A quick weekend trip will bring my family and me on short getaway, and it allows me to mark another check on my bucket list.
My goal since high school has been to visit at least one Major League ballpark each summer.
I will scratch another one off the list in a couple weeks when I head to Busch Stadium, home of the St. Louis Cardinals.
As a Cubs fan, I’m sure it seems strange to some of you that I’d want to see the home stadium of their archrivals.
This year, I will see the Cards host the Cubs, the team I’ve followed since I was 12. It was the year cable television surfaced in Plaquemine. We got 12 channels — seemed like 200 after so many years of only three stations in Baton Rouge.
One of those channels was WGN, the Chicago independent station that aired the Cubs, which were owned by the station’s parent company Tribute Broadcasting in those days.
Sometime I wondered why I remained a fan. After all, being a Cubs fan must have had a lot to do with sympathy. They’ve struggled so many years I’ve followed them, but it’s a little different this year.
They’re the hottest team in baseball, a description that has seldom applied to the Cubbies through the years.
In fact, I’d go as far as to describe this year’s success as “surreal.”
Life as a Cubs fan requires a lot of patience, and I’ve lost it every year.
I’ve always gone back the following season, clinging on to every thread of hope that somehow the current season would be different from all the other ill-fated years.
It got so bad that I sometimes wondered if I was into masochism, which is defined as “the tendency to find pleasure in one’s own pain and suffering.”
Maybe that would have explained it through the years — at least until 2016.
It was the year I watched the Cubs win the 2016 World Series, a feat they had not accomplished since 1911.
It felt surreal. Granted, south Louisiana was ravaged by a 100-year flood in 2016, so the eeriness made sense.
My love of baseball came as much from watching it for more than actual game. While certain players contributed to my fandom, so did the announcers.
Many of the Hall of Fame announcers built my love for baseball.
Announcers such as Jack Brickhouse, Jack Buck, Curt Gowdy and Milo Hamilton all contributed to my love for the game.
None, however, played a bigger role in my fandom than Harry Caray.
Unlike other announcers of that era, I didn’t feel like I had the best seat in the house when I watched it from the comfort of the living room.
He made fans want to be at the ballpark. Caray’s play-by-play, combined with his sardonic wit, came across more like the fans watching it in your den or at the barstool next to you.
The best part was hearing him sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the seventh inning stretch.
Caray was close friends with Frank Sinatra, but his singing would never draw a connection in that respect.
But it was more about a good time than singing well.
It was all about making the fans want to be at the ballpark. I hoped to see him when I went to Wrigley in 1999, but he went to the ballpark — or ballroom — behind the Pearly Gates one year earlier.
Harry is gone, but the tradition has continued.