Beddy Beddy Good To Me

I've become quite a baseball fan over the past couple of decades. I suppose you might expect as much from a guy who started his bachelor party at a Rockies-Giants tilt at the old Mile High Stadium, formerly Bears Stadium. I've got this odd, lifelong association with the Chicago Cubs. I run a fantasy baseball league. I sit on the couch on many summer evenings, watching the hometown A's compete with hopes of one more run at the World Series.
But it wasn't always that way. I grew up in a baseball vacuum. Colorado Rockies are a fairly recent invention. They weren't the team with which I grew up. I grew up listening to the Denver Bears on the AM radio that my parents kept as our TV-less link to the outside world at our mountain cabin. I would love to romanticize the music of the play-by-play, or the way that I tracked the team's progress and all its connections to the major league clubs that it kept fed over the years. As it stands, I have attended bushels of baseball games since I moved to California. When I lived in Colorado, that number would be aggressively smaller.
But that doesn't mean I don't have memories. When the Bears became the Zephyrs, just before they moved away just ahead of the looming shadow of the oncoming Rockies (the team, not the mountain range), I went to see a game in July, just before I moved to Oakland. In the bottom of the ninth inning, a walk-off home run won the game for the Zephyrs. The lights went out, and the fireworks commenced, nominally choreographed to rock music including "Glory Days" by Bruce Springsteen. I felt my heart swell and I breathed the thin Mile High air. It was time for me to take my leave. It was a baseball moment.
When August rolls around, I'll be all about football training camp, and college football can't start soon enough, but for now I have this nice bridge between one school year and the next: baseball. I guess you have to grow into it.