Look Out!

They are a baseball family, and they have a baseball rule: if you go to the game, you stay to the end. Always.

They are from St. Louis, so they are a Cardinals family. Even after they scattered and lived elsewhere, they remained a Cardinals family. Susan Perabo is now 55, a college professor in Pennsylvania whose major physical adornment—since she tends toward understated dress—is the wry smile that sneaks onto her face when she says something funny. Her 23-year-old son, Brady, is a Cardinals fan, though he has never lived in St. Louis. “We gave him no choice,” Perabo says. Her daughter, Chase, is less smitten, though Perabo thought she gave her no choice either. (Cue wry smile.) When they visit Perabo’s parents in St. Louis, days are organized around baseball games. The Cardinals are ingrained for life.

Perabo knows of only one breach of her family’s baseball rule. It happened before she was born, even before her father was born, on a day when her paternal great-grandfather went to a Cardinals game at Sportsman’s Park. He might have been alone. He was definitely without his wife, which might not be so surprising—in vintage baseball photos, you rarely see women in the stands. In the midst of play, fire broke out at his apartment building, a blaze significant enough to have been visible from the stadium. So he left for home. Ever after, when the next three generations of Perabos were at a game and saw people leaving early, they made the requisite comment: “Must be a fire.” Or, “Clearly an emergency.”

When she was growing up, Perabo accompanied her father, who worked in community affairs for Ralston Purina, to Cardinals games about six times a season, taking advantage of comped company tickets when available. Sometimes Perabo’s father brought along a business associate, and sometimes her mother or older sister went, but they didn’t love baseball the way Perabo loved baseball.

She loved watching it, and she loved playing it.

Though she is now a celebrated writer who has published four books of fiction, Perabo wasn’t the kind of kid who spent her childhood inside reading. She was always outdoors, playing baseball with the neighborhood boys. Eventually, she’d play baseball competitively, becoming the first woman to play NCAA baseball while an undergrad at Webster University. One day, her mother called weeping from a pay phone outside the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, because she’d just seen a plaque about Perabo in a “Women in Baseball” exhibit. No one from the Hall of Fame had mentioned the exhibit to the family.

As a girl, Perabo sometimes took her glove to Cardinals games. If a ball neared, she’d jump up for a catch. Others flinched or retreated. Her older sister was ball shy in this way, and Perabo always thought, “Oh, what a wimp.”

One afternoon when Perabo was about 13, her father came home from work and changed into his game clothes: red hat, red shirt, khaki pants. Then she and her father headed for the old Busch Stadium. They had company tickets that day, good seats to the left of third base, in the second section away from the field, but still fairly close in. As they sat, Perabo noticed four men chatting in front of her and her father. They were still in work clothes, though they had taken off their jackets and were loosening their ties.

Early in the game, a left-handed batter came up and, as Perabo puts it, “hit this screaming foul ball” to the opposite field. Sometimes, she adds, foul balls are “kind of loopy, and you have a chance to get under them” for a catch. Not this one. “You couldn’t even see it. It was so fast.” But she could hear it making a hollow sound on impact, as if hitting something hard. At first, she thought that something hard was her chest. Now she guesses she imagined this because fear knocked the wind out of her. Strangely at first, her father also thought the ball had hit her. In fact, it hit the head of the man sitting directly in front of Perabo, and he fell forward onto the concrete.