Yesterday's Tale-

Hey, I'm Joe Derive, your local reporter on everything Red Sox and spring training is about the worst time to be a reporter. Lots of no news.
Anyway, today, I got to thinking about baseball. Ya I know, that's what I do right? You know though, I gotta tell ya, baseball to me is more than pro ball. Call me old fashioned but asking a player for the thousanth time "how do you feel about..." get mind numbing. I mean really, how's he supposed to feel. He blew the game! I swear reporters ask the be-stupid questions and are proud of it. That of course forces the player to act like an idiot with the usual , " well I love the team and we're all in this together..." when all he really wants to do is kick the locker, slam a beer down his throat and go to bed. I mean, be real!
That's what got me to thinking about my own childhood and what baseball meant to me. You see that game was a sign of summer. When we hit the park, and in those days you could do it without parental supervision, we played ball the way it was meant to be played with grit and gusto and a lot of fun. We had sticks for bases and dirt for our uniforms and character.
I'd like to tell you about some of those characters. First names only! There was Joey. Joey had a lousy right leg and could barely run but he could hit a baseball and everyone loved him. We had Henry, who later became an FBI guy and he could hit and run and play hard. He reminded me a lot of Ron Howard the director. Same super nice guy personality that was going places in this world. There was Alex who never left that neighborhood. Heck, he never left his house. To this day he's still there but his baseball days are over but everytime we talk it reminds me of those summer days. Then there was Brian who made the mistake of swearing to another kid. That kid slugged him in the stomach. Despite the fact that there were seven of us and two of them, we were too scared to tackle em. Some tough guys we were hu!
I mean when we played the game we didn't care about contracts or stupid interviews or steroids. We played the game to mark the beginning of summer and the start of school. Baseball to us was our religion. It didn't matter if we won or not. What mattered was we were away from the world and its chaos. We were just by ourselves smelling green grass and trees. Sometimes I wonder what happened to those guys. I'm sure all of em' look back and see it as kid stuff but to me I was more alive then than I am today sometimes.
So here I am today having to ask Dice-K about his stupid sore back. I mean, this guys like the toothache that never goes away. A sore back? So what can I do? I have to ask, "how ya feeling today...and what is the outlook" and any number of pointless questions that never get answered because the press gets fed back takeout with a smile.
Na, that's not baseball. To me, its Fall River Massachuesetts at an old park with huge trees and character in neigborhoods without freaks and pediphiles where a bunch of kids passed the time playing real baseball and none of us ever went on the disabled list. Not once. But all of that's gone now. They world's changing so fast. Today's kids will never know the fun it was just to be in a world of your peers without everybody looking down at ya to make sure you smile for the camera.

I'm Joe Derive