... it means more

A friend told me to make this personal. Here it goes.

July 22, 2016. After getting just two hours of sleep the night before and a long drive in the opposite direction that I needed to be going, it could have sat easily as one of the worst days of my life. The Dodgers were in town, but my favorite place in the world was the last place I wanted to be that night.

Two nights before, my best friend had gotten close to killing himself. Laws had been broken in the process, and that Friday he was sent away. I didn’t know the exact details so I won’t bother sharing them with you now - all I could think of was that I wasn’t there when the most important person in my life needed me, and that there was a real possibility I could never see him again.

The last message I got from him was as I stood in the common area in Busch Stadium, prior to 7:15 first pitch. Tears welled in my eyes and my chest tightened – a sure sign of a panic attack. I couldn’t breathe and the amount of people walking around me was overwhelming. Then, as I made my way around the ramp leading to the right field bleachers, I caught that first look of lights overlooking crosshatched grass and dirt. I could breathe again.

That game was the single best thing that could have ever happened to me that night. The game was tied 2-2 until Justin Turner jacked a 1 out home run off of Oh. The Cardinals trailed 3-2 with 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th inning. I was scared of losing the calm feeling I had felt for the previous 3ish hours, and I could feel my chest tightening again.

Maybe you remember the game, or maybe you don’t. Either way, I don’t expect this next statement to surprise anyone. With 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th inning, Jedd – “I hit solo home runs for a living” - Gyroko crushed a first pitch inside fastball 5+ rows back into the left field bleachers. The game was tied.

I swear the baseball gods were looking out for me. We were in the few that had stayed at the game, so we shifted down to the first row. The next 7 innings were the most exhausting of my life, and more than once I declared that I didn’t care who won as long as I got to go sleep.

16th inning. 1 out. 12:25 am. With a 2-2 count, Matt Adams drilled a 93 mph fastball into the bleachers in right field. 5 hours and 10 minutes after the first pitch, the Cardinals had come out victorious, and I was too mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausted to feel anything other than relief.

The amount of times I have looked back on that game and the effect it had on me is endless. In a way, baseball saved me that day. The situation was still the same as the lights went down, and I cried myself to sleep that night. That day would have been the worst day of my life, had it not been for that baseball game. For a couple hours more than I could have ever anticipated, I was numb to anything occurring outside the brick walls of Busch Stadium.

That’s the beauty of it – the irrational idea that everything will be okay for just a little while as long as you can sit down and take in a ball game.