It’s a Grand Slam

When I was a kid I liked baseball. The Marlins* became the first MLB team for Florida when I was in elementary school which was pretty cool at the time. I played in some softball teams and had a few baseball cards. But I was never really a big fan. We didn’t watch games or really follow the teams. Eventually, I stopped paying any attention at all.

Last year, things changed. During the summer, we took my wife’s uncle, whose from Canada and loves baseball, to a game between the Astros and the Blue-Jays.  It came down to an almost perfect situation, down by 3, bottom of the 9th, bases loaded. No Grand Slam but the Astros did pull off a win. Very exciting game.

From that point on I started paying some attention to the Astros. A friend of mine was a big Astros fans and was always posting about them on FB. I started actually caring. I learned about MLBstreams on Reddit to get games. In the fall, we signed my son up for T-ball. He had expressed interest in baseball before and enjoyed the game we went too. We wanted him to start some kind of organized activity and he chose baseball.

Then the Astros made the play-offs and I got swept up in the hype following them making a play at their first World Series win. My wife got into it as well. We all stayed up to watch game 7. It was very exciting.

My son continued playing baseball in the spring and I got sucked into coaching. That filled up my spring with baseball all the time. This summer we again attended a game when the Blue Jays came back to town. We even sat down and watched the All-Star game while we were on vacation (granted we were exhausted that night so might have watched anything).

It was a weird confluence of events. Son reaching baseball age. Finally deciding to attend a game after all these years. And then the Astros winning their first World Series.

But now we’re a baseball family. Since college, we’ve watched the Florida Gators football but our interest in that as faded in recent years (more on that in another post). Even despite that fading interest, we were never as into it as this recent take-over of baseball. It’s kind of weird. But fun.

*I recently learned that the Florida Marlins are now the Miami Marlins and have different colors. I was unreasonably annoyed by this.