Grand slams
2024-10-12 09:26:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
This clip of Francisco Lindor’s grand slam in the eastern conference playoffs made it’s way to me via the ether. I don’t play or watch baseball anymore, but I sure used to. I’m not at all up to speed with the current baseball season, or indeed any season for the past 30 years, but at one point I totally was.
I knew loads of player stats, would go around to friends houses to watch games on elaborate old school enormous satellite systems to watch games. I collected baseball cards. Tops, Fleer, other brands I can’t remember now. I would endlessly play 80s and early 90s baseball video games. Hiting a grand slam was THE thing you were always trying, and usually failing, to do. Over and over and over.
I also played all through my teenage years. I must have done 10 seasons. Practiced multiple times per week, year in year out, played competition games every weekend, award ceremonies, trophies, 6ft bubble gum, giant pizzas, bbq hot dogs and hamburgers, american sodas, the whole thing. I was very into it. In later years I made it onto some all star teams. I spent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours out on the field, in blistering hot, freezing cold, wet and miserable weather. And in the duggout waiting to get an at bat.
The sound of a baseball bat connecting with a baseball is lodged so deep in my consciousness and attached in some way to all those memories, that when I hear and see a grand slam, even if I haven’t been following the season or any games for 30 freeking years, it all instantly comes flooding back, my eye brows raise, and some form of pure elation, happiness, and togetherness shines through me. I’m transported back in time, jumping up from my seat along with every god darn person in the stadium, arms raised, fists in the air, roars of joy.
It’s fucking insane how the things you do when you are young stay with you for the rest of your life. It’s sort of similar for other sports, I watched a lot of football, i.e. soccer, at university, in the pub, so that’s in some way similar for me, even if these days I don’t really watch any sports at all.
If you've never been into sports, perhaps for you it was something else like music. I have a similarish feeling when I hear incredible loud electric guitars.
Those moments are some of the best things about being alive. Let’s remember to keep those moments in our future techno world.
I don’t get so many grand slams these days, but my hope is that at least some of you out there reading this will remember that grand slams exist. That in itself will be a gram slam.