Closing Memories

Ah, memories. Sometimes they can cripple a man. During the 2000 Season I bought a scale model of the Murph, our former home in Mission Valley. When we closed it down in 2003 I had fourteen years as a fan and another six years as an employee under my belt. That’s twenty years of heartbreaking losses, two trips to the World Series, countless runs around the Plaza Concourse during Trevor Time and everything in between.

On many a lonely offseason night, I would take that model down from my shelf and stare at it, sometimes for hours on end while I wasted the night away drinking, writing and thinking. Each and every tiny section brought dozens of memories, often to the point where I could barely put together a clear thought. And while my alcohol consumption during those days may have had something to do with it, the real culprit was the uncontainable flood of memories, too large to accurately number.

The model is long gone now, lost during one of the many moves my family has made over the last eight years. Yet the other night, as I sat before a blank laptop screen, the memories of over a thousand games as a member of the Pad Squad and another several hundred as a ticket-holding fan came flooding back to me. It’s not a stretch to say I wrote at least fifteen opening lines for this piece, each worthy in its own right and each indicative of what I wanted to say. End-of-season doldrums began to set in, compounded by the fact that my family and I had gone to only two games this season.

 I wanted to write a blog and post it before Monday’s paper started landed on porches across the city, but how should I write it?

Did I want to tell my story as a chronological review of my gameday experience, starting with our arrival at Tailgate Park and end it with an account of our visit with my grandmother long after the last pitch, peppered with little anecdotes of what we ate, who we saw and who got swept?

Or should I talk about the multitude fans who constantly echoed the same sentiment of ‘the Pad Squad just isn’t the same any more…’?

Maybe it would have been a good idea to talk about the changes I’ve seen around the ballpark, like the way a once-blighted part of town has become another jewel in our crown of America’s Finest City, the hill at Park at the Park that has become hallowed ground, or even that little brat who used to follow the Pad Squad around the Murph, looking like that little girl from the Joe Pesci-voiced Pepsi commercials who has since grown into an outstanding young woman, albeit one who roots for the wrong team.

I realized I could take that tack with any of those but I also realized that there was no way I could stick with one and truly describe the feeling I had deep down long after my wife and children went to bed, providing me with the quiet time necessary to getting down the serious business of writing. I didn’t have a model of Petco Park to refer to but the memories; oh the memories flooded back the entire day and brought many more with them long through the night and deep into the early morning.

The year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Fourteen has been a trying year for our Friar Faithful, quite possibly the most trying year yet. We weren’t even a week in when our beloved Colonel, Jerry Coleman was called home for one last sortie into the heavens. Then, six months later we were hit with part two of the worst one-two punch us Padres fans could ever experience. My wife woke me early in the morning of June 16^th to tell me that Mr. Padre himself had passed away. No loss outside my blood family has hit me so hard, nor is it likely another ever will. Ironically, the last time I had a major block in my writing, sitting for hours and producing little more than a line or two when the ideas were flowing; was while trying to create a blog in honor of Tony Gwynn. As I wrote then, there were over 3,141 ways to honor him, just as many memories and just as many reasons to state why he has inspired me far above and beyond the game of baseball itself.

That’s when this piece finally came together. That’s when I realized that no matter how great the team is playing, or how poorly they’re doing; the game itself and the importance of it pales in comparison to the thing that kept me going back all those years and keeps me going back with my family in tow now;

The People…

My gameday experience isn’t about the game, it’s about the people. Much like Christmas isn’t about the presents, it’s about Family. It’s not about what you eat at the tailgate, it’s who you eat it with. It’s not about watching the team score runs, it’s who you watch them score with. Okay, I kind of take that last one back. After all, we want Our Padres to win. But wouldn’t you agree that the games would be much less exciting without someone to enjoy it with? It’s a team sport and it’s just as much a team effort in the stands as it is on the field.

