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“Hey Dad, Wanna Have a Catch?
Kevin Costner utters those six words in “Field of Dreams” and I, like any dad with a heart, turn into a puddle. Bottom lip quivers, eyes well up. I look for my phone, try to restore my composure, then can call my dad, all while our sons roll their eyes, elbow each other in the ribs and recoil when I try to give them hugs.
“Don’t worry,” I say, “It will happen to you one day. And I won’t take the call…”
The movie is the guys’ version of “Steel Magnolias”, “Titanic”, and “The Notebook” rolled into one, but we’ve got James Earl Jones, so we win.
It captures the “if you build it, they will come” purity of the game, the push-me-pull-you relationships that create scar tissue between fathers and sons. You were too like-minded, too different, too independent, or he was too distracted, too busy, too something… But this movie hit the big screen and beefs between fathers and sons, whether forgotten or hardened by time, melted into personal remembrances: sitting on the stoop, waiting for dad to get home for a game of catch before he could take off his suit jacket, or moping on a Saturday afternoon until he left the lawn half-mowed to “play catch”, as we called it.
We were a sports house, then and now. We were especially a baseball house. Our sons, Zach and Luke, were young when they saw me shed a tear the first time we watched “Field of Dreams” together. They asked why I was sad.
“I’m not sad,” I said. “I just miss Gramps.” So we called him. The next time Gram and Gramps came to visit, they asked him if he wanted to have a catch.
“I don’t have a glove anymore,” he said. They found him one for that afternoon. Then they pooled their money, all $3 of it, to buy him a glove for Christmas. It was the best $75 I ever spent.
Dad’s rocket arm was blown out by the time he would have been able to really show it off for me. He hasn’t made a throw he could be proud of since Nixon was in office. But his glove is always in the trunk, ready for anyone who wants to toss the ball around.
The World Series, that 10-day miracle of what once was “America’s pastime”, starts tonight.
Kids don’t get to watch the first inning of the game at school anymore before the final bell of the day rings and they sprint home to watch the rest of the game. Hell, most of them have to go to bed before the games start. No wonder it used to be our pastime.
It doesn’t matter if your team isn’t in it (easy for me to say, our Mets are almost never in it), but it bothered me a lot this year that my 86-year-old dad’s Yankees didn’t make it.
The games take too long, the reliance on stats turn it into a game for Xbox. There are too many commercials, too many missed cutoff men, too few bunts and not enough situational hitting.
But it’s baseball. Watch as much as you can, let your kids watch until you have to carry them to bed.
Then call your dad.
Because it’s baseball.
