Friends (One Sixty-Two: Day 14)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day Fourteen: Robinson Cano, New York Yankees

Everyone’s been talking about Robinson Cano lately – the Yankees second baseman is finally blossoming into the hitting star so many scouts predicted he’d become. So far this season, there has been no better hitter in baseball. Today, though, Cano is on my mind for a different reason.

It was September of 2006, and Cano had one of his best games yet as a Yankee. He hit a homer and drove in five runs as New York defeated Tampa Bay. I don’t remember a lot of details from that game, except that I was sitting in the upper deck of Yankee Stadium, and that I went to the game with Ron.

It was nothing new to be attending a Yankee game with Ron – this was our second time going that year, and probably our 20th or so together at the stadium since our parents first permitted us to drive from Staten Island to the Bronx. Add in the ballgames we’d seen in Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Montreal, Reading, Trenton, New Haven, and Frederick, Md., and you’ve got a lot of hours spent watching baseball side by side.

Because Ron and I both loved baseball, the games provided us with a place to relax, talk, and share a mutual passion. We’d discuss the teams and the games a bit, but mostly we’d talk about life – our jobs, homes, relationships, friends. Some people have these conversations over dinner; Ron and I had them from the upper deck. It felt right, for so many reasons. Weren’t we, after all, the nerdy seventh-graders who got Yankees players’ names and numbers screen-printed onto the backs of T-shirts years before teams even began selling those uniform tees? And weren’t we the ones collecting day-after newspapers from every New York publication after each Yankee title? Didn’t we also use baseball players’ names to help us remember the titles of paintings for our AP Art History tests?

It’s been more than three years since I last saw Ron. It’s hard to say why friends lose touch – often, it’s not anybody’s fault. Our lives take different turns, circumstances change, and suddenly we’ve fallen out of contact. It’s never fun, but it is human nature.

Today is Ron’s birthday, and so I’m thinking of him. I’ll send him an e-mail, wishing him the very best, and hoping we can meet up again soon. You can always go to another ballgame, and catch another Robinson Cano home run. But you don’t always get to do it with your friends. When you lose touch with that friend, you realize how much you took for granted. You want to sit in the upper deck and talk with him.