Midnight Baseball

I'm not getting enough sleep. Our local sports talk station, KNBR, broadcasts San Francisco Giants games and every night at midnight they rebroadcast them. Now you have to understand, one of my best memories of growing up is going to sleep listening to baseball on the radio.

I was a country music fan when I was in junior high in Michigan. I loved The Oakridge Boys and especially their bass singer, Richard Sterban. You all remember Elvira, right? Giddyup, ah um bop, ah um bop, a mauw mauw? Well, anyway...I would listen to this great country station from Wisconsin and in the evenings, when the signal was the best from across the big lake, they broadcast an interview show and talk to great country entertainers like Barbara Mandrell and George Strait. Ah, bliss. Well, it all came to a screeching halt one early spring evening.

You see, this particular station also broadcast the Milwaukee Brewers games. And I was soon to find out that baseball took precedence over country music. My evening interview program was subplanted by Bob Uecker and the 1982 Harvey's Wallbangers. Which, it turned out, wasn't so bad.

For those of you non-baseball fans, you might remember Ueck from the Miller Lite commercials. You know...I must be in the front row. Or maybe from Mr. Belvedere? Well, he was certainly an entertaining voice on the radio and I was soon hooked. I became a Brewers fan.

Sallie was living at home at the time and she caught baseball fever too. And we were both surprised to discover that my mother was a closet baseball fan and had been since she was a girl. It was a synergy that could not be stopped. We soon found ourselves tuning to the Game of the Week on Saturdays and even making annual trips to Detroit for games when the Brewers were in town (they played in the American League then and there was no interleague ball).

I spent many an evening listening to games on the radio when the signal was strong enough to make it across the water, many times falling asleep before the last out. So when KNBR started their Midnight Baseball replays I soon started staying up just to go to sleep to baseball. It's really cutting into my beauty sleep.