Father and Son At Bat

How baseball and the national anthem taught us harmony.

Idyllic Times

One of the most idyllic times in my life began with strife and discord -- in the professional baseball world, that is. In August 1994, the Major League Baseball strike left me without my usual summer evening's entertainment. When my wife, Mimi, brought home a book called Stolen Season by David Lamb, I spent several evenings enthralled. Lamb was a foreign correspondent who'd set out to clear his head of war and violence by traveling around America in an RV, visiting minor-league ballparks. He had found in the minors the soul of baseball -- a place where innocence, idealism and romance thrived despite all too often being driven out of the majors by greed and hype.

My son, Marcus, was seven then. He and I enjoyed playing catch in Riverside Park near our Manhattan apartment, and he'd recently become interested in watching games. I asked him if he would like to go see some minor-league teams play. He said yes.

Our family caught games in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and New Britain, Connecticut. I was hooked. There were cheerful greetings at the gate by retired firefighters dispensing $3 admission tickets. Between innings, there were all kinds of hijinks -- dizzy bat races, fat-suit wrestling matches, T-shirt tosses into the crowd -- and there were homegrown promotions by local businesses. Mostly there was the thrill of being close to the action.

I had an idea. Maybe Marcus and I could have our own stolen season the next summer, when my work as a music professor at Brooklyn College and trumpeter with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra was finished for the year. We could spend a few weeks on the road going to minor-league games. I might even try to arrange to play the national anthem at some ballparks.

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