Baseball, Friendships, and Moving On

I've been unfaithful to baseball this summer. My antidote to the South's summer swelter has always been sweet iced tea, watermelon, vine ripe tomatoes with my supper, and baseball. When I lived in Atlanta, I attended Braves games infrequently, but I always managed to watch them on TV or listen to games on the radio. I knew the players - the lineups remained stable for many years and, besides knowing their stats by heart, I tended to think of the players and coaches as members of my extended family. Then my summers began to experience a streak of sadness. The player rosters shifted all too often. The teams had salary caps, meaning highly desirable players had to be traded to stay on budget. The Braves were sold to Time Warner, who found paying for baseball, our national pastime, a non-cost effective proposition. Now I look at the box scores in the paper and hardly recognize a name. Moving to Asheville, here in the North Carolina Mountains, didn't help much. My wife and I quickly discovered the Asheville Tourists, a Class A farm team to the Colorado Rockies. The games are more intimate in a smaller stadium, the fans more colorful, the games more exciting, as former college and high school standouts fumbled their way toward Big League skills. Vendors served us cheap baseball food, beer, and cola in our six-dollar seats. Still, the favorite players disappeared at a steady pace, moving to AA or Triple A, some all the way to the Rockies. The price of seats is rising steadily, and the team's new owner has installed one of those Big League scoreboards - the kind that invariably diverts your attention from the real reason to be there - the game and its subtleties. It's much the same with friendships. Many of us move around as we grow up, take jobs, change careers, and retire to quieter spots and more peaceful lifestyles. My wife decries the loss of friendships, the difficult process of making new ones in late (ahem) middle age, and so do I. To counter that angst, I've made the effort to renew or maintain friendships with high school and college pals, professional colleagues, and friends made in other venues of life. Telephone calls and e-mails help recharge those friendships to some degree, but they don't replace being with old friends in person, and on a regular basis. We've made a few friends here - my wife through her weaving and local social activities, I though my writing and a late-blooming academic life. Sadly, though, friendships don't happen as spontaneously now as at age twenty-one. For some reason, we're more cautious about allowing new people into our lives. Friendships, like modern baseball, means moving on, I suppose. We never deny ourselves opportunities for change, but we have a visceral need for constancy. I still yearn to watch the Braves, to know all their players, but the modern game doesn't allow that. I want to keep the Tourist players here forever, but that would be at the expense of their dreams of baseball glory. I often want to return to my halcyon days, with my various coterie of friends, but they've changed, moved away, and so have I. Somehow we need to strike a balance between change and constancy. Too much change is disorienting, and constancy can lead to a dull, life-robbing existence. How we do balance things is an individual matter, certainly, but the need for both is something we all share.