By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

Every year about this time, I get this certain bucolic fantasy.

In my daydreams, I'm sitting on a porch swing somewhere in America's heartland (Indiana, Iowa, Illinois) listening to a baseball game on the radio in late September, when the last of the crickets are still chirping. It's the same thing I've been doing nearly every night for the past six months.

I've been following my team religiously (and I use the term advisedly) every night, staying up late to catch the West Coast games. I know every in and out of the lineup and box score, every batting average and ERA, every move the manager is likely to make.

It's almost as if I'm a 12-year-old kid again.

Somewhere along the line, I lost that experience. Although I never stopped being a fan, there hasn't been enough time in the past 35 years or so to follow baseball the way I once did, day-in, day-out, from beginning to end of the 162-game season.

Partly I blame adulthood; partly I blame television.

Too many other responsibilities, too little time to actually sit down and listen to a whole game, except on a rare Saturday afternoon when I'm working in the carport.

Besides, TV has ruined the experience, reducing a three-hour drama to a 20-second highlight, showing too easily what it once took a child's active imagination to see.

I was explaining all this the other night to my wife to help pass the time on one of our regular evening walks through Kailua. She's always impressed (or maybe bemused) by what seems to be the bottomless depth of my useless baseball knowledge. At least, she seems to shake her head in amazement when I insist that there really were a couple of brothers named Dizzy and Daffy Dean who in 1934 combined for 49 wins for the St. Louis Cardinal team known as the Gas House Gang.

So there I am, laying out my fondest childhood memories and combining them with my sincerest dreams for retirement. In my mind I can almost taste the third Old Milwaukee beer I'm drinking while the game heads into the bottom of the ninth inning and the manager is bringing in a reliever who just blew his past two saves and probably is going to throw an 87-mph fastball to the pinch-hitter, who ...

"That's the most boring thing I've ever heard," my wife says. "A whole summer in Iowa, just listening to baseball games? What am I going to be doing all the time?"

I was thinking that maybe she could be working the vegetable garden all day, doing crossword puzzles, and bringing me another beer between innings, but I decide it's better not to say all that.

Instead, I agree that maybe it does sound a little mundane. Although I know it wouldn't be the same, I suggest that maybe we could follow a team in San Francisco or Seattle, where we could spend the rest of the time shopping and going to museums.

Just like I didn't do when I was a 12-year-old fan.

Reach Mike Leidemann at 525-5460 or mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.