This Week In The Dream Antilles

Ebbets Field, Brooklyn

These days your Bloguero isn’t much of a baseball fan. His current team of choice, the Mets, flamed out early in the season. They were so bad that your Bloguero pronounced their season over on April 21, 2011. After that, your Bloguero treated the Mets with the revulsion he usually reserves for serious hangovers and the less benign forms of dentistry. Something to be given a very wide berth. Something to be avoided at all cost. But tonight is the climactic Seventh Game of the World Series. And last night’s Sixth Game, so the Trad Media inform, was a wonderful game. So maybe tonight’s game might be worth watching. Right.

It’s never that simple. There’s always the past to consider. And matters of the heart. When your Bloguero was small boy, he was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. He loved the Dodgers. He loved “dem Bums.” He particularly loved Roy Campanella, Jackie Robinson, Carl Furillo, Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges and Duke Snyder. And others. All the other baseball cards were meaningless; only the Dodgers counted. The Giants and Yankees were obviously teams of spoiled patricians; the Dodgers were the people’s choice. Hell, the Giants and Yankees were probably Republicans. Or worse. They certainly weren’t the lovable underdogs. How could any self respecting kid like teams that always won? Or pretended they did?

Yes, the Dodgers lost almost all of the important, big games back then. To the Yankees. To the Giants. It was a tradition. But that didn’t matter. The Dodgers were great players, and they were a great team. And there was always next year. Your Bloguero loved that they might lose, but that they tried hard not to. And he knew they were trying hard. What else was there, other than to show up and try hard? Your Bloguero liked the innocence and simplicity of that.

One morning your Bloguero awoke and learned that his beloved Dodgers had decided to abandon him. They announced they were pulling up roots in Brooklyn and heading to Los Angeles for the next season. Just like that. Poof. Here at Ebbets Field today, gone to LA tomorrow. Loved today, leaving behind your Bloguero, heart broken and abandoned tomorrow. And why? There was no reason your Bloguero’s 10-year old brain could understand. Ten year olds in love with a team don’t care about finances. Or revenues. Or anything else. They care about the game. They care about balls and strikes. Your Bloguero was stunned. And hurt. And perplexed. Asked your Broguero to any who would listen, to any who might be able to explain it to him, “You mean that the team I love is leaving me and going to the West Coast, to California for reasons I don’t understand?” Your Bloguero could not forgive that Sandy Koufax, the greatest pitcher ever, your Bloguero’s favorite pitcher, would not be throwing in Brooklyn but in LA. And that the home games would begin because of time zones at 10 pm in New York, past his bed time. He'd never see his first love again. There was no justice in that. At all.

So it’s the Seventh Game of the World Series tonight. And it might be interesting baseball to watch. But it’s also irritating the small, old scar your Bloguero has on his heart, the one that marks where the Dodgers were yanked away from him half a century ago. And your Bloguero wonders whether like him, all of the men of a certain age who used to be Brooklyn Dodger fans when they were kids, have the same small scar that marks the very first betrayal of their most avid love. And whether the World Series makes it ache.

This Week In The Dream Antilles is usually a weekly digest. Sometimes, like now, it isn't actually a digest of essays posted in the past week at The Dream Antilles. For that you have to visit The Dream Antilles.