Chipper Jones, Nostalgia and Backyard Baseball 2001

Pictured: Baseball at its purest

The moment had every dramatic baseball cliché you can think of. The bases were loaded. It was the bottom of the 9th. There were two outs, with the championship on the line. Sammy Sosa led off third. Vlad Guerrero stood on second as Barry Larkin watched from first. The batter dug into the box; the moment was his. He calmly took the first pitch, a crazyball, for a strike. The pitcher, uber-nerd Dmitri Petrovich, adjusted his glasses, then delivered an inside fireball. The batter swung late as the ball zipped by him in a gulf of flames. Strike two. With no more special pitching “power-ups,” the pitcher threw a breaking ball that hung over the center of the plate. And the batter, Chipper Jones made him pay.

Winning Backyard Baseball 2001 was the highlight of my summer, the one between 4th and 5th grade. I know this might seem a little sad, but Backyard Sports were the greatest electronic games until Halo, and I was a baseball fanatic. I still remember the exact order of my stack batting order, a lineup so littered with future Hall-of-Famers, All-Stars and steroid abusers that it’s a little embarrassing I had the championship game come down to the last half inning.

Kenny Lofton was my leadoff man. He would get to first on a bunt every time (to second if I had crazy bunt). Barry Bonds batted next, not quite the unrealistic steroid-aided power slugger in the computer game as he would soon become in real life, but Bonds was still usually good for an opposite field single or double down the line. The other team’s catchers were always the really sucky neighborhood kids (except for Pablo Sanchez whose gritty style of play and overall swagger made him the ideal sports figure to emulate), and so it was pretty easy to have Lofton steal all the way to home. It didn’t really matter if I did or not, for the 3-4-5-6 batters in the lineup read Griffey-Sosa-McGwire-Guerrero. After three out of those four hit homeruns into the neighbor’s lawn, I had Pablo Sanchez (see above). The 8 spot was reserved for Larkin --whose Topps rookie card was the coolest thing a pack of trading cards ever got me (Pokémon included). Then came Chipper batting 9th.

I honestly don’t remember why I put him in my lineup. As a Yankees fan you’d think I’d have gone with Jeter. As a fellow Jew, I always liked Shawn Green. And Alex Rodriguez, the young MVP-type talent from the Mariners, was also available. But for some reason Chipper drew me in. There was something very classic to his baseball game, down to the prefect baseball nickname of Chipper (I could tell you his real name but it would diminish the legacy). Come Opening Day 2012, he will have played all his 18 seasons in Major League Baseball with the same team, a rarity in modern times. Yet there will be no 19th season for Jones, who yesterday announced that the Braves 2012 campaign would be his last in a player’s uniform. While still a serviceable hitter, Jones’s numbers have dipped these past few years to but a fraction of what the perennial All-Star once produced in his prime. 1998-2003 saw a six year span where Jones hit over .300, 25 home runs and 100 RBI in each season. And then in 2008, despite injuries hampering the Braves third basemen in his later career, Jones, at the ripe age of 36, won the NL batting title with a .364 average, the a mark that National league player has come within 20 percentage points of since. But as a Yankees fan who frankly didn’t give two cares to Chipper’s on-field career (until late October at least), I’m reacting to his pending retirement with a good sense of nostalgia. I think 20 is the age a person can start feeling genuine nostalgia for a bygone era, and for me, the era was that summer spent hovered over a Backyard Sports game with my finger twitching the mouse.

 While not using the Aluminum Power bat to knock balls into adjacent stratospheres, I filled my days playing actually backyard baseball with the neighborhood kids, our own version of Sandlot, except that we all kind of stunk and there was no beast. After playing, we would gather in one of our basements to haggle each other over baseball card trades (I cried for three days when my older brother swindled me into trading away Carlos Delgado for Bobby Bonilla). I still have those cards somewhere in the attic, and if not for the steroid era defaming the good names of players like Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield, they might have actually been worth a considerable amount of money someday. Chipper Jones belongs to this time period in my life. And while there are still several players on the 2001 version of Backyard Baseball still in the league, many like Pudge Rodriguez, Guerrero and Carlos Beltran are but shadows of the players they once were.

It’s just a matter of time before they too make a similar announcement to the one Chipper made, closing the books on their playing careers and the period in my life when baseball was its purest.