Father appreciates son's antics

This is what I told folks in our moment of shar­ing at church last year. I said that a man, James Nai­smith, invented bas­ket­ball, but God invented base­ball. It was play­off time for the Cavs, and I was tired of being hyped up. As a mat­ter of fact, I was all hyped out.

My son, Peter, might agree with my base­ball sen­ti­ment. In 1980, when Pete was age nine, I took him to his first Cleve­land Indi­ans game at the now-defunct Munic­i­pal Sta­dium. Along with mem­bers of the Ober­lin Peace and Base­ball Fan Club, a group led by cam­pus min­is­ter Willis Lud­low, Peter and I hopped on an Ober­lin Col­lege bus behind Mudd Library and headed to Cleveland.

I recently asked Peter what he remem­bered about the game. He said — sur­prise! — that the Indi­ans lost by a lop-sided score, but that his favorite player, Indi­ans out­fielder Joe Char­boneau, homered.

Super Joe Char­boneau won the Amer­i­can League Rookie of the Year Award in 1980, as he knocked the cover off the ball 23 times, drove in 87 runs, and bat­ted .289. In addi­tion, Char­boneau led the Indi­ans in game-winning hits.

The high­light of the game, other than Charboneau’s home run, was see­ing the name of the Ober­lin Peace and Base­ball Fan Club in lights on the scoreboard.

Unfor­tu­nately , Char­boneau has long been his own worst enemy. For instance, he once nearly gagged to death try­ing to swal­low a whole egg in one gulp. Another time, he used a pair of pli­ers to fix his bro­ken nose. He later used those same pli­ers to pull his own tooth.

Peter didn’t know all this about Char­boneau. He just knew that Super Joe pos­sessed a sweet line drive swing.

“Peter, was that you chant­ing ‘Go, go, Joe Char­boneau’ in the shower?”

Sadly for Peter and for Super Joe, Char­boneau proved to be a flash in the pan. His rookie year was his only suc­cess­ful sea­son; it was also his only full season.

In high school, Peter found another Cleve­land Indian to fol­low, closer Doug Jones. Like Char­boneau, Jones was a bit of a rounder, too; how­ever, Jones found the Lord.

Jones played six years for the Indi­ans and many years for other teams, notch­ing 303 career saves. For Peter’s high school grad­u­a­tion gift, I asked Ober­lin native Bob Close, who ran a base­ball card shop in Avon Lake at the time, if he could get a signed Doug Jones pho­to­graph. Bob came through, and Peter took that pic­ture to hang in his Grin­nell dorm room.

He still has it, and he also has kept the Base­ball Ency­clo­pe­dia I gave him when he was a mid­dle schooler. He even remem­bered that I inscribed, “A wise son makes a glad father.” (Proverbs 10:1)

Last Christ­mas, Peter and his spouse Jenna gave me a won­der­ful Christ­mas gift — a photo album of their two beau­ti­ful daugh­ters. In addi­tion to the many grand­chil­dren pho­tos, there was one pic­ture of Jenna, her face super­im­posed on an Indian’s cut-out, in her mighty home run stance. The photo you see here shows Peter, his face super­im­posed on a dif­fer­ent Indian’s cut-out, look­ing as though he is going to stretch a sin­gle into a dou­ble with his dar­ing base running.

You won’t find this pas­sage in Proverbs, but it has a good ring to it: “A son who occa­sion­ally acts silly makes his father smile.”

Posted by Sid Comings on Apr 22 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.