I'm home. Well, that's not technically true because I never lived here, in my mother's place outside Chicago.
I'm here because she died. I can't understand that. We never got to finish watching Kevin Costner's movie about Shoeless Joe, though she did take the El with me down to see the White Sox in 2005, when the Yankees' Shawn Chacon beat former and soon-to-be-again Yankee El Duque. She actually said aloud that she wished Mariano Rivera, her favorite player, had gotten to pitch. She knew about him because she loved me and baseball was the only thing besides fear of not going to work that could get me to stop sleeping back then when I was sick. So she watched Yankee games so that we could talk about them, and that's how she learned about him. So I'm going to use this blog to steal away for a minute and talk about baseball. And the Dodgers, whom she and my dad took me to see so many times in LA, where she helped me dress up as Ron Cey for Halloween one year, and where I grew up until my Dad was transfered to the Chicago area just before Postseason of 1981, setting off 15 years of avoiding baseball, except a few games at Wrigley. And Brooklyn, where I work now, in the high school where Sandy Koufax played (Lafayette). And Jackie Robinson, who made that team what it is, and whose number is worn only by my mom's favorite baseball player. Because, as Mark Gremse said so often "That's baseball."
But, on the surface, these are really just a few trivial lines about movie: WYIN - public television out of NW Indiana - is showing The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), which, as I just discovered, can be viewed on Google Video here.
Regular readers know I'm a softie for great lines from broadcasters. Here's one from the movie, spoken right before Jackie steps to the plate in the 9th, with the Dodgers down by 1 and hoping to clinch the Pennant: "Brooklyn hearts have skipped more beats than an absent-minded policeman."
