So, as I noted in my first blog post here, I’ve been a baseball fan since I was a wee lad. That’s a given. Pretty normal part of many kids’ lives growing up, especially in such a baseball-centric city as St. Louis. What wasn’t particularly normal, however, was my budding interest in punk and new wave that I developed after discovering a radio show called “Freeform” on KWK in the early ’80s. I’d always loved music, but this stuff totally blew me away and it wasn’t long before I was a full-fledged punk rocker with the weird hair, clothes, and record collection to match. Punk rock also introduced me to a completely different way of looking at the world than I’d been used to growing up in the white, upper middle-class suburbs of West St. Louis County. I started to question not only authority, but religion, politics, and culture/society in general as they’d been presented to me my entire life. In college I began reading lots of left-leaning punk-rock fanzines, not the least influential of these being Maximum Rock’n’Roll. My new religion was hardcore punk, and I’d drive myself and whatever hodgepodge group of “punks” that I could round up at CMSU to see dozens of great, obscure bands at hole-in-the-wall dives, basements, and VFW halls in places like Columbia, Kansas City, Lawrence, and, of course, back home in St. Louis.

Luckily my love of baseball and of my home team, the Cardinals, didn’t waver during this volatile, dynamic period of my life. That’s probably mainly due to the fact that the Cardinals of the ’80s were a pretty successful team, and a helluva lot of fun to cheer for, especially since I was positioned in college just 50 miles east of Kansas City and the home of the Royals, so the 1985 I-70 Series did wonders to keep the baseball flame burning in my belly as the campus of CMSU was divided pretty much right down the middle on team allegiances. And, oh, what a heartbreak it was to lose that Series… and then again just two years later during my senior year. But I digress.

But it was a bit odd to be such a big fan of baseball (hockey, too, for that matter) and to be a “punk rocker” at the same time. After all, a lot of punks had very negative impressions of jocks or “sports fans” in general, and rightly so. Those types of people were often the most intolerant group of people you could find when it came to being accepting of us freaks and weirdos of the punk/new wave persuasion. But it didn’t stop me from just being myself and enjoying both. I mean, because I was a “punk” and therefore a fiercely independent free spirit, I wasn’t about to let anybody else—punk or otherwise—tell me what I should like or how I should live my life. And I’ve been that way ever since. It also didn’t hurt that I discovered that an MRR columnist and musician, Ben Weasel, was also a big baseball fan and even wrote a column once (which I’d love to be able to dig up and repost here if anyone reading this knows where I can get a copy!) where he wrote about the subject of punk rock and baseball.

Baseball, in my humble opinion, anyway, has always been a pretty important part of life in America, and it’s because of that that it is also a microcosm of society. Within the game you will find all sorts of players and fans who mirror what you find in “real life.” That’s important to remember. Baseball fans are impossible to stereotype or pigeonhole. The love of the game transcends all races, cultures, religions, classes, creeds, political divisions and, yes, believe it or not, even musical tastes.