It’s World Series time, the fall classic is about to unfold, I can feel my dormant baseball enthusiasm emerging from its regular season hiatus. As long as I can remember I’ve loved baseball. But I must admit the strike of 1994-95 took its toll on my unabashed love of the game. I’m not sure why I naively held onto baseball as something pure, a game not a business until that strike.

Baseball is one of the rare sports that I enjoy enough that it doesn’t matter too much which teams are playing. Back in the mid seventies, before the Blue Jays came to town, a couple of buddies and I used to take a week’s holidays just to watch major league baseball. We would begin on a Friday night at Tiger Stadium in Detroit and finish nine days later at Jarry Park in Montreal.

With careful planning, a lot of driving, limited sleep we could usually squeeze ten to twelve games in. An afternoon game at Shea followed by an evening game at Yankee stadium, then a drive up the coast to catch a double header at Fenway this was the norm. I caught my first and only home run off tiger third baseman Aurelio Rodriguez in Baltimore’s Memorial stadium. The highlight of those trips was to catch a Reds Dodgers game at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati.

Those trips came to an end in 1977 the year the Blue Jays opened. I bought six seats to the opening game, Dad and I and the boys watched the as the snow fell and the Jays beat the Chicago White Sox.

Times have changed, I’m a little more cynical, and I don’t follow the game as I once did. Yet when the playoffs begin I find myself riveted to the tube. Maybe this will be the year that the curse of the Bambino is finally foiled or more likely those damn Yankees will win again.