Being that I decided to forgo three hours of sleep (at best) after clocking out at 3am Sunday morning, I was considerably tired once the game started. Knowing that sitting still at a ballgame was never a strong suit of mine, I decided to take my sons out for a stroll around our fair ballpark. Needless to say, anywhere my eyes lay held more memories to cherish. An empty feeling of nostalgia burrowed into my heart when we walked through section 108, where our good friend Mark Gomez used to spread a love and enthusiasm a man could not help but be affected by. I looked down towards first base, where my mom patiently waited while I walked my niece and nephew around the bases one sunny afternoon in 2004. I looked up toward section 301, where former Navy Corpsman and original 1969 Season Ticket holder Joe Donegan used to sit, not quite as happy as he was with his seats in the old Loge level at the Murph but happy nonetheless to take in a game every chance he could.

During this little walk of ours my boys relished every moment, all the while there was something deeper going on in Daddy’s heart. For a brief moment, my heart sank as I thought about the memories of watching T hit one through the 5.5 hole, the should-almost-be-illegal natural high I got every time that first gong signaled the beginning of Trevor Time and the longing for the times I used to tell my coworkers when they claimed they had nothing to do “There are forty-thousand people out there, go shake hands with every one of them.” To my knowledge, no one ever shook hands with all forty thousand *at least in a single night but that didn’t stop me from trying, and it didn’t stop me from encouraging my coworkers to do the same.

We’ve had many games over the years when there were much less than forty thousand fans in attendance. You know things are bad when you’re sitting behind first base and you can hear someone coughing while high up beyond the Western Metal Company building. Heck, I remember a night at the Murph when we had a crowd that wouldn’t have filled the Sports Arena and while standing in right field, I swore I heard a spirited conversation between two people sitting under the smaller Jumbotron board along the third base side.

But someone is always there and although we as a family don’t get out to the ol’ ballgame nearly as much as we would like to, I can always count on seeing a member of my Family of 40,000 during a highlight reel on the news, or in the papers and of course, in their own social networking posts which keep me living the Ballpark Dream vicariously through them. So I know that even though my opportunities to create ballpark memories don’t come nearly as often as they used to, I do know that every night someone is out there doing just that.

I strongly believe that one of the most important things a member of any generation can do is share his/her traditions with the next generation. The way Tony Gwynn talked of how veterans guided him as a rookie and the hundreds of testimonies from players who in turn were guided by Tony are not only a prime example but a testament to that.

On that note, I recall an evening when my wife and I were babysitting my niece Hannah and nephews Santino and Abraham. To give you an idea of how long ago that was, Trevor was an only child then. Just before I set the dinner table I changed the TV from The Simpsons to Channel 4. Trevor was playing with his cousins and it took me a few moments to get his attention. Finally, he looked at me and I pointed to the TV. His eyes lit up, and I say this with all honesty, brighter than they did on Christmas Day later that year.

“Baseballlllllllllllllll!” Trevor yelled, jumping up and down with excitement. “Baseballlllllllllllllll!” My eighteen month old son yelled again, louder as he looked in my nephews face, making sure he knew how important it was. “Baseballlllllllllllllll!” He screamed a third time, running down the hall, slamming into the screen door and back into the living room before sitting down in front of the TV, oblivious to his toys and even to his cousins until a commercial break came. Then it was right back to business.

Fast forward to this past Monday, as I sat and tried in vain to create something worthy of what I was feeling Sunday afternoon as I enjoyed one last game for the 2014 season. My twenty-two month old daughter Layla walked out of her room swinging an inflatable bat, saying in that melt-my-heart voice of hers; “Bee-bah, bee-bah.” She might not have been as loud or nearly as intense as Trevor was on that night seven years ago, but the look in her eyes held every bit of excitement his did, just as they did when the fireworks went off signaling the sweep of the team lead by our dear friends Bruce Bochy and Tim Flannery. And before I go into the memories I have of those two, from McGregor’s to the golf course to the beach, I’ll leave you with this:

Memories; the only thing greater than creating them is showing the children how to create their own…

See you next Spring,
The Gonzales Tribe