not at the kid... at society for this rediculous rhyme.

That is why I will be teaching my kids more realistic versions of nursery rhymes. Take this for example... a much more accurate telling of how that story probably would happen:

"Someone was in the kitchen
Dunk on Rye
When 4 and 20 blackbirds
got baked in a pie
when the pie was opened
those burned birds began to scream
luckily the drunken one
happened to be the Queen."

No kid is EVER going to try to reenact this rhyme... and if he or she does, you know you have a sociopath, and you don't even need to pay a doctor to get the diagnosis.