Bad Date

I went out with a girl one night more than 30 years ago in what, looking back, I consider to be the worst date I've ever had. As that evening drew to a conclusion, I hoped I'd skid on icy roads and veer off the highway to end the pain of it all.

In the annals of dating, it was a bad one. But now, three decades later, I just learned that the girl recently died and the impact of that date has changed from being a disaster to a more nostalgic look at our youth.

I'm not pining over the girl by any means. I didn't even remember her last name until someone told me about her passing the other day. Instead, I guess I'm forlorn over a time when we were young and dates were an exciting venture and death was far away.

I don't remember exactly what year I went out with her. It was a one-time deal. I think I was in college and she may have been a high school senior. I know I was out of high school and able to avoid the awkward situation of meeting the girl in school in the following days.

I do remember, however, someone set us up, saying she was really nice person. And maybe she was. Just not to me.

We began the evening arguing over the song “Renegade” by Styx. She loved it; I hated it. We evolved to talking about what shows we liked on television; differing again. We were on opposite ends of which teachers we liked in the high school we attended. I mentioned I loved the New York Yankees. She hated them. When a girl hates your favorite baseball team, it's eminent that the date is doomed.

But I pressed on, despite the difficulty in conducting that fact-finding small talk you do on first dates.

We met another couple at a pizza restaurant about 15 miles from our town and the date continued to slide into a pit of despair. She flirted with the other guy in our foursome and, realizing this was heading for disaster, I didn't care. I may have even offered to drive the other guy's date home since my date and he were hitting it off so well.

The evening drew to a close and I drove her back home. There was none of that adolescent jitters of wondering if I should ask her out again, if I should walk her to her door, if I should even kiss her good night. This was one of those dates where stopping the car to let her out rather than driving by her home slowly and letting her tumble out was adequate enough.

It was the worst date I've been on and I hadn't given it any thought until just recently when I heard she died. I had not seen her since that night and I'm sure she never remembered me.

But now I find it sad that I've reached the time where people I may know are approaching the age when we begin dying. I don't know what she died of; but it happens now. It gives me the perspective of mortality, of time running out. At this age I begin wondering if this is it. Have I reached my goals, despite wanting more? Is time running out? Weird thoughts in a weird time.

So, I reflect back on that date with melancholy thoughts. If I could go back, I'd apologize to her for the date. I'd tell her that the date really didn't matter in the bigger scheme of life, that we had a long life ahead of us and we needed to take advantage of that and chalk up bad dates to youthful ignorance. I'd tell her that, really, I wasn't as bad as she probably thought I was that night and that I'm sure she wasn't the she-devil from the third level of hell, I met that night, either.

Other people have had far worse dates, I'm sure. I went to an Arkansas Razorbacks football game once on a double date with a guy whose date burped beer most of the night. Nice.

But my date with this girl was up there in bad ones. I mean, arguing about the New York Yankees?  

'Ball Four"

Whenever I hear people talk of books that changed their lives, I usually think they're simply being pseudo-intellectuals. You know the type: Those who admit to reading Ayn Rand's “Atlas Shrugged”, those who know how to pronounce Ayn's first name and those who understand the theme of individualism in Rand's “The Fountainhead.”

Notice how one-dimensional I am when making references to pseudo-intellectuals? I'm so bereft of brain I can only come up with Ayn Rand books as my examples.

Another display of my mental skill: A Facebook friend the other day posted an invitation for her friends to note their favorite presidents to honor Presidents' Day. Several of her friends were the high-brow type and they were quick to crow that Obama, Clinton, Kennedy and Roosevelt were the best. A few tossed in Washington and Adams. I, on the other hand, suggested William Taft. Anyone who invented the seventh-inning stretch and admitted to being stuck in a bathtub was all right by me, I wrote.

All that said, however, and in fear of sounding like a pseudo-intellectual myself, there is life-changing book that I've read.

Jim Bouton's book “Ball Four,” the diary of his 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and the Houston Astros, is the most impacting book I've ever read. Sports fans, I'm sure, have read it over and over. It's one of the rites of spring. Every few Februarys, I take the book from my shelf and read it again. I've done it for more than 40 years now.

I actually remember when and where I got the book. My aunt and uncle were visiting and my family took them to the Headwaters of the Mississippi River in June 1971. (The same place I reference in the previous post about my flip calendar). I saw the paperback priced at the hefty sum of $1.25. I was 11; I begged my parents to buy the book and then they balked, my aunt bought it for me.

On one level, it would seem irresponsible for adults to let a child read Bouton's book. It contained curse words and adult situations and many of Bouton's observations of life went over my head at that early age. But it also had baseball and that was the draw then.

I remember taking the book to grade school the following fall and showing my friends the bad words. And while it was funny to see those words in print, it also put me on a different plane than the others in my reading, and it helped form the way I thought and how I questioned things. While my classmates were struggling through “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “The Outsiders” and “Harriet the Spy,” I was reading “Ball Four.”

A few years later, when my family moved to Arkansas, I left the book in my junior high English classroom after the class ended and we left for the next class. I realized what I had done and despite being really shy back then, I immediately walked back, barged into the room and picked up my book. It was that important of a read to me to shun my attempt at avoiding any attention to myself at that school.

The book is so much more than a baseball book and now, 42 years after I first read it, I still learn things when I read it again. It is an amazing story of how the system works, the ridiculousness of life and the acceptance of being different. Maybe now I tend to over analyze things and look at things from different angles because of this book.

