Sure We’re Grinning; Baseball’s Beginning

People try, and often fail, to describe the wonders of baseball. I’ve written about it many times, striving to be alternately profound or poetic. As the late Yankee Manager Casey Stengel used to say, you could look it up.

Please don’t.

I just love the game on some visceral level, and was one of those sons whose father introduced him to it. Before I knew all the U.S. presidents, I knew about Cap Anson and Rabbit Maranville, a guy named George Herman Ruth and the Flying Dutchman.

Dad isn’t around anymore to talk with me about the unfolding of another baseball season, which begins today, but I found some soul mates in George Abraham and his 20-something sons, Jason, Mike and Jeff. They have a sister, Jolie, who’s in on things too, but baseball has always been considered father-son turf.

So, we guys stood around George’s T-shirt-printing business in Orange last week, stammering and mumbling and trying to articulate why we like baseball so much, and finally concluded we didn’t know how to say it. Actually, the Abrahams have nothing to prove: He, with the boys at his side, won a contest in 2004 as the Angels’ ultimate fan.

With that pedigree, I asked them to talk about the hold that baseball has on so many of us.

“I was actually thinking about that a few weeks ago,” Jason says. “What’s the big deal? But it is, for some reason that I don’t really know. It’s one of those things. I don’t ever remember ever being shown a baseball [as a child]. It was just always there.”

Mike says Opening Day still gives him a buzz. “Every time,” he says. “I always tell my friends, an extra ticket is the one thing I’ll never say no to. My girlfriend says she feels special, but she says that she knows that once the season rolls around, she takes second place. That’s our little joke, but she’s kind of already feeling that.”

The Angels open the season Monday in Seattle. The home opener is Friday against the Yankees.

The T-shirt shop operates out of a tiny office bejeweled with a photo showing George with two of the boys standing in the “field of dreams” in Iowa that was used as the site of the baseball movie. Son Jeff later superimposed images of some of the all-time greats in the background and an image of George’s late father in the foreground. Another office photo shows father and sons exulting in the stadium moments after the Angels won the 2002 World Series.

But lo and behold, the front office gives way to doors No. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 (I eventually lost count) -- and rooms with tens of thousands of baseball artifacts. Everything from ashtrays and lighters to windup toys and mugs and ceramics, to photos of the boys with and without famous ballplayers next to them.

And in this cornucopia of corniness and Abraham family history, it becomes obvious all over again why baseball retains its grip on us. In these catacomb-like rooms in an otherwise nondescript commercial park, generations of baseball lore have been handed down.

Every picture does tell a story and every silly ceramic item represents a connection between a father and his sons.

Today, it’s early April. By October, more stories will be added to the family treasure chest.

George has been an Angels fan since his family moved here in 1967, when he was a young teen. His boys are Angel lifers.

In an essay for a scrapbook about the Angels 2002 seasons, Mike wrote that baseball had always been a family affair. Their father’s shop wasn’t far from old Anaheim Stadium and, sometimes after a day’s work, one or more of the boys might walk over to the ballpark, crossing the railroad tracks to get there.

Now, they can do it as grown men and never with more joy than when the Angels won the World Series. “It had to be a dream come true for him,” Mike wrote of his father’s joy in taking that hike with his sons, “because it sure was for me.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.