For a couple of weeks in February 2021, my DH and I are exploring Sarasota, Florida and attending five Orioles Spring Training baseball games. It is a leg on our FT RVing journey, long ago planned. We also had plans for a return visit to Orioles Dream Week as well, but Covid cancelled the program this year, much like a lot of the world’s big plans.
Orioles Dream Week is a weeklong program whereby Orioles fans become players for a week, immersed in professional baseball facilities, alongside former MLB players, and two baseball games a day, as players in the game they love.
Andrew has enough baseball knowledge in his head to fill an encyclopedia. He KNOWS the game, its history and it is a part of his soul! I, on the other hand, know just about nothing about ALL sports! Instead, I enjoy the human side of sports – I love the stories, the traditions and the atmosphere. So a few visits to Ed Smith Stadium in Sarasota this month have been a series of terrific date nights for us, that is also a “coming home” of sorts, where we get to reflect and remember our first trip to the area in 2017. Below is a little story I wrote about our experiences at Orioles Dream Week, that are still so darn true for our life! Enjoy.
Baseball is more than a sport. I finally understand that. It transcends from sport and moves into being something about life. But in 50 years, I never understood that until now.
As newlyweds, my husband, Andrew, and I went to an Orioles game last summer celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 1966 World Series-winning team, there were a dozen aging former professional players that visited the park and were introduced to the fans. The announcer rattled off each player’s most important baseball statistics and achievements in their career. And before their names were ever spoken, just hearing the introductions, my baseball-almanac-sweetheart named the player and proudly told me how that player impacted his life by sharing some special memory of the era. “I played baseball with Billy Hunter at his camp when I was a kid”, he said. Or “Wow, my dad and I watched him play”, or “That guy helped teach me how to hit a ball”.
All these decades later, Andrew’s youth was reflected back to me in the memories of his direct and indirect baseball experiences with the Baltimore Orioles. So I had a feeling that his participation in Orioles Dream Week would be important to him, but I didn’t fully understand how or why exactly, until we went there. Despite knowing Andrew since childhood, dating and loving him in high school, despite our lives each taking left turns when we parted ways at my graduation, and despite reconnecting 30 years later and finally marrying, it wasn’t until Orioles Dream Week that it finally all made sense to me. It took me 50 years and a trip to Sarasota, Florida to understand it. That is the magic that baseball can have on a person.
Orioles Dream Week, for us, connected some missing links in our lives…the connection between baseball and love; between choices and life. It certainly doesn’t take on this meaning for all players and fans, perhaps not even for a lot of them, but for us, Orioles Dream Week helped us better understand the mistakes we made and the regrets we have because of them. We must all accept the results of our actions, but Orioles Dream Week helped us face them – and conquer them.
Dream Week began on a flight with a large group of fellow passengers, all conspicuously dressed in orange fan shirts, O’s baseball caps and smiles that made you forget it was 6:00 am on a Sunday. With whispers that Tippy Martinez was on board with us, and chatter with new-found friends, we arrived at the Buck O’Neil Baseball Complex at Twin Lakes Park, the minor league spring training fields of the Baltimore Orioles. The players, ages 30 – 84, were immediately led to the locker room to suit up and get ready for warm-ups and drills, while family members traveling along (aka fans) were shown their way to the cafeteria, a place that would be our home base for the next week.
That moment when my husband walked out of the locker room on that first day of camp was a tremendous rush of emotion. He was wearing the uniform that he always wanted to wear – the Orioles, and his name and “our number” were emblazoned on the back. That proud boyish smile in my wonderful 49 year old husband’s face was what I had hoped for and dreaded for all these many months of preparation. It was the first of countless moments he and I would experience in the next week while in Sarasota, Florida.
Orioles Dream Week was absolutely magical for him, for me, and I believe for the other players and coaches on his team. He and I would get a taste of what baseball might have been for us, had we communicated better and tried a little harder to hold onto our passions; had we stuck with baseball and each other.
All week I would cheer him on in a series of games while he was managed and coached by former major league players that had successfully taken baseball to the next level. It was a thrill to watch him play again and see the joy it brought everyone on the field and in the stands. Through challenges and successes on the field, Andy would be able to test his mettle and learn just how much of what he had was the natural talent that God gave him, how much of it was practice and hard work, and how much of it still remained after decades of baseball as only a spectator. We would also forge new relationships with other baseball fans, each with their own unique story that brought them to Orioles Dream Week.
There was the player that fought back from both a heart attack and a severe bone break to be a return player. He brought along his wife, who consistently rooted him on with his own cheer that became so popular among the team that they too would spell out the chant “R-U-S-S, Russ, Russ, Russ” every time he came up to bat. There was the player that found Dream Week to be such an inspiration that he has returned many times and maintains a blog about his trips to help others understand how it can be a life experience not to be missed.
There was the wife, who not only surprised her 73 year old husband with the trip, but then further surprised him by bringing their two sons to play baseball right alongside their father all week in Florida. There was the retired fellow that had been a lifelong fan of baseball and the Orioles, but had never once played the game before arriving at camp. And there was the quiet team member whom we learned very little about until late in the week at the team dinner. It was then that he shared the importance of Dream Week to him, as a challenge to further himself, battling Parkinson’s disease following a varied, interesting and successful career in two branches of the military, in business and as a newlywed starting off a new chapter in his life.
Perhaps the most inspirational impact of all was that of the retired professional players that acted as our team’s coach and manager. Glenn Gulliver and Sammy Stewart worked together so smoothly and made the week so much fun, while at the same time sharing their amazing talents with team members looking to play the best baseball they could play. They filled the team with kindness, humor, comradery and stories of their experiences that gave every player a personal inside historical tour of baseball.
Glenn was the calming voice of reason between the two. He pitched all fourteen innings (seven innings each for our team and our opponents) of the traditional “coach pitch” Wednesday game (and then played a round of golf that evening). He quietly talked to Sammy about which player might be best placed in what position on the field and chatted comfortably with the team members.
While at the same time, Sammy shouted out hilarious and colorful advice from the dugout in his gravelly voice, teasing anyone in his path, becoming the glue that brought the team together. Having already faced tremendous heartache and difficulty in his life, it seems that baseball has been a rudder to help steer Sammy through all the trials and thrills of his life. Sharing that passion and honesty with this newly formed “band of baseball brothers” was invaluable to us all.
The genuine and heartfelt natures of our coach and manager allowed the team to be amazed by the players they were, while at the same time become friends with the wonderful men those ballplayers have become. Somewhere right in the middle of those games, between the wrapped hamstrings and ice-packs on pitching arms, the banquets and bull sessions, the meals and long days in the warm January sunshine, baseball began to heal us. The naturally occurring wounds of living life as a flawed human being faded a bit each inning that week. Baseball became redemptive as Andy and I realized that there were no guarantees of what life would have been like had he – and I – and baseball all stayed together all these years.
We will always regret that we didn’t face all of life’s challenges together. We will always regret that we didn’t try “one more time” to get what we both wanted. But because of Dream Week, he once again played the game he has always loved and I was there to love it with him. It was both exciting and bittersweet. Life may not be exactly what we wanted it to be, but is still better than we thought it could ever be. Love and baseball go hand in hand. In fact, Orioles Dream Week has reminded us just how blessed we are to be at this place and this time.
Safe travels – and keep trying to get life right, because God doesn’t count you out after three strikes!
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