Life Happens at the Ballpark

This is my 24th season at Greer Stadium, the first place I felt at home in Nashville when I moved here from New York City in 1981. The record label that brought me here had two season tickets, about six rows up from the field, in Section T, which is where I was for the home opener in April 1982. I hardly knew anyone in Nashville then, so I went alone, keenly aware that back in New York, I would be with my friends on our traditional opening day outing at Yankee Stadium, watching Ron Guidry and Craig Nettles, Willie Randolph and Goose Gossage.

But, watching those baby players run to their places on the green expanse of field, centered with a diamond of beautiful symmetry framed with russet-colored dirt, still unmarked white squares at three tips, and a place called home at the base, I felt as if I had exhaled for the first time since I had arrived here. That afternoon, I met Imogene and Clyde Green, who held season tickets one row behind me, and David Cheatham, a beer vendor who's been at Greer since 1978 and counted Clyde among his most dedicated customers. Clyde bought me a beer to welcome me to Greer, and the Greens were among my first friends in Nashville. We spent the next couple of summers there until 1985, when I got married and the Sounds jumped up to AAA, which the Greens didn't like.

During the first several years of my marriage, I rarely made it to Greer. But in June 1989, I went back to the park to see an old friend. Ron Guidry, one of the best left-handed Yankees pitchers of all time and a most beloved player, was coming off of a terrible 5-8 season in 1987, and had sat out much of 1988 recovering from shoulder surgery. He began the season in New York, but after a bad start, was sent down to Columbus on a 20-day rehab. When I heard he would be pitching against the Sounds, I bought a ticket back in my old section. From where I sat, he didn't look any different than he had 11 years before, in his infamous 1978 Cy Young Award-winning season. That year, he won 13 games before he lost any. His regular season record was 25-3, his 25th victory the dramatic one-game playoff against Boston that won the division. Against the Dodgers in the World Series, he pitched a complete game victory.

That rainy night in Greer, the 1978 season receded further and further into the history books. In a mist, then a drizzle, he struggled to retire the sides in the first two innings. By the third, as rain began to fall harder, on a 1-1 count, Jeff Reynolds hit a homer over the left field fence. Guidry walked the next batter, and the next hit a hard double that scored the runner from first. Columbus manager Bucky Dent walked deliberately out to the mound and mercifully took the ball from his former teammate. I wrote a story about it for the Scene, and it came straight from my heart. I was there for that magical season, and because I once wrote about the Yankees for Soho Weekly News, I knew Ron Guidry. I'm proud of the story, but I wish it hadn't been at the expense of one of the best pitchers and sweetest men I've ever known. On the window ledge over my desk are two baseballs, both from him. One is from the 1978 World Series, the other from the May 16, 1979 game he pitched against the Detroit Tigers at Yankee Stadium. Guidry won.

I had my first child in April 1990, my second in September 1991, so I was pretty busy with babies there for a while. Their father worked many nights, and toddlers in a ballpark were too much for me to manage on my own.

In April 1997, when my daughter Joy was a couple weeks shy of her 7th birthday and son Harry was 5, there came a giant ripple across my marital pond—my husband moved out, and we divorced the next year. But a new season at Greer had just started, and it occurred to me that baseball might be a distraction for my kids and me, an escape from our broken home and a reassuring haven from the uncertainties in our lives. I went back to my old section, T, though quite a few rows farther up from the field, closer to concessions and bathrooms. I liked the location, midway between home plate and the Sounds bullpen. I've had a fondness for relief pitchers since Goose Gossage fireballed for the Yankees.