I’ve always loved the month of April. As a keeper of Jewish holidays, April usually coincides with the holiday of Passover, an excuse to gather with family and be thankful for the happiness that life provides. It’s also when the weather warms up and flowers bloom, making for some of the best temperatures of the year. But as a sports fan, April features the first month of the baseball season and the NFL Draft, two of my favorite sporting occasions on the calendar. My love of baseball is obvious, but I think people might be surprised to hear how much I enjoy watching the NFL Draft. There’s something about seeing franchises change over the course of three exciting days that makes the spectacle so captivating. What has bothered me, however, about the Draft in recent years is the way prospects are scouted and analyzed by draft junkies. I guarantee you that there will be a Moneyall-esque revolution within NFL front offices because calling every prospect “physical, fast, and capable of playing the game of football” provides no intelligence to both the drafting team and the team’s fans. It also detracts from the game's story.
I don’t intend on this being a post degrading all sports for being devoid of narrative in contrast to baseball, but as the calendar turns from April to May to June in just a few days, it's all I can think about. All I’m saying is that even the most laymen of laymen can talk about baseball through their personal experiences with the sport with a specific type of non-numerical pedantry that feels whimsical for its rarity, like how an old-timer can recall the seat they sat in when they saw their first home run at Ebbets Field or how a Gen-Zer can gush with nostalgia over the hit Nintendo Wii game, MLB Power Pros 2007 (it was all about Mauer and Guerrero in that game, but you didn’t hear that from me). One baseball story that touches my heart that reflects this is about my grandpa serving in the US military during the Korean War. He was stationed in Japan and would play baseball with his barracks and some of the locals in Sasebo, a small-ish Japanese city with a little over 230,000 people living there today. He says that when he would walk up to bat against the Japanese fielders, he would stride with such a “swagger”, as he puts it, that they would take several steps back from their normal positions. My grandma and I always smile when my grandpa tells his Sasebo baseball story because of how much that time meant to him.
My grandpa never fought while he served, but as an American Jew living through World War II, he had plenty of relatives that died in Europe from the Holocaust, so the impact of war is not lost on him. It's not lost on me that his relatives that succumbed to Hitler's tyranny weren't able to immigrate to the United States, which happened to be during a time when the most “Americana” piece of Americana was baseball. FDR even made it a point to issue a statement that Major League Baseball had to continue playing during the war despite a mandatory conscription that would draft a massive chunk of the league by the time the war wrapped up in 1945. From the brief knowledge I have on the subject, only a few professional baseball players were killed in combat by the Axis, but plenty of baseball fans were killed during World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Iraq, and Afghanistan. After all, World War II hand grenades were manufactured to feel and weigh like baseballs because that’s what soldiers were used to throwing.
My grandpa is, thankfully, still with us, still providing me with stories about his swaggering batting stance and sitting patiently as I rant about the constant goings on of the baseball season. While I use statistics and research to display my version of baseball, my grandpa uses his longevity and experience to regale me with tales of a time long gone, when computers were as big as houses and the only tweets that he heard of were of the ornithological variety. We’re both storytellers, bards who strive to achieve a higher connection through bonding over a seemingly useless game that has strung branches of family trees together for a century-and-a-half. Never more is that sentiment felt than on Memorial Day, a day to remember those that we’ve lost from war, and the only day that I really go out of my way to say to my grandpa, “Thank you for your service.”
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Memorial Day falls during the baseball season. It feels almost natural to hear of your relatives’ greatest sacrifices around the barbecue with a baseball game faintly on in the background. It’s the coalescence of narratives on the last Monday in May that cements Memorial Day’s importance for me, so make sure to tell a story today. Happy Memorial Day, everyone!
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