My old man is still around but, well, he's really not, you know? It's killing me he probably has no idea what happened tonight, or ever really will.
I was introduced to the Astros as a kid in the "bleacher" seats in CF at the Dome. A dollar a pop on Sundays, and my mom would make sandwiches and put them and chips and drinks and stuff in a basket, which of course we were allowed to carry into the park. If we were lucky, we
might get a bag of peanuts, if the old man was feeling magnanimous. He always was a little tight with his cash.
He was really a man of the 1950's, as far as baseball went. Those were his formative years, I suppose. He was a radio color commentator for a Texas League team for a year, in 1952 I think, while he was in college; and prior to that he had gone to a military prep school in Indiana with G. Steinbrenner -- those are his two baseball claims to fame. Most of the great players he talked about, except for the biggest stars, I'd never heard of as a kid, and only later studied up on. So the Astros were sort of our common ground, his and mine, baseball-wise. Our heroes were Wynn and Rusty Staub, Don Wilson and Larry Dierker (my mom would swoon over Dierker's good looks, which is funny as hell to me, now.) I remember the excitement when C. Cedeno was first called up. Everyone could see right away he was something different. My dad got a ticket to the 1968 All-Star game at the Dome, and he brought me home a comemorative program from the game (I was about 7), which I still have. In fact, one of the first things I did tonight, after some phone calls to fellow fans who'd been in as long or longer than I have, was dig out a lot of my old game programs, from over the years. A Sunday DH against the Reds in 1970, which I am pretty sure I went to with my LL team; several other games throughout the 1970's; a mid-week game in '83, against the Expos, which I attended on a whim, and thus witnessed
George Bjorkman's greatest game as a pro, by far -- 2-for-2, a homer (grand slam) and 5 RBIs. Lots of stuff like that.
When Lane caught the fly for the last out, my oldest son (almost 13) came tearing into the room to give me a hug, and knocked me onto the floor. He's built like a truck, and solid as a rock, like his grandpa. He was happy for himself, and for me, too, I think. He has a sense of my existential pain, maybe... he got a real sense of it Monday night, anyway, after Pujols' bomb, when I threw the remote across the living room and inadvertantly blurted out, "EVERY FUCKING TIME..."
He'll never know how cool it is to not have to wait nearly forty years for this to happen. And also to know your dad still has all his marbles (well, most of 'em, anyway) when it does.
