Baseball as a Leisure Sport

Thick, humid air pressed down on the fans in the old Busch Stadium, that summer afternoon in the early 2000s. I sat with my grandmother in a shaded section under the upper deck, a sweaty scorecard on my lap, pencil poised in my right hand. The tickets for the close, shaded seats had been given to me by one of my mother’s co-workers, for I had a reputation in high school for being a huge fan of the St. Louis Cardinals. It was not often that people heard of a teenage girl loving professional baseball, so when they had tickets to give away, they often offered them to me. I listened to the games on KMOX, learning the language of the game from the broadcasting legends of Jack Buck and Mike Shannon. In those days, I read the sports section of the paper every morning, carefully going over the players’ statistics and my favorite columnists’ analyses. I listened to a sports radio show every evening. And I managed to get free tickets to many games each season. This particular weekend, I had been to two games already, both of which had ended with walk-off hits by my favorite center fielder, Jim Edmonds.