Birthday on the Bases

The New York Times

August 31, 2008

by Doug Glanville

I used to complain to my parents about my late-August birthday. Since my mom was a teacher, the family vacation took place the week before school started. So most of my early birthdays were spent in some exotic location I didn’t appreciate at the time. No friends, no piñatas, no pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. My parents, my brother and sand.

But over the course of my baseball career, my parents did better than erase that memory of a disgruntled kid. They paid me back tenfold by throwing a party wherever I was playing — and after 15 years, Team Glanville knew how to throw down.

From joining in with me at the Iowa Cubs’ on-field concert with Huey Lewis and the News at Sec Taylor Stadium in Des Moines, to the Orlando, Fla., Olive Garden restaurant soiree, my family always found me and made a road warrior feel a sense of home for a least one special day.

Over time, the fact that I was never home for my birthday became exciting. As soon as I reported to a team after spring training, my family and I would look at the pocket schedule and to see where we would be rendezvous-ing that year. The Glanville travel calendar would then be updated accordingly.

I remember one birthday when I almost didn’t get out of bed for what turned out to be a powerful day. The night before, we had come in at some crazy hour (as usual) from a road trip terminating in Birmingham, Ala. We were playing the Birmingham Barons (the team that ultimately hosted Michael Jordan’s attempt at baseball), and I just wanted to sleep in. My mom woke me up and told me that we needed to tour Birmingham for my birthday. Those days it seemed that every time I hit the snooze bar I was in a different city, so what was the difference between Chattanooga and Birmingham, or Greenville and Indianapolis? You wake up, you eat, you get on the bus, you play ball and you go home. I had given up on being a tourist in the various road towns three years earlier, after I ran myself ragged once by visiting Niagara Falls before a game. The bat seemed to weigh twice as much that day.

But Birmingham was different. It housed the Civil Rights Institute and was the site of an amazing tapestry of struggle that my parents had experienced firsthand. As my mom hovered over me, I knew I had to find the energy to get going, so I mumbled something incoherent and slowly dragged myself out of bed.

From the moment you walk into the institute your heart stops — at least mine did. I was dropped into 1960s America. Right outside its front gates was the 16th Street Baptist Church, the site of the infamous 1963 bombing that killed four young girls and became a focal point of the injustice during that era. Across the street was the huge Kelly Ingram Park where dogs and hoses had been turned on protesters.

I was glad that I got out of that bed to touch our past. I couldn’t help thinking about Jackie Robinson and the madness he must have experienced when he steamrolled over one of the most prominent color lines in our history.

My dad got so inspired that he ran off to write one of his magical poems right there on the spot.

Although this history-lesson-in-a-day was my most memorable birthday, my favorite was in 2001. My Phillies were out for vengeance because we were playing the Arizona Diamondbacks at home, who had my former teammate (and all-star) Curt Schilling pitching against us. It was a Saturday, and typically we played night games entering any weekend series, but this time our game had been picked up as the National League “game of the week” and moved up to early afternoon.

This opened the door for me to catch my favorite band, Hall and Oates, who were performing in Atlantic City that evening. John Oates and I were friends, so first I arranged to have a car pick him up, along with his father and son, and bring them to the game. It turned out that it was his son’s first baseball game to boot. The Phillies rolled out the red carpet as their P.A. announcer played Hall and Oates’s 1980’s hits all game long, and they even let John run around to change the bases between innings. Afterwards, about 20 of my family and friends went to Atlantic City for dinner and the concert.

Of course, my teammates over the years also did a lot to make road birthday celebrations special. One year while I was with the Phillies, we were in Chicago playing the White Sox during interleague play. One of my good friends on the team invited me to “a small birthday get-together,” but insisted that we make a quick stop by his office.

I hung out in the office and then, on some pretext or other, he sent me downstairs to the basement. As I started back up the stairs, I saw teammate after teammate sheepishly creeping in the front door. For a second, I thought, “Why are Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley coming to Randy’s office?” It turned out that my entire team was in on a surprise party for me (they’d passed secret memos around in the locker room) and for our teammate Jason Michaels (whose birthday was that week, too). It was one of the most moving instances of team solidarity of my career. My baseball family made it feel like home.

In baseball, anticipation becomes a key part of your game, from thinking about the opposing pitcher’s strategy to planning on how to defend against a hitter before he even swings the bat. I had learned to look forward to the next step in just about everything, including organizing the events that helped me get away from the day-to-day drag.

And as time went on, what I most looked forward to was the way this game brought my family, baseball and blood, together on my birthday — from my 21st in my first professional season with the Geneva Cubs in upstate New York, to my 33rd in the deserts of Scottsdale, Ariz. Coast to coast, my family shared the day with me. It helped keep the twinkle in my eye; it helped me remember why I picked up a bat in the first place.

Even if I didn’t understand it as a 10-year-old, I learned that there is nothing like being home with family and friends — even when home has to come to you.

Republished from The NY Times