Baseball is considered to be the great American past-time, a part of our nation"s culture and heritage. Baseball is as much a part of being patriotic as eating apple pie and voting for the president. As an American child, baseball was invariably a part of my childhood experience. From the baseball cap and baseball glove that my father posed me in for my first birthday photo shoot, to the block-baseball team that used my suburban home back-yard as the outfield, to the interrupted regularly-scheduled programming of lengthy televised games in our Not-Fighting living room, to the good and evil dichotomy of coaches that would shape my Middle-School and High-School teams, baseball has been an omnipresent force in my life. It has been there to highlight the great times, as well as emphasize the bad ones, and occasionally, when fate thought kindly of my situation, even brought some comfort and relief when the rest of the world was falling apart. Baseball built my childhood identity for me in many ways, and it also assisted me in defying every expectation when I discovered my new identity. .

             My father did not sing me lullabies when I was a baby. When Mom told him to tuck me in at night he put on his best Phil-Rizzuto announcer voice and, amidst whisper-crowd cheers and tongue-clicking sound effects, gave me the play-by-play analysis of his baseball fantasy game. Of course, he probably sang "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" for good measure, but the focus was definitely on the game, not the song. Most of my memories of this event are fuzzy and unclear, but I do clearly recall as a toddler when Mom opened the door to check on us, he suddenly interrupted the bases-loaded play of the night and started singing an off-tune rendition of a Cat Stevens song. Or it might have been Kenny Logans. The point is that baseball-bedtime was our secret, and assumably something Mom would not have thought was healthy.