FanPost

Hope in the dark years: Growing up with the O's

I easily could have picked Game 2 of the 2012 ALDS. My now wife bought me tickets for my birthday, and being at Camden Yards for the first playoff win in many years was exhilarating. Walking back to the car after the game I felt like a kid again, which is one of the great things baseball can do for a fan.

Instead of picking that wonderful memory, I'll go for something a little different. I suppose it's a story more about me than about the game itself. My family lived in northern Virginia until I was 8 years old, and I was lucky enough to go to Camden Yards most Sundays with my Dad and a family friend for the first couple of years the stadium was open. That early bonding served me well, as we moved deep into the heart of Yankees territory just before my 9th birthday. I was always a devoted fan, checking box scores and watching games on TV when they were available, but unlike today it was harder to be fully engaged in your team if you lived far away. Living through the Jeffrey Maier catch as a middle school kid surrounded by the enemy was not much fun.

Fast forward several years to 2009, I graduated college and was in my first year of graduate school in D.C. I was excited to be close enough to watch the O's again on TV, especially because I didn't have a car and couldn't really afford to go to many games in person anyway. My grandmother still lived in northern Virginia, and as it turns out I was the only relative within 300 miles. It was around this time she started to have trouble with memory loss, and not too long after it was clear driving was no longer an option. She gave me the car, which allowed me to visit more regularly and help run errands, but it also more generally gave me the freedom to leave D.C. when I wanted.

Late May of 2009, the Orioles announced Matt Wieters was getting the call, and I was pumped. The biggest O's prospect in years, 'Mauer with Power', was coming to save the fans from years of losing! I couldn't make his first game on a Friday, but his second was Saturday May 30th, and I drove my grandma's 1985 Toyota Camry up to Baltimore. It was a great feeling to be able to say, 'Hey I'd like to go to the game tomorrow', and just do it. A kind of freedom that I would now take for granted. That game included Wieters' first hit, a drive to center just over a leaping Curtis Granderson which then ricocheted off the wall, and because baseball is awesome, turned into a triple. One of a whopping four in his career. The crowd loved it, and in that moment hope reigned.

The Tigers won the game and Wieters has not quite lived up to the hype that followed him from the draft to majors, but the game is memorable as much for what was going on in my life outside of baseball. The combination of the freedom of being truly on my own for the first time with the responsibility of taking care of not only myself but now my grandmother as well forced me to be a little more serious than I expected to be at 23. Over that spring I could feel myself 'growing up', the first signs of feeling like an adult in the ways a young person would prefer to ignore. Baseball again served as a reminder to enjoy the moment, and hope for the future. To feel like a kid again, even just for a few hours.

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