ACBN Friday #285: Lay Off the High Ones
Ballpark food, a caffeinated cocktail, new music, a classic book, and BASEBALL, RAY!
I have had a few sports loves in my life.
College football has had a major impact on my adult life—it’s the thing that got me into writing online, and it’s a been a binding force that’s led me into a number of cherished friendships.
Professional basketball has given me the truest moment of sports joy in my entire life, when the 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers exorcised a half-century of civic demons and ended the so-called Cleveland Sports Curse.
NFL football? Well, I spent some fun Sunday afternoons in bars in my twenties, in spite of the team I was born into supporting.
When it comes down to it, though, I have to come back to my first love.
I have to come back to baseball.
It’s the first sport I ever loved—the first sport I ever saw in person, in an ancient, cavernous stadium that seemed impossibly big and never half-full of people but was still full of wonder to me.
Baseball is a sport that rewards any attention you’re willing to give it, with endless libraries stats to pore over. I can spend the long, cold months of the offseason delving into Baseball Reference or figuring out new ways to play Kenny Lofton on Immaculate Grid. When the warmer months roll around, it repays this attention with a constant, seemingly-inexhaustible drumbeat of games. As I wrote several years ago—no matter where you are, no matter what day it is, somewhere, there’s baseball.
It’s been a long and difficult winter, and the return of baseball this week couldn’t come at a more welcome time.
As James Earl Jones’s character Terrence Mann effused in Field of Dreams:
The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game—it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.
It’s Friday at The Action Cookbook Newsletter, my friends.
I’m looking forward to finding myself in a ballpark very soon, but util then, I’ve got a few things to bide the time.
Today, that includes a ballpark-inspired recipe, a pick-me-up of a cocktail, some terrific new music, a charming classic book, a deep-dive discussion of baseball time travel, and more!
It’s Friday. Here comes the deuce—and when you speak of me, speak well.