On The Fly

In this episode, Chasing the Magic: How the Summer of ’98 Inspired the 'Ball Boys' . . .  Do you remember that feeling? The late-summer air was thick with humidity, radios crackling on porches, the smell of fresh-cut grass and barbecue smoke in the backyard. Every evening carried a new kind of suspense—the country holding its collective breath after every pitch. “Did he hit one today?” became more than a question; it sparked a nationwide conversation.   For me, and millions of others, the summer of 1998 wasn’t just another baseball season. It was theater, a movement, a time when the game recaptured something sacred. As sportswriter Mike Lupica said so perfectly,   “No matter how old you are or how much you’ve seen, sports is still about memory and imagination. Never more than during the summer of ’98, when baseball made everyone feel like a kid again, when it felt important again.”    Just four years earlier, the 1994 players’ strike had left the sport bruised...

My fondest baseball memories were not spring training or a visit to a major league ballpark; it was not meeting a famous ballplayer (although you could not pry my treasured official Mickey Mantle bat at that time, from my fingers). For me, it was learning to catch lighting ; and field line drives with my Dad. As a youngster, my attention was not on major league baseball (see, A Budding Cubs Fan ). The game, at that level, was always backgrounded noise from an old transistor radio tuned to 720  WGN Chicago. In Cuba, Illinois fans chewed on one another over the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals. For our family, baseball was always something we participated in, not something we paid to watch. My father (everyone calls him Doc) was an exceptional underhand fastpitch softball hurler for Cuba Merchants, a little-known team in Central Illinois. Back then, every small town had a team, and the local ball-field was where families gathered on the weekends. After he enlisted in ...