At my advanced age - Shawn Loughlin editorial

During a recent bike ride, a friend asked if I had been keeping up with the World Series. The answer was a definitive no. With games starting just before 9 p.m. every night, I just don’t have the stamina or the will to tack another three or four hours onto my day at that time of night.

 

So, no. I’ve barely kept up with the epic battle between the Houston Astros and the Atlanta Braves. It would be easy to attribute that to our daughter and her early mornings, but really, it started happening much earlier.

 

It’s funny because there was a time in my life that I’d do anything for baseball. I’d watch every pitch of the World Series, no matter which teams were playing. I think back to those early road trips I took shortly after moving to Huron County – all centred around baseball with insane itineraries – there’s no way I’d be able to keep these days.

 

The first time I went to the U.S. on one of these baseball trips, it was essentially two trips sandwiched together. I went for a week with Jess, came back to Ontario, dropped Jess off, picked up my friend Scott and went right back south of the border. Even just typing that gives me flashbacks of hours on the road, trying to stay awake and gassing up in dark corners of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

 

On the first day, Jess and I set out from my family’s old home in Pickering, starting with the five-and-a-half-hour drive to Cooperstown to go to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum; a nice way to kick off the trip.

 

We then proceeded through the Catskill Mountains on our way to New Jersey to stay with my cousin Mike and his family. That first trip, though, we really didn’t spend much time with them. It’s a regret of mine, but we pretty much treated his place like a hotel, returning late at night and leaving early in the morning.

 

The next day we started making day trips. Jess and I would take the train into New York City to see the Yankees, then drive down to Washington D.C. to see the Nationals, taking in all of the sights along the way. On the way home, we squeezed in a Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park, making it all the way back to Pickering very early the following morning.

 

My dad took the car to the mechanic early that morning for an oil change (we had put over 5,000 kilometres on it just over the past few days) and then I was off again with Scott to New Jersey and back to Mike’s. Scott and I went to Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York (to see the Mets), again swinging through Boston on our way back to Canada. 

 

The timing of the two trips was great. I was able to visit old Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium in their final years, only to return the next year with my sister when we saw games at the new Yankee Stadium and Citi Field.

 

Those all-encompassing road trips are now a thing of the past, but it was almost 10 years ago now that Jess and I really dove back in when the Detroit Tigers were in the World Series. Fulfilling a boyhood dream, I was able to see a World Series game live and in-person in 2012 (though the Tigers would be swept by the San Francisco Giants).

 

We got lucky buying tickets for games with their dates yet to be determined, as two of the three playoff games were on weekends, allowing us to get a hotel and stay the night. One was a weeknight, though, and the game went well past midnight, meaning Jess and I got home not long before the sun came up.

 

I’ll always love baseball. It was really my first passion, but these days, I just can’t justify staying up past 10 p.m., let alone traversing the east coast in search of games to watch.