Journa@! Na@! HI MOM! I wrote this a while ago and didn't have a ton of time to embellish, er, elaborate. That first little thing says "Journay! Nay!" But at the time, two keyboards ago, the "y"wasn't working and for speed I would put the "@"symbol there and sometimes go back and edit it.

Legendary Tim "Rock" Raines was my favorite player from 1981, his rookie season. I was ten years old.

In the fall of 1985, I finally saw him play in person. My mother drove us to Saint Louis from Bloomington, Indiana.

HOW I FIRST SAW MY FAVORITE PLAYER IN PERSON...

As I had stated, Rock had become my favorite baseball player at the end of his rookie year in 1981 when he became visible with his division winning Expos. I thought the Expos had cool uniforms, too, which was important to a 10 year-old. (I also thought the Astros were cool, but I later realized those unis were an aberration). And they had nobody who became my lifetime icon.

I had not pursued playing baseball as much as a lot of people thought I should. It boiled down to a combination of stage fright, lack of dedication and friends who didn't make the cut, and perhaps my childish fantasies of reading books and watching TV and playing with Star Wars figures rather than really devoting myself to a discipline. Sports require a lot of grown up attributes that I shied away from. Play through pain, concentrate when your brain isn't really engaged, stick to something without feeling the immediate results are worth it, conquering self fears and doubts, things along those lines. That can be hard medicine for anybody to take, do you think? I just wasn't in it enough. Perhaps it is simply a part of me.

I had a church member who coached little league encourage me to go out for his team; he coached a lot of members of my church. Most of them were older and bigger than me and they intimidated me. They knew things about baseball of which I was clueless, plus they threw the ball with more confidence and know how. I think I was concerned with my batting a bit, too. Fear of failure and disappointment were real factors, but I always had my own fantasy projects going on, creating stories and books and characters as well, and I would watch the Cubs on TV a lot but sports di not really start to grab me until I was 12-13 years old.

But Raines immediately grabbed me because he was fast as anything and was a switch hitter. My dad taught me to bat left along with my natural batting right, so I felt like if I played, he was me:  short, fast, switch hitting Raines. Stealing bases became my number one attraction to the game. Not the homers. And Rock was the master of the NL.

I only watched National League Games because of geography and television. WGN (one of our 9-10 channels, with cable) showed almost all the Cubs games, and almost never showed the White Sox. Plus Wrigley Field did not have lights and most of the games were showed in the day when I was around in the summer. The same kind of thing happened to my step-nephew in Bedford, Indiana, with the Sosa phenomenon in recent years.

WTBS showed the Braves pretty well, and the local channnel four affiliate (Indianapolis/Bloomington) broadcast the Reds a bit. All NL, all the time. The AL was the "other", and I usually rooted against them.

So by 1982 I was catching Timmy on the tube when he played Chicago, Atlanta, and sometimes the Reds. If I saw him three or four times in a week it was special. This exposure to the team solifified my like for him. He was who I wasn't: fast and fearless. Maybe that first year I didn't pay particular attention but he continued his excellence. Little did I know he was fighting his own demons with cocaine. I learned that later, but it never diminished my admiration for him. 

During the winter of my 6th grade year (1982-83) things were good personally but then my family started to unravel when my parents decided to break up. The following summer was hard because my mom stayed at an apartment away from home, and in retrospect it wasn't very far from my house but she might as well have been in another country. Like Raines in Montreal. I had a hard time dealing with things, mostly trying to pretend that things were either the same or trying harder to not deal with it at all. Trying to forget, deny, shutdown, turn off...Or pretend it would get better, and hope it could, and believe that it was a serious mistake that would be corrected.

I did jobs during the summer; by then I had stopped taking swimming lessons across the street at the local public pool. I mowed lawns and earned decent money to buy comic books and save; mostly save. Some times some desperate parents from my church ward would come by and have me babysit their kids for the night. I considered the money chump change in comparison to lawn mowing money, but it was still money.

