Field of Dreams: Why I drove 350 miles to go to a baseball game and how sports can bring us together.

Celebrating Major League's baseball opening day with some thoughts on why sports matter. A father/son tale.

Today is Major League Baseball opening day and as always hope springs eternal. If I can manage to, I’ll take some time at 4:00 PM to watch the start of the Pirates/Reds game, even as my Buccos are coming off consecutive 100-loss seasons (which would be three straight if not the pandemic pause). The day has me thinking back almost a decade to another Reds/Pirates game - the 2013 NL Wild Card game, which marked the Pirates’ first postseason appearance (and winning season!) in 21 years.

Even though I couldn’t stay even 24 houts in the city, I drove the 350 miles to go to this game with my dad. It turned out to be the greatest sports event I’ve ever attended, and likely ever will. An exorcism of sorts with an energy level that was off the charts. There is always somewhat of a forced enthusiasm at games, but this was something else. A true, honest celebration. Andrew McCutcheon called for fans to wear all black and the “black out night” game was electric from start to finish. After they won, we walked across the Roberto Clemente Bridge, back to our car downtown, and a couple of lunatics leaped off into the river to whoops and cries. It was a night to remember but, of course, I didn’t know that when I decided to attend. Below is the column I wrote then, in 2013, explaining why I made that decision, and why it was so easy.

It was like this all night.

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Me, my dad, Roberto Clemente, October 1, 2013. The Blackout Game.

This is the post pretty much as I wrote it in 2013.

Tomorrow morning, I will see my kids off to school, kiss Becky good bye, gas up my Chevrolet and drive 357 miles from my New Jersey home to see a baseball game in my hometown of Pittsburgh. It was not a difficult decision.

The NL Wildcard Playoff game against the Cincinnati Reds is an opportunity to square some circles – with my abiding love for my hometown, whose proud Diaspora I have lived amongst since I was 18; with the Pirates, my favorite childhood team and original sports obsession, who just this year broke a 20-year losing streak, the longest such run not just in baseball but in any North American team sport; and with the man who fueled my love for the Pirates and as a kid and stuck by them for two decades of losing: my father, Dixie Doc.

As with many men, sports were always an avenue of communication between my father, brother and I, a way to keep talking even through years when there were distances in other regards. Back in the days when I thought it was reasonable idea to drive a garbage truck from Ann Arbor to Tegucigalpa, Nicaragua to aid the struggling Sandinistas, when the pockets of my thrift store overcoat overflowed with things my father didn’t approve of; and I disregarded his advice about many things, including how far it was reasonable drive to meet up with an old girlfriend and have some fun. (“Son, you don’t drive halfway across the country for a piece of ass.”)

Even then, we had the Pirates.

We paid a visit to my dad’s old buddy Manny Sanguillén - Dixie was his family pediatrican.

Now we will go the stadium together to celebrate the team’s return to relevance, which I believe will be a magical moment for the city of Pittsburgh and the hardcore group of us who kept paying attention through so much atrocious baseball. There will never be the first game again.

The last time the Bucs were in contention was 1992; there was no internet to speak of. Dixie clipped articles form the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and sent them to me in Manhattan, where I lived, or wherever else I might be. In the intervening years, the Pirates have never been good and they have oftentimes been spectacularly bad. Even during those years, my father’s optimism would bloom in the spring, and we would go to games, eventually joined by my sons Jacob and Eli. Eventually, their sister Anna joined in as well, proudly wearing a pink Pirates hat every summer day.

Roberto with my kids, circa 2013.

My boys became diehard Steelers fans, a fun passion to share through a few Super Bowl runs, but I told them they didn’t have to come with me to the Pirates. Being a fan of the team has been a unique brand of torture. We live in Yankees land. Many of our friends are Red Sox fanatics. I always liked the Oakland A’s. I urged my kids to pick any baseball team they fancied. They stuck by the Bucs. They stuck by me. They stuck by my dad. Anna followed along. All of us have had plenty of beautiful evenings at PNC park together.

Me and Anna - thats my mom behind us. Anna is a college sophomore now.

Eight years ago I had just moved to Beijing with my young family when my father called on a Sunday morning and told me he had bladder cancer. I recounted the difficulties and emotional complexities of dealing with an illness like this from 8,000 miles away in Big in China. About six months after that initial phone call, following months of chemotherapy, my father went under the knife and had his bladder removed and a new one created from his intestine. A couple of days later I flew from Beijing to New York to visit him, expecting to spend a week in the city, staying with my mother in a Sloan Kettering apartment and visiting my father daily in the hospital. A day after I arrived, Dixie announced he was heading home. He checked himself out of the hospital against doctor’s orders, pronouncing it “a good place to die.” The next thing I knew I was back in Pittsburgh, sleeping in my childhood bed.

On day two back home, the Pirates were playing the Dodgers in a day game and Dixie suddenly said, “Hey let’s go down to the stadium, have a pulled pork sandwich for lunch and watch the game for a while.”

So off we went. My mom drove us down and dropped us at the door so we didn’t have to walk anywhere; we bought some scalped box seats for 20 bucks and were sitting in the sun by the top of the 2nd. The Bucs lost 13-5 in a rather pathetic show but being there together was rather amazing. I’ve tried to retain that same level of appreciation for every special moment. Every moment, period. As Warren Zevon said, “Enjoy every sandwich.”

A few years later, I had a Big in China reading in Pittsburgh that happened to be on the day of the Bucs’ home opener. My dad and I attended together. Since then, we’ve been back many times, often with my kids as well. My drive to Pittsburgh is to celebrate the resurrection of a team I love, but it’s about a lot more as well.

Alan Paul’s fourth book, Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s, will be published July 25, 2023, by St. Martin’s Press. His last two books – Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan and  One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band  – debuted in the New York Times Non-Fiction Hardcover Bestsellers List. His first book was Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Becoming a Star in Beijing, about his experiences raising a family in Beijing and touring China with a popular original blues band. It was optioned for a movie by Ivan Reitman’s Montecito Productions.  He is also a guitarist and singer who fronts two bands, Big in China and Friends of the Brothers, the premier celebration of the Allman Brothers Band.