My First Baseball Memory
The first memory I have of paying attention to professional sports was in the fourth grade. I've read that most people become sports fans because of their parents, but my baseball obsession certainly did not come from my parents. My father was happy to play catch with me in the backyard, but that's as far as his interest in baseball went, and that was a lot farther than my mother's interest in any sport. And it wasn't just baseball - neither of my parents has ever had the slightest interest in either collegiate or college sports beyond the ones that my sister and I played in. At that early age, the only organized sport I'd done was tee-ball, which I played in the summers after first, second and third grade.
I had classmates who were into sports in a casual elementary school sort of manner, but the kids I spent the most time with back then also didn't follow sports. I don't have any memories of talking baseball (or football or hockey) in those first years of elementary school. North Dakota was nominally in Twins/Vikings/Stars territory, but none of those teams had been particularly good during my lifetime. For college sports, people cheered for UND or NDSU depending on which one they'd attended; NDSU Football and UND Hockey were the primary focus.
It was also a lot harder to follow sports back then. ESPN was in its infancy and we didn't have cable anyway. The internet essentially didn't exist for my friends and I. Sports coverage was solely by the local newspaper or local TV news or very occasionally national TV coverage during elementary school. In junior high I received a subscription to Sports Illustrated that lasted until I went to college, but in elementary school it was pretty much the Grand Forks Herald, which I read every morning, or nothing. That read through included all the box scores, although I still didn't really understand them.
The first time that sports really broke into my memory in any meaningful way was in the fall of 1987. I was in the fourth grade, and despite having a mediocre record or 85-77, the Minnesota Twins managed to win the AL West. This first intruded on my memory because my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Bohlman the younger (to distinguish her from my 3rd grade teacher), turned on the radio broadcast of the Twins/Tigers ALCS matchups in the afternoon during class. This is the one and only time I ever recall this happening when I was in school. Or at least I think I remember it; looking at retrosheet it appears that 3 of the 5 games of that series were on school days, but only Game 5 was a day game. So it was game 5, or maybe it was a late season game with Twins playoff implications.
The real big first memory though has a very specific date: Saturday, October 24. I was in the fourth grade, and I was on a Cub Scout camping trip. Somewhat unusually, my father wasn't on the trip with me. I went with Joe and his father Dwight, and we slept in their big orange van. I believe it was some kind of Fall Camporee which atypically was allowing Cub Scouts to attend. It had clearly been scheduled months in advance, and nobody expected this night to feature the Minnesota Twins in Game 6 of the 1987 World Series.
Now, in this pre-internet, pre-cell phone era, the most anyone could have expected to have for coverage in the middle of nowhere was possible some spotty AM radio. However, one of the Cub Scouts in question was Brian, and Brian's father Wayne had brought a portable television. It was the height of 1987 technology, which meant it had a black and white screen that was perhaps 4 inches square, and a body that looked something like a big white shoebox with an antenna on it. Wayne set this up next to his lawn chair as we sat around the camp fire on a dry October night. Well, I remember it being night, but it's officially listed as a day game so it was probably early evening.
I was probably watching the television more for the sheer novelty of having a portable television than for the baseball, but this is why I was actually paying some attention when Kent Hrbek hit a mammoth grand slam to clinch the game for the Twins and force Game 7. This is the first memory that I have of a specific baseball play.
In 1988 the A's were really good, and that's about when I started to really systematically pay attention and become an A's fan. Was it a desire to be different from the hordes of newly invigorated Twins fans I found myself surrounded by? The appeal of the oh so cool and impressive Bash Brothers? I truly have no idea, but here we are nearly 40 years later and there's still nothing I've been doing longer.
I had classmates who were into sports in a casual elementary school sort of manner, but the kids I spent the most time with back then also didn't follow sports. I don't have any memories of talking baseball (or football or hockey) in those first years of elementary school. North Dakota was nominally in Twins/Vikings/Stars territory, but none of those teams had been particularly good during my lifetime. For college sports, people cheered for UND or NDSU depending on which one they'd attended; NDSU Football and UND Hockey were the primary focus.
It was also a lot harder to follow sports back then. ESPN was in its infancy and we didn't have cable anyway. The internet essentially didn't exist for my friends and I. Sports coverage was solely by the local newspaper or local TV news or very occasionally national TV coverage during elementary school. In junior high I received a subscription to Sports Illustrated that lasted until I went to college, but in elementary school it was pretty much the Grand Forks Herald, which I read every morning, or nothing. That read through included all the box scores, although I still didn't really understand them.
The first time that sports really broke into my memory in any meaningful way was in the fall of 1987. I was in the fourth grade, and despite having a mediocre record or 85-77, the Minnesota Twins managed to win the AL West. This first intruded on my memory because my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Bohlman the younger (to distinguish her from my 3rd grade teacher), turned on the radio broadcast of the Twins/Tigers ALCS matchups in the afternoon during class. This is the one and only time I ever recall this happening when I was in school. Or at least I think I remember it; looking at retrosheet it appears that 3 of the 5 games of that series were on school days, but only Game 5 was a day game. So it was game 5, or maybe it was a late season game with Twins playoff implications.
The real big first memory though has a very specific date: Saturday, October 24. I was in the fourth grade, and I was on a Cub Scout camping trip. Somewhat unusually, my father wasn't on the trip with me. I went with Joe and his father Dwight, and we slept in their big orange van. I believe it was some kind of Fall Camporee which atypically was allowing Cub Scouts to attend. It had clearly been scheduled months in advance, and nobody expected this night to feature the Minnesota Twins in Game 6 of the 1987 World Series.
Now, in this pre-internet, pre-cell phone era, the most anyone could have expected to have for coverage in the middle of nowhere was possible some spotty AM radio. However, one of the Cub Scouts in question was Brian, and Brian's father Wayne had brought a portable television. It was the height of 1987 technology, which meant it had a black and white screen that was perhaps 4 inches square, and a body that looked something like a big white shoebox with an antenna on it. Wayne set this up next to his lawn chair as we sat around the camp fire on a dry October night. Well, I remember it being night, but it's officially listed as a day game so it was probably early evening.
I was probably watching the television more for the sheer novelty of having a portable television than for the baseball, but this is why I was actually paying some attention when Kent Hrbek hit a mammoth grand slam to clinch the game for the Twins and force Game 7. This is the first memory that I have of a specific baseball play.
In 1988 the A's were really good, and that's about when I started to really systematically pay attention and become an A's fan. Was it a desire to be different from the hordes of newly invigorated Twins fans I found myself surrounded by? The appeal of the oh so cool and impressive Bash Brothers? I truly have no idea, but here we are nearly 40 years later and there's still nothing I've been doing longer.