I really like baseball. I always have. It’s part of my DNA at this point, having grown up with it, played it, watched it, shared it with family, read about it. James Earl Jones’ character in “Field of Dreams” summed it up well:
The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.
Yup, that says it all. But something has changed. That something is Major League Baseball. MLB used to be a collection of teams playing the best game in the world on a relatively even playing field. Today, it’s a thriving business and nothing more. There are a handful of money teams – Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Phillies – and all the rest, which serve no other purpose than to be glorified farm systems for these financial behemoths.
I could go on about that travesty, but I’ll concentrate on the positive: Minor league baseball, specifically the Lowell Spinners. If you like baseball and you live in the northeastern part of MA, this is the place to be. Real baseball played by underpaid, hustling kids playing their hearts out, trying to make it to The Show.
And some do. Here’s one who made it big, posing with my daughter:
Jacoby Ellsbury, when he was nobody, with Emmaline, who has always been somebody.
The point is, that if you love baseball, there is no better place to see it than at LeLacheur Park in Lowell, home of the Lowell Spinners.
Then again, if you want to see stilted baseball played by jaded, egocentric millionaires, and pay $500 for a family of four to do it, that’s your right. I’ll pay $9 to see the Spinners play it the way it’s meant to be played.
And maybe I’ll pick up a bobblehead in the process! 
Limping in the Light 
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