I was an active Boy Scout and was loyal but not terribly "into" it; I was mostly in it because my church expected all good priesthood holders and righteous young men to be involved; I considered myself among that group. Camping in southern Indiana during the summer was tortuous. Winter camps were no picnic, either. It always rained! At least it did too much.

So that summer of 1983 I was looking for distractions, something a little more real than "Return of the Jedi" or Indiana Jones, and I think I latched on to something all baseball fanatics really comprehend: the Newspaper. Particularly: Box scores. Have you read "The Old Man and the Sea" by Hemingway? If you don't understand what I am referring to, read it agian. You cannot err with the masters of literature. But I digress.

So with the absence of a daily injection of a televised schedule, Sportscenter, or the modern Internet, I live to check the hitting lines, and stats became a byproduct of my love. If you hit one for four one day, and 2 for four on the next, you are batting a nifty.375, and THAT two day result is much more impressive in May or June than in August or September. These are good thing for a twelve year-old to learn. Unfortunately, once hooked you may never decide to give up that facination. Unless he retires. But of course, he may have a son..._

My parents did get back together by the fall of 1983 ever so briefly, but it was over again for good by the winter of 1984-1985. By 1985 I had perfected the Tim Raines calendar: I would painstakenly copy all 162 games onto 3 or 4 regugular line pieces of paper, and then day by day track Raines' stats and the the Expos' win/loss record and scores. By the end of the summer I would have a good piece of work made, which represented a lot of hope and perseverance. I grew to really loathe the Mets in that time because this was Montreal's main competition. Gooden was the rage and they had hitters, too, always more feted and recognized than those guys up north.

And now it had been a sizable time since Montreal had played in the pennant championship of 1981. My voice had dropped a few octaves, and I was finished with middle school and looked forward to the big time: High School.   And then my mother, only a month removed form her official (legal) divorce from my father, suggested the best idea imaginable:

"Let's watch Tim Raines play."

We could do that? Yeah, that is why they play the game, right? A spectator sport? Of course!

And the Expos still had an outside shot at the race, they were a mere 5 or 6 games out in September! (Late September, but what did I know?) Raines is unconquerable!

How far is St. Louis? I had never been there. 9 (We had driven by on our way to Texas when I was 11). Only 4 or 5 hours? That is like Chicago, only less Indiana time...

Stay the night? Catch a weekend Saturday evening game?

Or was it day? Did we stay over Friday? I cannot recall exactly, but I'll tell you what I do remember...

It was day light, maybe it was a 1:00 day game, it had to be Saturday. We parked somewhere close and walked into a big Busch Stadium. We were high up and far away but I could see perfectly.

This was my first Major League game since once as a wee child, watching the Red Machine of Cinncinnati versus the Pirates sometime in the 70s. They had Pete Rose, George Foster, and afew other great players. But none of those guys held a candle to Tim Raines.

Raines was surrounded by great talent: Andre Dawson, Tim Wallach, Hubie Brooks, Andres Galarraga. But he was The Man.

That day, he did everything. He hit, he stole, he scored. It was everything I had dreamed of him doing. Dawson hit a grandslam and the Expos (a handful of games behind the Cardinals) were winning 6-2 and then the Cards rallied. They were a great team that year. Jack Clark, Tommy Herr, Ozzie Smith, Terry Pendleton, Willie McGee, Vince Coleman, Andy Van Slyke, Pedro Guerrero, who was their catcher?

Regardless, they went to the World Series that year.

And in that game, Clark hit a game winning blast to win in the bottom of the ninth...

But Raines did his part, as did his teammates...

So my Mom stood up and became my hero, enabling me to break through and realize I can go to see my favorite player in person! And I did!

1986 Indianapolis

1987 Chicago

1988 Cinncinnati (injured)

1989 Montreal (My mom again)

1997 Detroit

1998 New York

2002 Los Angeles

She started something cool. I love you Mom.

See you in 2007! *She's in Indonesia until then.

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More later... it is IU-Iowa time!

(And we lost by 3, AJ Raitliff missed a floater) Oh, yeah, at home and Davis was sick. He announced his resigning the following week.