The 1990s. For real they started in the 6th grade, however since elementary school lines up so well with the end of the 80s, some of 1990 will get shoved into 1989. It’s not my fault it’s just that calendar years and school years don’t match perfectly. There will be a lot of this. In fact I wont start in on the 7th grade until 1991, since that allows 1996 to have its proper time as my graduation year. What does that leave us to cover? Well an incredible busy summer for one. There is an amazing amount of events for a short period of time that will happen. The summer of 1990 also is when George joined the family. His life may have started in 1987, but he wasn’t the good boy we all knew and loved until he joined us from the pound this summer.

So let’s cover other things. Let’s start with the Spring of 1990 which brought us a new Little League season. This year I would get selected for the Majors. Oddly I didn’t care, I didn’t realize my love for baseball was waning at the time, it was too close to the peak still. Now unfortunately for me I liked the National league, but our town was divided into east and west districts, and kid’s living in the east side of town had to represent the American League teams. So, I was emotionally a little disappointed with being put on the Orioles. Which to boot was silly because like the Tigers the year before, instead of being orange and black with the name as would make sense for a team called the Tigers, we were red. This year we were a team in the AL that in real life was orange and black and little league made us red like I was last year.

Another odd note is that I as on a AAA team the year before that had a American League team name, the Tigers, but I am positive it was triple AAA, so go figure Davis Little League not thinking their names through.

Anyway another reason for a downturn in love of the game was that our team was so bad. We also had one kid that was such a braggard in the dugout that our lack of on field production made his bolsters seem that much more pointless. There could probably be a litany of reasons why this team didn’t work out. But I think at this point there really was a break in kids that could pitch well enough to win, which there was like three of, and then the dregs. So only a couple teams would win all of their games and the rest of us would be batting practice.

Thus it made for kind of an excruciating season. We didn’t win games, we still had issues with ego’s like we were something to brag about and it just made me internally wish I could either be on another team, at home playing RBI baseball for the NES instead, or sorting through my baseball card collection. With the experience the year before and then this season I have a feeling this would be a major cause for this waning that I didn’t realize was happening.

Another was coming in the Fall. So, it was in the fall of seventh grade (1990), that one of the kids I went to elementary school with’s father called me up. I was sitting in what would become the TV room and later Jake’s room but was at the time still Mom’s office in the L street house. I sat at the desk and got recruited to come out and sign up for the city youth football team. Never had that happen, baseball which was the sport I had been really into was always full of tryouts and nepotism, they never acted like the wanted you, you wanted them. Thus, I instantly liked the idea of it.

When I got mom on board to okay it all those reasons for it being fun came to life. Then there was some stuff beyond that. All these sports up until now I mentioned were intra-city, Football was not. As a city every kid in town was on the city team, which I had to get over being called the Cowboys, and we travelled to away games. This allowed me to see different schools, we played in places as far away as Oakland and then just up the road versus Woodland, oddly not into Sacramento too much. It just felt so much more like a team sport, the kids you played with would then be there at school and you could talk about it, and it wasn’t like the intra city stuff were it bread in city rivals. It was just better.

I ended up playing a lot of defenses, although seventh grade year we had to play both ways a bunch since our team was so thin on players. But defense had always been kind of my thing now in the other sports and it bleed into football now, but where defense was cool and all in others football is the sport where defense really can be more fun that scoring and playing offense, which probably is what helped with its climb to success as a professional sport. GPA issues would cause issues with consistent play after eighth grade but at least the last sport I played I never got tired of.

Now I would be remiss if I didn’t delve into RBI baseball for a second. I mentioned I might possibly rather be playing that. For a span of time, that was the go to baseball game for me. It was one of those weird Tengen NES games that weren’t shaped like the regular Nintendo games which made it memorable. But it also had what I think was the 1987 major league rosters. Which allowed having pretend seasons where people would break the HR mark.

Beyond that it had a memorable theme that drove Mom nuts. It was her go to example of why the music on the Nintendo was so bad. It’s repetitive tune grated on her and she wasn’t a big fan of when I played it, constantly telling me to turn that noise down. As the years when by, Chris M. would play this game retroactively some, along with I think Chris K. and maybe Marty. Somewhere along that line the lyrics of “9 99, 9 99, 9 99, 9 99!” were developed for the general tune and have been lodged in the back of mind ever since.