It started with Jose Canseco. The year before, he’d become the first Major Leaguer to hit forty homers and steal forty bases in a season. I’d missed it. So, when Ryan Miller introduced me to baseball the following spring (my father had taught me to fish, not to play games with balls), he claimed Canseco as his favorite slugger on the 1989 Oakland A’s. That left me with the other Bash Brother, Mark McGwire, which was more than okay with me. We collected their baseball cards, wore their t-shirts, pretended to be them when we smacked Wiffle balls over his fence.
We divided other players, too. Ryan, having played the game longer, was the better infielder, and believing that short was the superior position, he took Walt Weiss. I’d be Mike Gallego, flipping him the ball to turn two, then pretending to be McGwire again at first when he threw it back. Ryan had the better arm, too, so he claimed starter Dave Stewart. I was happy to have closer Dennis Eckersley; his long hair and mustache made him look like a 70’s rocker, and he had a wicked sidearm delivery (my own throws were sloppy sidearm tosses that Ryan’s father, our Babe Ruth team’s assistant coach, tried to correct). Then there was Rickey Henderson. The Man of Steal was so cool, we each had to have him.
Rickey Henderson notwithstanding, the ‘89 Oakland A’s gave us easy choices (and a World Series victory). Outside of the pure joy of watching Major League Baseball on TV, and two glorious afternoons at Wrigley Field (I’ll never forget walking up the tunnel to the Technicolor delight of grass, ivy, and sky), most things were out of our control.
The following year, our favorite A’s were back, but the Reds swept them in the Series, a crushing upset and a major disappointment to us. Thirty years later, I see parallels in watching the A’s capture the pennant then and watching them leading the AL West now, as they play to empty stadiums. Not since my adolescence have I been so uncertain about what the future holds. College, adulthood—in 1990 those thoughts lived on a vague horizon, not unlike the gauzy territory in which I can one day take my children to Wrigley. But I can be almost certain that tomorrow will look just like today, as I could back then. As sure as I am that tomorrow I’ll stay in and report to my basement office, I could predict that Rickey Henderson would steal with a face-first slide that had him overtaking the bag, a Bash Brother would pummel the ball to bring him home, Eck would pick up the save, and Ryan and I would replay the infield magic in an endless game of catch.
What I couldn’t predict was whether one of our fathers were stricken by a disease that left them unable to play catch, whether one of our brothers came home with Gulf War syndrome.
Patrick Nevins is Associate Professor of English at Ivy Tech Community College.