I was born in New York City, July 31, 1955, the year the Boys of Summer won their World Championship. They then broke the heart of my father and many other people in New York by moving to LA. And so it was to Yankee Stadium that Dad took his only child. But I grew up a big Mets fan. Here are some highlights of my baseball watching life (in terms of actually being at the stadium) in chronological order: Unfortunately, there is much I no longer remember about some of these red letter days. 1) I am writing this on August 6, 2005. Thirty-nine years ago today, I went to Shea Stadium with my father and another little girl who will be referred to in this blog as "My Friend the Yankees Fan" to meet my all-time favorite player - Ron Swoboda. He used to wear No. 4 with the Mets, so I had a sign with a big 4 on it that said: Gehrig, Camilli, Kiner, Swoboda. 2) In 1967, as the Red Sox were pushing toward a pennant, they played a doubleheader at Yankee Stadium. My father and I were supposed to go, but he got caught up doing an errand for a friend and we were only able to make the second game. No problem. That one went 18 innings. I remember rooting for the Red Sox. It was the year Yaz won the Triple Crown. 3) in 1968, My Friend the Yankees Fan and I participated in the Banner Day parade between games of a doubleheader, back when you could get two games for the price of one. Ron Swoboda and Tom Seaver watched the proceedings from the dugout. Swoboda was semi-reclining along the bench chewing on a fingernail. Seaver was sitting further down the bench and when we saw him, we called out to him and waved. He waved back and then started applauding Swoboda for the fact that our banner read: Ron Swoboda is superfine. He'll bat .350 in '69. That's exactly what he batted in the '69 series. 4) In 1969, both my parents and I were at Shea Stadium when the Mets captured their first division crown. They played the Cardinals; the Cubs had defeated the Expos earlier in the day and I was happy about that because I wanted the Mets to clinch it on their own. I took a couple of clods of earth from center field. The Mets went on to be the World Champs. In addition to batting.350 in the Series he made a great diving catch, not unlike catches I have seen more recently by Eric Byrnes. :). But Swoboda was not known for that type of play and if he had missed, it would have been extra bases. It was a brave thing to try in the World Series. 5) In 1974, I was at Yankee Stadium for the final home game before the remodeling. It was against the Tigers. My father got us seats in right field. I think he did that because he knew Al Kaline was one of my favorites. I guess I have a thing for outfielders. That was Kaline's last year. I don't remember the score, but I remember that my dad and I were almost splattered by a banana that someone threw that hit a bannister behind us as we were leaving at the end of the game. That would suggest the Tigers won. 6) Well, if MLB.com is going to call my bio cool, I had better add 1977. That was the year I graduated from Fordham University, and if I had thought of it sooner I would have asked for a ticket to the All-Star Game as a graduation present. The Mets were hosting and my father knew someone connected to the front office. But by the time I thought to ask, the game was completely sold out. I met Pete Rose, his son Petey and Greg Luzinski on the subway the day before the game. That was the year Tom Seaver got traded to the Reds, so a few of us who had recognized Rose on the train asked him to say hello to Seaver for us, and to let him know that New Yorkers had not forgotten him. Luzinski kept to himself, letting Rose get all the attention. Pete asked us how to get to Columbus Circle. 7) Since I was going to law school at Indiana University in Bloomington, with the intention of staying in Indiana permanently, I decided I would become a Reds fan. Just before I went to Bloomington, my father and I took in one more Mets game at Shea. Pedro Borbon was the outstanding relief pitcher of the Reds at that time. The Mets lost that game and I remember my father saying "Borbon is throwing some wicked pitches." I bought a Reds cap that night. For the first time in their 15-year existence, I rooted against the Mets. I was determined at that time to turn my back on New York City for reasons that have nothing to do with baseball. My father and I took the subway home and for a moment I caught him looking rather wistfully at me. He must have been thinking about how big a Mets fan I had been for so many years, and how many games we had attended together, but now I was adopting a new team. It was the last game we ever attended together. He died just before my third year of law school. When he drove me to Bloomington, he told me not to bother with minor league baseball. "Don't waste your money on minor league baseball," he said, "You've been brought up with major league baseball. If you need to see baseball, root for your college team." I never saw Indiana play baseball. This was the Bob Knight-Isaiah Thomas era, and I focused on watching basketball. I never did see the Reds, or any other baseball team while I was in Bloomington, and I don't recall whatever became of the Reds cap I had gotten at Shea that night in August of '77, when Seaver was gone and Borbon was throwing those wicked pitches. 