COLUMN: A Love Song For Alabama Baseball

*This is an opinion column*

"Well, I beat the drum and hold the phone, the sun came out today. We're born again, there's new grass on the field."

- John Fogerty, "Centerfield" (1985)

TUSCALOOSA, AL — I'm not sure if it's the sunshine after a long winter indoors, the pop of a bat echoing through a park or the explosive thwack of a hard-thrown ball meeting leather.

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No, I can't be certain if it's the leisurely pace of the game, the smell of freshly turned dirt or the camaraderie of fellow baseball lovers that keeps me coming back to the ballpark year after year.

Still, however ineffable, there's nothing else like it. No other sport. No other experience.

The best this author can figure is that it's this simple game that takes me back to being a little boy clutching his glove in the cheap seats at Sewell-Thomas Stadium in the hopes of catching a foul ball. It reminds me of a time before I became so much older than the players out there today, when I viewed amateur college athletes as gods among mortals.

Friday marked the first open practice of the 2023 season for the Crimson Tide, which was followed by an intrasquad scrimmage that provided the very first glimpse of a new team preparing to embark on a new season. The slate is clean and hope springs eternal.

I can't sit in the stands at The Joe without being overcome with nostalgia: the 1997 College World Series runner-up team; Andy Phillips, G.W. Keller, Dustan Mohr, Joe Caruso and Matt Frick; The Alabama Super Fan head-banging on a rail to "Cotton Eyed Joe" by Rednex; former Alabama running back Shaud Williams coming in as a pinch runner in one of the 10 games he appeared in 2001; Wade LeBlanc's 17 strikeouts against McNeese State in 2005 and Brett Booth's walk-off homer against Ole Miss in 2012.

A wealth of memories — perhaps the most surprising thing when you consider how seemingly low of a priority baseball has been at The Capstone. But some of us have a wholesale different perspective. Those of us who have lived it through the good and bad, only to come back the second the gates opened the next season.

To many, the University of Alabama is nothing more than a football school that sometimes plays some pretty good basketball. And while Alabama softball and gymnastics have both swelled in popularity and filled trophy cases, baseball has always been something of an outlier.

Sure, students do come out to The Joe when the time is right, but Alabama baseball — for as long as I can remember it — has been a sport for mid-week townies like me.

Indeed, some of my most-cherished memories are still just as vivid today when I think back to when my Dad, working with UAPD at the time, would regularly take me to The Joe and introduce me to players as he worked security.

It's worth noting that in the years since, I've met the late Hank Aaron, saw Mark McGwire play in person the year he broke the single-season home run record, watched "Big Papi" David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez take batting practice the year the Red Sox reversed the curse and saw a rookie Bryce Harper dust himself off after advancing to a third base manned by Chipper Jones during his final season.

But in pondering my beloved baseball memories, I'm transported back to 1996. I'm seven years old and standing in a mostly empty Crimson Tide locker room with my Dad in his police uniform and pitcher Andy Bernard standing taller than both of us in his pristine white Alabama baseball uniform.

No, Andy Bernard is not a name most younger Alabama baseball fans will get excited about and he wasn't even the most famous "Andy" on his own team. But scores of players have come and gone over the last two decades since without me retaining their names in the same way.

Before the three of us walked out onto the field, Bernard signed a dirty brown practice ball procured by my Dad and handed it to me and asked me to stand with him during the National Anthem — a distinction I would later reserve solely for former Tide slugger and current Tuscaloosa County Sheriff's Office Chief Deputy G.W. Keller.

On the field beside Bernard with the anthem playing over the public address system at The Joe, my grin stretched the full distance between my oversized ears and, standing there with my cap over my heart, the game felt magical. Absolutely magical.

So maybe that's why I keep coming back to the ballpark. But don't take my word for it.

Friend of Patch and former Boston Red Sox manager Butch Hobson was a standout two-sport athlete at Alabama and played third base for both the Red Sox and New York Yankees during legendary eras. A minor league manager today, he was noted for his grit during his playing days and has forgotten more baseball than most of us can understand.

Still, the 71-year-old former ballplayer's inner child immediately comes to the surface when he talks about why he loves the game.

"I don't know what I'd do without it," he told me of the game, before remarking that his own legendary college football coach, Paul "Bear" Bryant, retired from coaching and was dead shortly thereafter. "I love being on the field, teaching the game, seeing guys improve and progress, and seeing guys get to the big leagues. But to be able to do something that you love to do as a job for 52 years is special. A lot of times when I'm standing during the National Anthem, I'll look at my pitching coach after it's over and ask him how many National Anthems he thinks we have stood for over the years."

