I was never a baseball fan. We didn’t get many games televised in the tree that I was born in.
Frank was never a baseball fan. He played farm league baseball (the one between t-ball and little league) for two summers before getting his nose broken by a hard throw to home. (He was a catcher who picked the perfect time to throw off his mask…and caught the ball with his face.) It’s hard to like something after it broke your nose.
Ken Burns changed all that… for Frank anyway. Burns did a little 10 part documentary on the game for PBS called Baseball. One weekend in 2011, Frank happened to stream it on Netflix. He started with the first hour and the next thing he knew, he watched the whole thing. All 1,000 hours of it. He loved the stories of the men and women in the game. He was hooked.
He kept his new found love a secret for a while, but this was at the beginning of the season. The lure of almost nightly games was too much for the man to resist. He knew that Lezley was a New York Yankees fan, but was still hesitant to reveal his secret to even the love of his life.
He did a week of strips telling the world how he became a baseball fan… even putting Ken Burns himself in the strip. He then sent those strips to Mr. Burns, who loved them so much, he sent Frank an entire set of his dvds. As of this post, we still haven’t watched them all..
Finally he told her. The first game they watched together was a Cleveland Indians vs. New York Yankees game. You’re probably wondering why and how I remember that. Wouldn’t YOU remember when you lost your best friend to a game? Wouldn’t you?
It took two years, but he broke me. I now like baseball. I now watch baseball. Oh, I resisted… in the end, resistance is futile…and I got tired of not being included. So yes, I am a Yankee fan…but more importantly, I am a Baseball fan.
Everything between Ken Burns and me? It’s squashed. Let’s watch a couple of innings.