8) This is another late addition because I had to look up the year of the game. It was 1989. I was working as an editor for a lawbook publishing company in San Francisco called Bancroft-Whitney, which has since been merged into the West Group. When you watch law shows on TV and see lawbooks in the background, well, I used to write for some of those. Anyway, we used to have our own version of a rotisserie league and a few of us in the league decided to see a Giants game. What made this a red-letter day, besides the fact that the Giants were hosting the Reds, was that it was Dave Dravecky's comeback from cancer. He was the winning pitcher that day. Unfortunately, in his next start at Montreal his arm broke and eventually it was amputated. So while it wasn't as successful a comeback as Eric Davis or Lance Armstrong, he did come back, and some of us editors saw it. In fact, we'd been talking about taking in a game for some time, and we chose that one because we wanted to see Dravecky come back. Bancroft-Whitney had a flextime policy and I had enrolled at San Francisco State University to get a 2nd Bachelor's degree in music. (My original bachelor's degree is in economics). I was a member of the San Franicsco State Concert Choir and one day one of the Channel 7 ABC anchors, an Asian lady whose name I don't remember, came to tape the choir singing "Take Me Out To the Ball Game." We had been told the day before to wear baseball gear if we had it. The director placed the anchorwoman right next to the two people who were not wearing Giants gear. Directly behind her was a fellow who wore a Cubs jersey with a stripe of black electrical tape running across it as a symbol of mourning. And immediately to the anchorwoman's left was the one person decked out in a brand new Oakland A's cap and sweatshirt....me. That was in October, during the A's-Giants World Series. The following day, I decided that I would that I would put the radio on in my office and work through the World Series Game at Candlestick, as I had been putting in some short days and needed to make up the time. That was the day of the earthquake. I may owe the fact that I am alive today to the World Series. Otherwise I would have left the office at 4:30, would have been on the Bay Bridge by 5 and at or near the point where a section of the Bridge collapsed at the time of the earthquake. A slab on the eastern side of the doubledecker bridge collapsed down onto the roadway where people heading east, as I would have been but for the Series, were driving. 9) In 1992, I went to my first playoff game. The A's vs. the Blue Jays. It was the last time Dave Stewart pitched for the A's. The Blue Jays won those playoffs. I still use the plastic soda cup I bought as a souvenir. Right now, it's a flower vase. 10) In 2003, I went to the final game of the Red Sox- A's playoffs. It really hurts to watch the other team celebrating on your field. I have always hated called strike 3, but never more so than when Jermaine Dye and Terrence Long each struck out looking to end that game. Johnny Damon had that horrible collision, but he raised his fist into the air as they carted him off on a gurney and we all cheered. And that turned out to be the beginning of the rocknroll Johnny even My Friend the Yankees Fan thinks is cool. (She's right!) 11) In 2004, I decided to go to Opening Day...er, Night for the Oakland A's. April is no time to play night baseball in Oakland (or most other major league cities). During the 7th inning stretch, I went to the concession stand. I was still 20 feet away when the vendor told me, "We're out of coffee and we're out of hot chocolate." How could he tell that I had planned to order a hot chocolate? Were my lips that blue? (It felt like it). The A's beat the Rangers and Arthur Rhodes got the save, but it was not meant to be for either of them last year. I passed up on Opening Night this year because I knew it would be too cold to enjoy. I have been doing a lot of journalism on energy over the last three years. A friend of mine who is now trading in journalism and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays for grad school and the (affordable) Mets minor league team in Brooklyn, interviewed me for one of her last public affairs shows in Florida. We talked about Peak Oil, which is a very grim subject, and she asked me if there was anything positive about it. I said that it would encourage more day games in the warm sunshine when the teams looked to reduce their energy costs by cutting the number of night games, which required all that lighting. I would like to see an All-Star Game and a World Series Game. And I would like to see a game at Fenway Park and Camden Yards. I have never been to Boston. And the times I was close enough to Baltimore in the summer to catch a game was in '95 and '96, but the Birds were away both times. Everyone I have known who has been to Camden Yards tells me it's beautiful. Currently, I work part time at KPFA-FM in Berkeley, where we talk sports in the newsroom all the time, but we don't have a sports department. I was in charge of noon headlines the day Tug McGraw died, so I made the news of his death the last item I read. I would have done it even if he hadn't been born in nearby Vallejo. Roy Campanella II, son of the Dodger great, has been our GM for about a year. He described his dad as a total jock, but Roy II's not a jock at all. Too bad. I think life around KPFA would be more fun if we had a sports department. I put MLB.com's Gameday on my computer when I am engineering the Evening News so that I can keep up with whatever team Eric Byrnes is playing for that week while I wait for the next technical move I have to make for the cast. As a reporter who knew digital was the way to go the moment I saw it, I helped the newsroom make the transition from tape to digital. I'm pretty handy with a program called Sound Forge. But I've signed up for a video editing class with the aim of pursuing a career as a digital video editor in a couple of years. Sports videos. Not hard news. I look forward to someday having a portfolio that includes an Eric Byrnes highlight tape.

Keeping stats on Eric Byrnes' hitting, astrology, Darkover novels, Big Ten college basketball (especially Indiana)