MLB Postseason A Reminder Of Life's, Sports' Similarities

By JOHN P. WISE
One Great Season

Every sportswriter in history it seems has written at least once about his childhood and how he loved going to the ballpark to catch a game with his father. In fact, many of America's greatest writers, sports or otherwise, have penned great things about our national pastime.

This will not be one of those pieces.

But I, too, recall with fondness the many times my dad took me to the yard to watch the Indians get bounced around by the Yankees, Orioles or any other AL East team back then. Cleveland Municipal Stadium wasn't exactly the nicest joint around, but it's where we went to see Andre Thornton, Joe Charboneau, Cory Snyder, Joe Carter and others try to win one for the home crowd.

No offense to dad or my childhood, but I don't have this love of baseball that prompts me to post something poetic and elegant about the romance that for more than a century has burned between man and sport.

My dad and I enjoyed a strong bond and sports were often at the heart of it. Certainly it would have been cool to hit the stadium now that I've been of legal drinking age for nearly two decades. Dad died in 1992, just when the Indians were starting to assemble a nucleus of good, young players under the ownership of the Jacobs family. They were hard to beat in the strike-shortened season of 1994, and kept their foot on the gas the following season, winning game after game with a loaded lineup, often with walk-off heroics in the bottom of many ninth innings, en route to their first World Series in more than 40 years. I'm sure Dad and I would have loved to have seen a game or two together at the Jake back then.

Today's piece, however, is neither a historical look at my hometown team nor an essay on longing for an easier time when Dad was still around. I'm here instead to describe to you what else I've learned to love about baseball over the years.

If you know me, you probably know the story of what I did to my shorts back around 1990 or so. It happened in Hattiesburg, Miss., where I was covering the Metro Conference Baseball Tournament. The University of Cincinnati, where I was a sophomore, took an unheralded bunch of Bearcats like Chris Newton, Mike Mottice, George Glinatsis, Pat Murphy and some dude named Metzinger down south for a tournament usually owned by Florida State. My assignment was to cover this event and, wouldn't you know it, the upstart team from Cincinnati pulled off a couple of upsets and advanced farther than anyone expected.

Being forced to watch mediocre college baseball for a week straight taught me some of the finer strategies of the game. And that experience stayed with me prominently enough that when my hometown Indians found themselves playing October baseball a few years later, I kind of knew what I was talking about when I told friends things like, "They ought to walk this guy to get to that guy and set up a double play" or "Bring in Assenmacher to get Griffey out."

Now, I realize the statements above hardly make me qualified to write the sequel to "Moneyball," but in baseball, the one thing better than learning the nuances of the game is enjoying the process.

The mid-1990s, when the Indians became a postseason staple, were when I learned how similar baseball was to my preferred sport of basketball. Situational matchups are critical in both sports. An at-bat on the diamond is much like a possession on the hardwood; each can require a multitude of strategies in order to achieve one small success before moving on to the next of many sequences.

And therein perhaps lies the analogy of sports to life. In both we need to strategize, execute and move on. The effort will often determine the outcome, but should not be less significant than it.