Baseball

That might be the last picture Dad and I took together.  It's a selfie I took last June when the Cubs were down in Atlanta.

Dad and I did a lot of baseball.  He was a Braves fan.  Even after they won in 1995, I'm not sure he's ever forgiven Lonnie Smith for his performance in the 1991 Series they lost to the Twins.

One good way to get him riled was to say that Dale Murphy didn't belong in the Hall of Fame.

He was a Cubs supporter, too.  That was because of me.  He always wished them well, and would cheer for them when they weren't playing the Braves.

He was happy for them and me when the Cubs won the World Series last fall.

Lot of baseball memories.

He took me out of school in 1992 to see a Braves playoff game against the Pirates.

He took me to Riverfront in Cincinnati in 1988 to see my first Major League game.  The Cubs won that one 4-2 in 11 innings.  I was eating a hot dog which popped out of the bun after the first bite and rolled down three or four rows in front of us.  He bought me another.

We started hitting Braves games pretty regularly in 1989.  It was a different world then.  Those Braves were lucky to win 70 games, and you could walk up to Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium and get a whole family in for about 16 dollars.

When I was going to school out in Middle Tennessee, he came out and we hit a Nashville Sounds game.  It was early in the season, and it was a cool week night.  There were maybe 500 people in the stands that night, and a knuckleball hurler was going for the other team.  It may have been Jared Fernandez, but the answer escapes me right now.  The knuckler was mostly working.  There were probably 50 foul balls into the crowd that night.

His birthday gift to me this year was going to be tickets to the Cubs and Braves in the new Stadium down in Atlanta this season.

Little things keep hitting me.  And the fact that we'll never go to another baseball game together was a big one.