My first baseball game
Today is the 25th anniversary of my first time going to a baseball game. Since the first two blog posts here have been re-posts from older work, I figured I’d keep that train going by re-posting the story of that game.
Originally posted in 2013 as a “Box Score Monday” at uselessanalysis.com:
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I've heard it said that the first baseball game you go to is the most memorable, but when I directly ask most people "what was your first baseball game?", it's a rare person that can tell you. Well, I definitely remember mine.
I've had a tepid relationship with baseball my entire life. When I lived in Boulder, Colorado in the 1980s, I didn't even know what baseball was! That was a football town, through and through (both college and pro), and the Rockies wouldn't start playing until 1993, three years after I left.
I moved to Cincinnati, Ohio in the summer of 1990, figured out the rules of the game by watching it on TV, and watched my new hometown team win the World Series by sweeping the heavily favored Oakland Athletics. I assumed -- wrongly of course -- that this was something that happened all the time, so I had no context to celebrate. Baseball is fun! The Reds win!
In the early 1990s, the Reds were your classic "every other year" team. In 1989, 1991, and 1993, they finished below .500. In 1988, 1990 (with the championship), and 1992, they finished above .500. So 1994 was trending to be a good year. The team got off to a fast start, and they became particularly exciting when they acquired Deion Sanders in late May.
On June 22nd, the Reds stood at 39-29, and I finally got to go to my first baseball game ever with one of my best buddies, Debin. The Giants (30-40) -- coached by future Reds manager Dusty Baker -- were in town, and they had two of the best mashers in the sport in Matt Williams (43 HRs in 1994) and Barry Bonds (37). The game didn't disappoint.
Deion Sanders scored the first run of the game in the bottom of the 1st, but the Giants tied it up in the 2nd. After the Reds took a 2-1 lead in the bottom of the 2nd, Barry Bonds hit a home run in the top of the 4th to tie it up. Deion scored again in the bottom of the 8th off of a base hit by one of my personal favorite players, Reggie Sanders, and the Reds brought in Jeff Brantley to close it out with a 3-2 lead. Matt Williams then hit his own solo shot, sending a tie game to the bottom of the 9th. With two outs and a runner on 3rd, hometown hero Barry Larkin hit a single ... "and this one belongs to the Reds!" A 4-3 classic win with a little bit of everything.
However, it turns out that two much bigger sporting events took place on that day. We learned during the game on the jumbotron that the USA had defeated Colombia in the 1994 World Cup group stage -- a monumental upset that ultimately propelled the Americans into the second round for the first time in decades. And later that night, the Houston Rockets beat the New York Knicks in game 7 of the 1994 NBA Finals. Baseball was upstaged -- perhaps emblematic of my future thoughts about the sport -- and this, more than anything else, is the reason that I can so easily find the box score for the first baseball game I ever attended.
As for that Reds team, they were leading the Central Division when the baseball strike of 1994 wiped out the postseason. And while they came back swinging in 1995 -- with Barry Larkin now NL MVP -- they ultimately lost to the Braves in the NLCS and haven't won a playoff series since. Bummer. Maybe I should have celebrated back in 1990.