I actually found Bouton once and called him on the phone to talk briefly with him about the impact his book had. I'm sure he gets calls like that all the time and, while I rambled on about the genius of his story, he was probably looking at the clock thinking, “I gotta get out of here.”

So, while the rest talk of the impact of reading the works of Emerson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway or even David Foster Wallace, I tout Bouton's “Ball Four” as the most influential book I've ever read.

It's February again. Time to read his book yet again.

But, despite my foray into the intellectual side, I still think Taft was a great president for that seventh-inning stretch deal.

1981 AL East Race, Sept. 12, 1981

With about three weeks remaining in the 1981 season that I'm replaying with APBA baseball, the American League East division is featuring the tightest pennant race I've seen in the 14 years I've been playing the statistical based game.

For those of you new to the game, APBA uses dice and player cards with numbers printed on them that replicate closely their actual statistics complied for that particular season. Players roll two dice, match the number rolled to that on the player's card and then compare it to a corresponding number on a board to determine the batter's action.

The game company has created cards for most of the previous seasons, so enthusiasts like me, can replay virtually any season. It's a great way to learn baseball history and, as in this case, provides pretty neat results.

I began replaying the 1981 season in December 2011 and decided to act like the baseball strike of that year never happened and play each team's full 162-game schedule. Fourteen months later, I've reached Sept. 12, 1981.

Here's how the AL East looks:

                   W     L     GB
Detroit         85    57      –

Baltimore    85    58     .5

Milwaukee  85    58     .5

New York   81    61     4

Here's the games remaining for those teams:

Baltimore: at Mil (1); at Cle (2); Mil (3); Det (3); at NY (4); at Det (3); NY (3)

Detroit: Cle (1); at Bos (4); at Cle (3); at Bal (3); Mil (3); Bal (3); at Mil (3)

Milwaukee: Bal (1); NY (3); at Bal (3) at Bos (3) at Det (3); Bos (3); Det (3)

New York: Bos (1); at Mil (3); at Bos (3); Cle (3); Bal (4); at Cle (3); at Bal (3)

In the American League West, Kansas City leads California by 3.5 games. The two teams play each other three more times, so that division could turn into a dogfight as well.

Both divisions in the National League are virtually decided. Montreal, with speedsters Tim Raines and Rodney Scott and home run slugger Andre Dawson, is leading Philadelphia by 12 games with 21 games remaining for both teams. Los Angeles, with a chance of having four 20-game winners on its pitching staff, leads Houston by 11 games.

It's why we play this game. I've learned about the 1981 season doing this replay and each night, as I roll games, I create the drama and excitement that comes with real pennant races.

Flip Calendar

Flip, ching.

Metal plates inside a small flip calendar I keep on my desk make a distinctive noise when I change the date. Each plate has a number to coincide with the day’s date and it appears in a window on the calendar.

When I change the date I have to rotate the window mounted on a bracket. The plate slides out of the window’s frame and the next day’s date appears. At the end of each month, a plate flips up to remind you to change the month below.

I’ve been doing this since June 30, 1972. I know this because adhered to the bottom of the calendar is that date on a thin red band I stamped out on a label making machine my father owned. For some unknown reason, I’ve managed to keep this flip calendar for more than 40 years, and it’s been marking off days since.

Flip, ching.

My parents bought it for me a day after my 12th birthday that summer day in 1972 when we visited the Headwaters of the Mississippi River in northern Minnesota. The calendar has a drawing of the Itasca State Park area where the river begins.

I used the calendar to mark the actual days in the past, but for the 1981 APBA baseball replay game I’m doing now, I instead use the calendar to show the day of the replay. I’m at Sept. 10, 1981. So, despite it being February 2013 now, my calendar shows it’s still September 1981. And, since it takes more than one day to replay a full day’s schedule of the 1981 games, the calendar may remain unchanged for two or three days.

On the same token, on days in 1981 when there were only a few games — for example, on Sept. 10, 1981, there were only two games played — I will change the calendar twice in a day.

Flip, ching. Flip, ching.

It’s a way to measure the progress of my replay and it gives me a sense of accomplishment when I change the date. APBA replayers can attest that a season replay takes a long time, and we look for anything to show progression late in the season.

This does it for me. After tonight, when I play the two games scheduled for Sept. 10, 1981, I’ll flip the calendar again to Sept. 11, 1981, and then wait to flip it again while I play the 12 or 13 games scheduled for that day.

It’s somewhat odd to have a calendar, a device normally used to mark the time ahead, to actually show the passage of time years ago. 

And the logo of the river’s birth is symbolic as well. It’s a mark of the beginning of something. The beginning of the river, the beginning of my childhood, the beginning of a life itself, I guess. The flowing of the river is a metaphor for life’s journey, smooth at times, turbulent at others.

It all comes to a loop. I’ve walked across the Mississippi River as a child in 1972 at Itasca many times. Two years ago, nearly four decades later and 1,000 miles south of the headwaters, I stood on a Mississippi River levee in Helena, Ark., and watched large trees, parts of barns and other debris float down the flooded waters. At that spot, the river was three miles wide.

So, as I flip the calendar to signify the days’ passage in my 1981 APBA replay, I think of the river, and the day I got this calendar and the 40 years hence.  Kind of heady stuff when I’m rolling games like Seattle vs. Cleveland, isn’t it.

Flip, ching.