Twenty eight.
I wrote and saved and didn’t post, literally, nine or ten drafts of this. Angry letters to Mariners fans who keep getting the facts wrong. Long love letters to college baseball that no one else cares about. But in the end. In the end, it’s this: last night we drove to Zebulon to watch Dustin Ackley play.
He played second base. He batted sixth. He didn’t make an error, he knocked a double and drove in a run, he was hit by two pitches. Dusty’s not hitting much right now but he still has the prettiest swing I’ve ever seen. He signed a battered ACC baseball I’ve been toting around, collecting ex-Tar Heel signatures on; he looked at it and almost but not quite smiled (because baseball is serious business for Dustin Ackley), asked me when I’d seen his ex-teammates to get their autographs. His family was there. So was the entirety of the Carolina baseball team (which was traumatizingly bizarre on an another level completely, but I can’t talk about that now). I’ve loved him since he was an awkward, skinny 18 year old with bad hair and zits, breaking aluminum baseball bats hitting home runs.
College baseball is not an extension of the minor leagues. It is its own beast, beautiful in its own way, and it ends every year in Omaha, Nebraska, an unlikely home town for the only major NCAA championship played in the same city year after year. I have reached a point where I don’t expect MLB fans to understand why or how I love college baseball, and I do expect them to trample across the sacred ground of the College World Series for the sake of seeing their draft picks, when fans of the college game are still watching, and caring, and mourning, for another season of their game ending.
But what it is, really, is that we loved Dustin Ackley first, and shep. still loves him best, after his mama.
That’s what every post I’ve tried to write is about.
brand new kind of photography 