Maybe, Just Maybe

It's started already. Four games in, 1-3, and I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing so wrong that is screwing my O's. Is it the O's glass I employ during games?  I bought it last year for the stretch run thinking the mojo would inch us into the playoffs.  We faded. Is it my new O's hat, the one with the low crown and crisp Orioles cartoon smiling amid a black background and sharp orange brim? Not the right one for this year?  It isn’t the 1983 white and black and orange affair that saw us win our last World Series.  Maybe I should only wear it for home games? I have an older hat I bought when my father was dying.  I got him and me low crown O’s hats with the scripted O’s on the lid.  I bought for his birthday, in 2005, and I don’t think he ever wore it.  Maybe I was thinking it could bring some magic and help him live longer, maybe even somehow (in my panic) it could even cure him. It didn’t, I knew it wouldn’t, but I wore it daily.  The O’s were still losing, but leave it to me to believe that hat had the power to propel us to 93 wins in 2012. The hat was already seven years old and I was fooling myself, just like with dad. 

Maybe since Donna and I are 3-0 at home the past year she and I should go to every other home game remaining? You think we could go 79-2 at home this year?  I know, no.  I got it, maybe it's that I have my O's license plate covers on the wrong ends. I'll change them today. The front is white with black and orange script and the rear is black with white script.  Maybe I need a cold Natty Boh at hand during the games, you know, just in case?  Maybe it’s not about maybe and maybe I should stop with all the madness? Hmm?  I have no power, I get it, and I understand it’s just a game. Four games in and I'm blaming myself. Four games in and the season is unfun. 

I’ve always placed too great a meaning on an O's win and too great a punishment for a loss.  I remember growing up and rushing to the newsstand to see the box scores and resting my moods on the O's and the Colts.  The Colts though were long gone by 1972 but that didn’t stop me from sheading tears March 29, 1983.  No mojo worked then. But the O’s were still Baltimore’s.  My dad and I would talk baseball and he would get so pissed with me because I never got any of the statics correct. I would make shit up just to talk with him about the O’s and he would yell, “Get your facts right!  Goddamn it!”  I’d brush it off because it was the bonding I yearned for.  There was a time in 1985 when I spewed a stat about Don Mattingly and seemingly simultaneously the Chuck Thompson echoed my words. Dad was floored, looked me in the eye and praised me.  “That’s it!  That’s what I want to hear!”  If only I were better at it maybe dad and I could have been closer, who knows?  But my mojo has never worked.  No amount of contrived rituals worked, ever, and you'd think after 40+ years of loving the O's I would have learned how to temper my angst and adulation.  Alas, poor Derrick, he's slow on the uptake. It's just a game.

As kids we played every chance we found.  I wasn't serviceable, was usually picked first or second for the teams, and occasionally could knock the shit out of the ball; but only during neighborhood pick up games. For some reason, when I donned an official uniform for official league play, I stunk up the field. I had no confidence, none. Couldn’t get out of my own way and looked like a boy with no arms or legs out in the field. I never got why I could be like Doug DeCinces on the sandlot but ridiculously inept in a regulation game.  Maybe my therapist can help with that.    Anyway, we’d play every day, all day, and I swear we didn’t finish one game. Ever. Usually there would be someone getting pissed off for whatever reason a teenage boy does, or the score would be so ridiculously incalculable that it didn't matter anymore and we’d switch up teams.  There were lots of times when someone's feelings got hurt because of the collective ribbing we unloaded on them. Ribbing? Too soft a word.  We unleashed a blitzkrieg anyone we subconsciously and collectively agreed upon was to be blasted.  We were merciless, mean. We all had our turns and all was forgotten after the day’s end. But we always came back for more because baseball galvanized us.  It brought our neighborhood together whenever we played other neighborhoods (always kicking their asses).  Baseball was our rite of passage, our escape, our raison d'être. 

So today I sit with my O’s at 1-3.  One and three.  The sun came across the east, the skies obeyed their cosmic lords, and I woke.  I woke.