Take Me Out to the Ballgame

It's baseball season, and I've got the fever.
I signed up our youngest son, Mark, for T-ball, and ever since then he's had the fever, too. Every waking moment, he's asking me, his mother, his brothers and even our dog to play catch and throw pitches to him for batting practice. He is obsessed.
Baseball isn't a pastime for him; it's a passion, and I think I understand what he's going through. I think a lot about baseball these days, and all of the time I spent as a kid in Bossier City, La., playing ball with my best friends, Buzzy and Hoppy.
We'd get home from school and within 15 milliseconds have our ball gloves, bats and baseball in hand for a game of 500, flies-and-grounders, catch, burnout and any other permutation on baseball an 11-year-old mind could think of.
We played in a huge open field behind the trailer park. In the summers, the heat and humidity would both be in the 90s, but it was nothing a 10-cent grape Nehi from the soda machine in front of the laundromat couldn't fix.
I was one of those kids who was fixated on equipment, and the more the better. That meant I was the catcher.  My heros were Dick Brown, a catcher for the Detroit Tigers, and Yogi Berra of the New York Yankees. When the CBS "Game of the Week" came on our black-and-white Zenith with Dizzy Dean and Peewee Reese announcing, I'd put on all of my catcher's equipment and "catch" the pitches as they were thrown on the TV. I'd even argue with the umpire if I felt he was visually impaired on any particular pitch.
I also played in the Barksdale Air Force Base Little League. My team was the Little Commanders. One day, the coach got the idea that he would have me pitch.
Bad idea.
We were playing the Jet Aces, and our regular pitchers weren't there. One Jet Ace player had my number. He hit not one, not two but three home runs off me that day.
I felt like Charlie Brown out on that mound, with all my clothes blown off. The final score was something like 423-0.
That was the low point of my baseball career. But there has never been a spring when thoughts of baseball haven't returned.
The other day, I saw a movie called "Fever Pitch." It was about a teacher who is a diehard Boston Red Sox fan. I went to school one summer with one. He was a breed apart. We were students at a Russian language school in Vermont, and every Saturday we'd sneak into the recreation hall to watch a Red Sox game on the television. Every time, the Sox would get hammered, but he'd just shrug and say, "We'll get 'em next time."
The movie reminded me a lot of him. Being a Red Sox fan is a lifestyle and an obsession much more than anything else.
By the end of the movie, an amazing thing happens. The Red Sox win the World Series for the first time in a bajillion years, and the Sox fan finds his true love.
Maybe that's what's so attractive about baseball. Maybe we are all Charlie Browns or hapless Red Sox fans and we're just looking for that one magic moment, when the Sox win the series and the prettiest girl in stadium falls for us.
Maybe it won't happen this year. If not, we'll get 'em next time.