Oh brother, who's on first

A number of you, gentle readers, have been kind enough to ask how my trip to Houston to see my long lost brother went. It went quite well, thank you. Except for the nine and a half hour drive through deepest darkest Texas in the rain, it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience.
Didn’t do anything touristy, didn’t visit the San Jacento battlefield or go sneer at Enron Field (oh, excuse me. Make that Astros Field). Just kicked back and got reacquainted with my family.
Living among my wife’s family sometimes causes me to forget that, nasty old curmudgeon that I am, I am not an isolated phenomenon. Although my brother Carl, as stated previously in this space, is a much nicer person than I am, he is none the less, a Bradow, and therefore subject to all the faults and foibles attendant thereto.
Primarily these faults and foibles manifest themselves as an absolute intolerance for stupidity or ineptitude. Brother Carl has been in the petrochemical business for ages. These days he is a consultant for numerous endeavors, mostly with his former employer, Exxon. His specialty is chemical plant safety, and I say with no small amount of pride that Brother Carl is one of the main reasons you don’t hear of petrochemical plants exploding and killing people like you used to. In his own bailiwick, he’s just as persnickety and hard to get along with as I am. As with all other members of clan Bradow with whom I am acquainted, “good enough” isn’t as far as Brother Carl is concerned.
Who says that being anal is a bad thing?
When you’re dealing with something as potentially lethal as making chemicals from crude oil, you can’t cut corners with the care you take in the process. Brother Carl can be a bit edgy when he encounters folks who don’t want to do things the right way. Wonder where he gets that.
While in Texas, I got to see all of Carl and his lovely wife Carolyn’s kids and grandkids. Nice brood. Not an ax murderer or car thief among them. Carl’s eldest grandson is even a budding baseball enthusiast. A pitcher and shortstop by trade. Ah, the family tradition continues.
Perhaps there is some deeply rooted, genetic reason why Bradows have an affinity for the great American pastime that approaches fanaticism, but I doubt it. Were that the case, somewhere along the line there would have been a mutant, a family member who shared the erroneously held opinion that baseball is slow and dull because it doesn’t involve steroid junkies and vertically overachieving freaks trying to end one another’s lives over possession of an inflated pig’s bladder. Baseball is played best by average sized people, and certain positions in the game are best occupied by folks who are a shade below “average” size.
And anybody who thinks the game is slow and dull obviously has never looked down the barrel of an 80-plus mile an hour fastball thrown by somebody who knows what he’s doing. Or tried to catch a top-spin ground ball that picks up speed as it skips over the infield.
I guess that may be the ticket. Baseball only seems dull to people who have never made a serious attempt to play the game, and the Bradows have been playing it for generations.
So, to my grandnephew, “Hang in there, slugger. The game is in your blood. Get in front of the ball and don’t try to pull the curve. Stay back and hit it the other way.”
For those of you who got lost in the preceding paragraph - It’s a baseball thing, you wouldn’t understand.