Day at the ballpark is always a hit

Opening Day has come and gone, but we still haven’t made it to a baseball game.

The Portland Rockets won’t start their season for a few more weeks, and we can’t wait that long.

Ordinarily, we’d have been to a Fort Wayne TinCaps game by now. But our attendance is usually on Sunday afternoons, and the TinCaps won’t play a home Sunday game until May.

So our best bet is this weekend in Indianapolis, when our grandsons will be coming for a visit and the Indy Indians are likely to be on the agenda.

That’ll work, and it’s sure to provide some memories for the boys when they head back to Boston. After all, baseball and memories go together.

Memories like:

•My first Major League game with my father at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. Our seats were under cover in the shade, and I was chilly. But I’d never seen grass so green in my life.

•Playing “knock-out flies” in Dave Bennett’s backyard, a place everyone in the neighborhood knew as Bennett’s field though it wasn’t a whole lot larger than anyone else’s backyard. A ground ball was scored as a quarter, one bounce as 50 cents. Catch a fly ball and it was scored as a dollar. I think it took a score of 5 dollars to head to the plate and replace the batter.

•Games at Wrigley Field in the mid to early 1960s when my sister Linda was working at a summer camp near Chicago. Family vacations took us in her direction, and a ballgame always made sense. It was at Wrigley that I had my first-ever encounter with box seats.

•Bush Stadium in Indianapolis, which was one cold and rundown place. One memorable weekend afternoon, Connie and I and my old friend Tex decided that we could walk to Bush from a downtown apartment building. It was not a good decision. But we made it to the game and followed it with dozens of others.

•Seats in the nosebleed section of old Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati with friends who were teaching in the suburbs. If we leaned forward to get a view of the right fielder, we ran the chance of tumbling forward into the row below. In fact, it felt as if we could tumble all the way down and over the railing into oblivion.

•Comiskey Park about 1966 or ’67. I’d been tasked with chaperoning some newspaper carriers who had won a contest around the Windy City. The Yankees were in town and in a pennant race with the White Sox. It was a twi-night doubleheader. Mickey Mantle was near the end of his career and only played in the first game. I can still see him hobbling around the bases.

•An Indians game at Victory Field in Indianapolis with daughter Sally and her now-husband Ben. They were dating at the time, and this was supposed to be a get acquainted gathering. It was also supposed to be warm and spring-like. Instead, it snowed. Then again, we made it onto the Jumbotron, and Ben has turned out to be a great son-in-law.

•An Opening Day trip to Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati to see the Reds take on the Chicago Cubs. Lou Pinella was managing the Cubs at that point, and we still remember a moment in late innings when Lou went to the mound to calm down his pitcher and walked back toward us — our seats were right behind the Cubs’ dugout — completely unaware that his fly was open.

As I said, baseball is about memories. Lou would probably prefer that I forget that one.