#29 of 92: The Baseball Season Has Ended and All is Well

The Milwaukee Brewers won the World Series last night. It is a stunning and wonderful thing especially for people old enough to remember their losing the World Series in Game #7 in 1982. The ’82 Brewers are Milwaukee legends – Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, Cecil Cooper, Ted Simmons, Rollie Fingers – that every Milwaukeean of a certain age can rattle off like they saw them play last week. We’re all surprised to see them now. They got old, too, along with us. The new players are young and beautiful, and we love them like they’re our grandsons.

I asked my husband how many Brewers games we watched this year. There were the twenty in our season ticket package although we gave a couple of those away. And then there were baseball games on TV throughout the nights of summer, the windows open, the gentle din of kids playing in the street, our dog barking at the neighbor, the big fan running, maybe a little rain, a child asleep on my lap. My husband said we watched a hundred games. I don’t know if that’s right. It seems right. There were so many.

I could say that baseball saved us after the death of our daughter in June. That would be hyperbole. We were weak through much of the summer, but we didn’t need saving. As it turns out, though, we did need the rhythm of baseball, the balls and strikes, the pitch count, the stealing, the hit batters, the high fly balls and the wild catches where outfielders crashed into walls to grab a ball. We needed Sal Frelick, William Contreras, Christian Yelich, Jackson Churio, Brice Turang, all of them. They were our boys and they did good.

The Brewers won the World Series last night. In a weird kind of way, so did we.