By September in the Singleton household, admittedly, I’m weary of baseball. Let’s just get the Yankees to the World Series already, and get Mr. Singy home to make spaghetti.

If I had a dollar for every baseball game I’ve watched (um, sort of watched) being a Singleton, I could have loads of fun at The Dollar Tree. (You thought I was going to say I’d be rich?)

Throughout Ken’s radio announcing days for the Montreal Expos, TV broadcasting for Madison Square Garden and the YES Network, our son Justin’s little league, high school, and Clemson University games, his summer leagues (including Cape Cod), and on up to his Minor League career in the Toronto Blue Jays’ Triple-A system … whew, that’s a ton of baseball for someone who connects with the phrase ants in her pants.

Wait … forgot to count two other sons’ rec council baseball games. Now we’re up to 19 years’ worth of being a baseball mom and wife, loyally sitting through mega-innings of a sport with which I have a love/hate relationship. Good thing the tickets have been free.

It’s not a secret – Ken admits it, too – baseball is a slow, methodical, and sometimes
L-O-N-G game. I’ve been the one in the stands reading a book (hey, a girl has to prepare for rain delays somehow), and I’ve walked around stadiums to stretch my legs and people watch. I’ve hunted for the healthiest stadium food possible and even shopped in team stores to pass time through extra innings, although our household does not need one more jersey, cap, or jacket in the closets. (Wait – do they make high heels yet with team logos?)

I try to pay attention, honestly I do, but the distractions are too great … watching people pig out or guzzle beer, noticing kids more bored than I am fiddle with their dad’s hat or fold their stadium seat up and down 42 times. I contemplate why that girl walking up the aisle would want to show that much cleavage in a male-dominated venue (oh right); and calculate the time we’ll get back to the hotel to catch a “Sex and the City” rerun.

Basically I’ve decided that watching baseball is like going to work with my husband. The sport has been extremely good to the Singletons, certainly, I’d never want to sound ungrateful (that’s the love part). Baseball feeds our hungry teens and my shoe fetish. Yet it separates our family for seven months (that’s the hate part). We miss Ken, and Ken misses out on family life such as birthdays and weddings, meeting visiting cousins from Italy, simply hanging out with the kids – and the most recent, as you may have heard Michael Kay announce on air – the birth of our first grandson September 21.

We can bring Ken’s face into our living room via airwaves, sure, but that is no substitute for the real deal.

Yes, 19 years is a lot of baseball. Excuse me while I run out to the dollar store.