I have tickets to a lot of A’s games this year, thinking that if I’m going to become a fan I’d better move decisively. It’s not really my style to ramp up slowly. But I didn’t want to cheat and only get seats right up front. My sense is that there are real fans all over the stadium, from the sky boxes and VIP seats right behind home plate, where they serve box dinners and cocktails, or some I’m told, to the last row of the bleachers (or, at least, there are fans there when the Yankees come to town). (By the way, if anyone out there has skybox seats, I believe this is an experience I really should have before the season is out. Please call!)

But K. is an Angels fan, so I figured she’d be excited to see the came from up close. This is probably the closest to the field I’ll be in my life – nine rows away; it felt something like watching a bunch of wildly overgrown high school players. I had a dream a few nights ago about running the bases, but I doubt anyone is ever going to let me do that. Had I known the players names (I’m trying, really I am) I would have yelled at them at they were taking the field in the top of the first. I would have brought a ball for autographs.

But, as it was, two things about being up front stood out. First, the colors are surreal. It looks as if the whole stadium had been turned into a television studio, flooded with yellow light. The colors are the sort of intense only visible on a massive plasma screen in a fancy clothing store. The other thing was that the players, who under normal circumstances look exactly as they do on TV, in other words, small, not real, disconnected, were very real. In fact, they looked like people, albeit enormous, sinewy, mutant sort of people. It’s rather shocking – one imagines a being that can do what these guys do every day is not actually, really a human being. Sure, they take the form of a person. But let’s face it, I’m a person, and I’m not even in the ballpark, so to speak. Ballplayers, like movie stars and politicians and CEOs and news anchors, do not seem to be of the same species as the rest of us.

But there they were, just guys. Next to me were two brothers, plump, with bad eczema. I can’t say how old they were, but old enough to have snot dripping out of their noses and not be concerned about what the 17 year old chicks in the row behind would think. They drank beers nonchalantly and said very little during the game. And on the field was Frank Thomas. Thomas is a large, large, large man. But still, he’s man. K. referred to his buttocks as taut; she called him a “stallion.” But the idea that he has a buttocks at all connects him directly to the brothers to my left. He walks, they walk. He smiles – I saw him smile – they smiled, stood, cheered, when Eric Chavez hit a two-run homer in the bottom of the seventh inning.

There’s something to this, the recognition that even though we can’t hit or pitch a hundred mph fastball, or do much of anything else of particular use on the field of dreams, we’re there because we share something with these guys. Call it humanness, for lack of a better word. If they get hurt, we can relate. If they strike out, shit, we can relate. Maybe not to the salaries or the travel schedule or the celebrity – but we can relate to the basic struggle of trying to do the impossible–make a living, raise kids, write books, stay married–and trying to stay optimistic about the future.

Another thing, too. It occurred to me as I was watching Angel’s pitcher John Lackey warm up that the one thing at work more than anything else in the game of baseball, the thing that no one seems to talk about, probably because it’s not the manliest of issues, is fear. A batter stands dug into the box while a pitcher with more or less control of what he’s doing hurls a small hard object in the area of his groin/head &tc. The ball takes something like a second to travel the 60 feet from mound to catcher’s mitt. So, hitting, at its core, is about overcoming fear.

It pops up elsewhere, too. Fear of being traded to a lesser team, or bumped down to the minors. Fear of your wife cheating on you while you’re on the road. Fear of injury. Fear of striking out or making fielding errors or losing your temper and jumping into the stands to rip the lungs out of a jeering fan. Fear of flubbing a TV appearance.

And fear, of course, is something everyone can understand. We route for our boys, in part, then, because we understand that it takes serious guts to be out there in the first place.