Performer: Pearl Jam
Songwriters: Jeff Ament, Eddie Vedder
Original Release: Binaural
Year: 2000
Definitive Version: None
When Debbie and I scheduled our trip to Alaska for around Memorial Day 2000, it became quickly apparent that we were going to have to come back a day before we might ordinarily have. The reason was as obvious as the predominant amount of Cincinnati Reds gear that adorned my Baseball Room: The team was going to pay tribute to the 25th anniversary the 1975 Reds—one of the greatest teams of all time—on my birthday.
Debbie didn’t like it. She wanted to add Denali to our trip, and despite the ambitiousness of that goal, I suppose that if we had had the extra day, we might have been able to shoehorn it in. But I wasn’t going to relent: I had to be in Cincinnati that day, once-in-a-lifetime trips be damned. Besides, Denali would always be there. The 1975 Reds? Definitely not.
We went to the game with my brother Scott and his wife and a couple of Debbie’s friends from work on a perfect June afternoon. Each member of the superteam was introduced, except for Joe Morgan, who couldn’t attend for reasons that weren’t entirely clear, and, of course, Pete Rose, who was there in spirit. But the unquestioned highlight came in the middle of the game when they began to roll out the birthday announcements on the scoreboard.
There it was—big as life—Happy Birthday to Will and BaseballTruth.com. I was stunned. Debbie had made the arrangements and apparently paid a pretty penny for the privilege. (I never learned how much.) Apparently all had been forgiven for cutting short the Alaska trip.
Little did I know at the time, the launching of BBT that day started a chain of events that led me to wind up in Chicago 5 years later. “Moved by sleight of hand,” indeed.
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