I keep ticket stubs: movies, concerts, sporting events, if I’ve been there, I kept it.  I can tell you from experience that movie tickets don’t last well, but that most concert tickets are still fresh years later.  Some of the stubs are laughable now; in fact the only laughable thing about the Jason Biggs movie Loser is that it was my first date.  Others are still quite moving; the most emotional one I have is from a Tuesday night Angels vs. Mariners game.  The date of the game?  September 11^th, 2001.  I still remember planning to go to that game with a few co-workers, and I remember going to it a month later when the game was rescheduled.  I don’t remember who won (although considering their records at the time I suspect the M’s did) but I remember how nice it was to be back at Angel Stadium.  There’s a certain peace that comes from a baseball game—it’s that peace that some in the ADD-generation misinterpret as boredom.  Not to get all Field of Dreams on ya but there’s a consistency to baseball, a timelessness that is comforting to me in times of hardship.  It’s why I expect to begin to recover from the Nick Adenhart tragedy by, strangely enough, going to a game.  

I didn’t know Nick Adenhart personally.  We didn’t go to the same high school, he didn’t play for Long Beach State.  I didn’t know a guy who knew a guy who was friends with him, and we never ended up at the same party.  And yet I am deeply saddened by his passing.  And I’d be sad anytime I hear about a 22-year-old killed by a drunk driver; but this is different.  It’s deeper, it’s closer to home.  One hundred and ten people in the US are going to die today in a car accident, a lot of them due to drinking and driving; will we remember that the next time we go to the bar with some friends?

But this one is deeper because baseball is the sports-soundtrack to our lives.  It’s there almost every evening, and during summer afternoons.  And Nick was one of the newest cuts on the soundtrack.  We saw him last season come up and struggle; we saw him come back this year, dust himself off, and throw a beauty on Wednesday night.  He was supposed to be there for us for years to come.  There’s an attachment we all develop towards celebrities, especially athletes, because we see them so often.  We see a lot of them more often than we see our own friends.  This isn’t about whether or not they are role models, this is about a natural human thing to develop attachments to people that we see often, even if we don’t know them personally.  It’s why we remember Hank Gathers, Len Bias, Roberto Clemente, and the countless others who were a part of our lives and then taken away.

Whenever sometime this tragic happens, we are left with so many questions. How did this happen?  Why did this happen?  During the game yesterday, Vin Scully—who has seen more baseball than I will ever dream of—addressed the incident briefly but to the point: “Don’t even waste your time questioning why things like that happen.”  This clearly is a man who has seen his share of tragedy and he knows the questions that so many of us are stuck with, the unanswerable questions that we use to try and wrap our head around something that just doesn’t seem fair.  Vinny knows the answer: there are no answers.  There are no explanations that will make it okay. 

However: I don’t know about you, and I don’t know about Nick, but to me there is something comforting about the thought of the world continuing even after I’m gone.  And that is where baseball comes in.  We lost a friend, and we lost him in a terrible way.  And when that throws me into turmoil, when I get so tangled up in the “Whys?” that I can’t think about anything else, then the only thing that I can do is simply go to a ballgame and try to find peace.