Indeed, the game of baseball stands in stark contrast to all other sports. But it's the sport's ability to make fans out of all kinds that keeps folks coming back to The Joe, despite the program never having won a national title and often taking a back seat to the likes of football and basketball.

As I sat in the stands behind home plate at The Joe on Friday, I was joined by walking baseball encyclopedia Roger Myers, who manned his regular seat and discussed his love of the game in between scribbling in a baseball scorebook once the scrimmage started.

It's worth noting that Myers and I share a common bond in our names, with him being named after legendary slugger Roger Maris, while my parents have joked my entire life that I was named after the greatest pitcher to ever play the game — Nolan Ryan. In fact, the year I was born, (1989), Ryan finished with a 16–10 record and a league-leading 301 strikeouts.

And despite both Myers and I being named after icons of the game, neither of us amounted to much as ballplayers. But our lack of talent on the field had zero bearing on our love of the game.

"I love the players, love the coaches ... everything about the game," Myers told me. "It's kind of in my blood. I played but wasn't very good. I enjoy watching people that are good at things. It's a game of failure and repetition — you fail seven out of 10 times and you're in the Hall of Fame and there's so many little things people don't understand when they say baseball is boring. There's just so much, but I guess if people don't like it or understand it, they must not be very smart."

Former Mississippi State baseball player Kent Walters is the father of former Alabama pitcher Jake Walters and joined our conversation, where he echoed most of the same sentiments.

As we watched the players shagging fly balls and working on day-one mechanics, Walters commented on Alabama's standout shortstop Jim Jarvis as he took the field.

"I just watched Jim run from the dugout to the outfield," he told our little group. "Four years ago, he was this little guy and now he's a man, he's grown into his body and he's confident as a player and can do it all."

Like the saying made famous in the book and subsequent movie "Moneyball": "How can you not be romantic about baseball?"

Like Hobson, the timbre in Walters' voice lightened as he spoke about the game with the same awe and wonder of a wide-eyed child, despite having lived a more full baseball life than most could imagine. The man played for Ron Polk for crying out loud.

"It all revolves around a person on the mound," Walters told me. "I like to see good pitching, good coaching. I just enjoy it. I feel at home out here. Not everybody understands this game. If you get it, you get it and really can enjoy it. You'll always see something new you've never seen before."

Perhaps the most stunningly accurate analysis of the day, however, came from a young woman who joined us about the time the scrimmage started.

Meghan Dennis is setting out on her 11th Alabama baseball season after falling in love with the program as a student more than a decade ago. I confess, I might have twisted muscles in my neck to turn around when she began to analyze one player's mechanics as he ran the bases. I'm a trained observer who gets paid to do such things and I fell well short of noticing such detail in the game I love so much.

And damn it, her commentary was better than most of the stuff peddled on ESPN or MLB Network.

Again, there's no sport like baseball, is there?

"I've been following the team since my freshman year at UA and the moment I heard the gates were open today, I figured I could either do schoolwork or come out to the park," she told me. "It's the community around here, too. Over the last decade, I've gotten to know players and made friends with these guys and I'm going to see familiar faces every time I come to the ballpark. It's always felt like home. There's something special about here, it's not just going to the ballpark, it's coming to The Joe."

As our small group basked in the sunshine on a crisp January afternoon and watched former Hillcrest High and Shelton State standout pitcher Garrett McMillan toss the old horsehide to begin the 2023 season, I felt that flutter in my stomach ... like I was a kid again.

And that's baseball.

I was in attendance at the Iron Bowl when Amari Cooper broke Alabama's single-season receiving touchdown record in 2014. If it was a matter of life and death, though, I couldn't tell you how many he caught on the year.

But to this day, 17 — the number of strikeouts Wade LeBlanc recorded against McNeese State in a single game — is imprinted on my soul. It's one strikeout short of the school's single-game record, but who cares?

How often does one get to witness an achievement so rare? Of the possible outs LeBlanc faced that sunny day in 2005 over 7 and 2/3 innings, he struck out roughly 71% of the batters he faced.

Do I have an explanation for why that means so much to me? Absolutely not.

After all, this question was part of the reason I set out to write this column and try to make sense of what this simple children's game brings out in those of us who love it so.

And maybe the answer is more simple than any of us care to consider.

Perhaps Bama long-hauler Jim Ballard said it best on Friday when I asked him what keeps him coming back to the ballpark.

"It's just the best game in the world."

Ryan Phillips is an award-winning journalist, editor and opinion columnist. He is also the founder and field editor of Tuscaloosa Patch. The views expressed in this column are his own and in no way reflective of any views held by our parent company or sponsors.