http://www.miamiherald.com/418/story/1147901.html

Memories linger in the celebration of a new ballpark

BY DAN LE BATARD
DLEBATARD@MIAMIHERALD.COM

I got lost on my way to the party on the burial ground.

Can you believe that? I actually got lost headed to where the Orange Bowl used to be. I've lived in South Florida all my life. I've gone to the Orange Bowl hundreds of times. My first concert was there -- Michael Jackson. My love of sports was born there, too, while holding my father's meaty hand and booing O.J. Simpson back in that better time when I could view him, and games, through only a child's eyes.

Heck, I learned how to be Cuban in that neighborhood, with Abuelita's cafecito y Abuelito's pastelitos. My late grandmother lived right next to that old orange dump, which means I had the best VIP parking spot on the noisiest nights, and the memory of her, and that, still can make my eyes sting.

But on Saturday morning, as I headed toward history, I got lost in the old neighborhood because they have paved over my childhood. I really hadn't realized until that moment that I had always gotten to the Orange Bowl organically -- by seeing it from a distance, bigger than everything around it. Feeling it, too. It was, rather literally, my landmark.

I don't actually know the street names or numbers in much of that maze. The Orange Bowl and its lights always were my guide, and with them I had never felt even a little bit lost around sports.

But everything in life is fleeting, even the biggest things, and impermanence is the only permanent. Michael Jackson is dead now, and O.J. Simpson is in jail, and my favorite sports address in the world has been wrecked to save baseball in South Florida.

It is a beautiful thing, really, that all those kids holding hands with their parents Saturday morning were making their way toward a lifetime of new memories. And that all those sons, all grown up now, were pushing fathers in wheelchairs over the dirt where progress will be built and tomorrows will be remembered.

That is priceless . . . even as it will cost our city either hundreds of millions or billions, depending on whom you believe. So I kept making U-turns in Abuelita's old neighborhood Saturday until I could finally follow the crowds and the noise toward the big party on the burial ground meant to celebrate tomorrow.

It is hard to make a sound argument for our broke city spending these kinds of dollars to build a new palace for a bunch of rich guys to play games, but that argument is emotional, not logical, and it certainly felt good on this morning. The speeches were made in English and Spanish. The organ played Take Me Out To The Ball Game. A salsa band sang and danced. Hundreds were lined up at 8 a.m. for the free hot dogs, and thousands were gathered by the time silver shovels symbolically broke the ground four hours later. People cheered the mere mention of a future roof as the speech-makers sweated through their dark jackets during an unreasonable noon.

Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, dress shoes dusty from the ashy ground about to be broken, stepped to a microphone and promised the assembled thousands that, once those new lights get turned on, "all the negativity and concern will disappear."

ROMANCE, NOSTALGIA

Maybe they were all here because baseball does have a future in this city if we just air-condition and dry it. Or maybe they were here because you can get thousands anywhere in South Florida if you give away hot dogs. Regardless, baseball sells romance and nostalgia better than it sells anything else, and the love of this game gets passed down from parents to kids like a family heirloom.

Even with championships, plural, that love hasn't had a lot of time to grow here between all the betrayals and mistrust of management and rain delays. That love must be tended to over generations, as it has been in such places as Boston and Chicago and St. Louis. Marlins owner Jeff Loria promised that Saturday marked the beginning of "a lifetime of memories" for "you and your family and your children and your children's children."

It is hard to put a price on that. It makes my head hurt when I think of dollars going to a ballpark in this economy, especially when this team has so much trouble proving it has fans and we live in one of America's poorest big cities.

And I don't really understand how the potential cost can be millions now but billions by 2012. I can't pretend to know, even in our most quantifiable sport of numbers, what any of this might be worth to you. All I can tell you is what it is worth to me -- which is more than ever as I enter midlife with an appreciation for things I didn't treasure as much when I was younger.

Charlie Hough and I talked about that a lot Saturday. He was here to throw out the ceremonial first pitch to Benito Santiago, and what they did more than anything on this morning was remember. Hough's first pitch in Marlins history, back in 1993, allegedly was a strike because baseball can make even the umpires emotional.

"Strike?" Santiago said. "That pitch almost hit my foot!"

Hough and Santiago helped teach me baseball. I was a scared rookie reporter, and they always treated me with kindness. Santiago, so flashy and rich, showed me a catalog back then from which he was thinking of buying a blue dog. That's the kind of stuff I remember. Hough walked out of his first physical with a cigarette in his mouth and said he was in great shape . . . for someone who was 60.

Hough actually is in his 60s now, all these years later, and he is in constant pain. He has had three hip replacements, and the medicine he takes to heal makes his skin blotch. There have been a couple of mornings when he hasn't been able to summon the strength to get out of bed. And that's the cure, not the ailment. He has traveled too much chasing baseballs over the years, on buses and planes, and he lives in California now, but he didn't hesitate when the Marlins asked him to fly five hours across the country to throw one pitch Saturday.

I asked him why he came all this way. He looked at me as if an alien were growing out of my forehead.

"Why?" he said. "Because I was 44 when I came to pitch for the Marlins. My legs were killing me, and my arm didn't feel so hot, either. And they gave me a chance to pitch 10 miles from my home. I told them when they signed me that I'd do anything for them for giving me that opportunity. Anything."

They gave him one more year to feel young.

And today, Hough, a man who pitched in three World Series and played in an All-Star Game, still calls 1993 the most fun he has ever had in a baseball uniform.

FRIENDS FROM HIALEAH

Hough grew up in Hialeah. And some of the people who knew him then were there Saturday. An older gentleman came up and said he was Hough's bat boy back in high school. A woman came up, gave her former street address and reminded him that she had been his Hialeah neighbor. An old high school foe gave him a hug.

Hough didn't recognize any of them. He looked around and was just about as lost as I had been earlier.

"I think I played on a baseball field over there once," he said. "The Orange Bowl was our center field. Everything is gone from back then."

Hough kept gravitating toward Santiago on Saturday, even though they don't have much of anything in common beyond baseball, because Santiago is just about the only person or thing that remained here from something as recent as 1993. Then Hough spotted affable Hall of Famer Tony Perez.

''I hate him!'' Hough said.

Santiago recognized the joke and laughed.

''Because you could never get him out!'' Santiago said.

Maybe these memories don't mean much. Or, given what the commissioner of baseball and the Marlins were selling at this celebration Saturday, maybe they mean everything. Either way, there is an eternal truth in this sport that applies to everyone from a broken-down knuckleballer to a knucklehead like me making U-turns in Abuelita's old neighborhood: There can be a lot of pain on the path, and you can even get lost en route, but baseball always feels pretty good once you arrive home.