I was so obsessed with the sport that even before Major League Baseball moved to the West Coast in 1958 when the Dodgers came to Los Angeles and the Giants to San Francisco I would listen on radio to Game of the Day broadcasts on the Mutual Broadcasting System, especially on days it featured my favorite teams of those years, the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox.

I was so obsessed with the sport that I sent out letters to the star players of major league teams seeking their autographs, and soon I had in my proud possession signed photos from the likes of Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams, Yogi Berra, Ernie Banks, Bill Skowron, Elston Howard, Pee Wee Reese, Jim Gilliam, Gil Hodges, Whitey Ford, Don Newcomb, Billy Martin, Bob Lemon and even Frankie Crosetti, the venerable third base coach of the Yankees.

I was so obsessed with the sport that at 7 each morning during the sweltering days of a Fowler (my tiny hometown in the San Joaquin Valley) summer I would gather with my buddies at a ball yard at the local high school and we'd engage in lively pickup games until noon when the heat would rise beyond 100 degrees and force us to depart the premises.

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I was so obsessed with the sport that I listened faithfully for many seasons to the Giants radio broadcasts with Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons doing the games -- the Dodgers weren't on any Fresno stations -- and the habit lasted well into my college years.

I saw my first major league game in August of 1958 in San Francisco at an iconic Pacific Coast League structure, Seals Stadium, and it was between the Giants and St. Louis Cardinals.

I sat breathlessly with my cousin Ron Wilburn in the leftfield pavilion in the old park at 16th and Bryant where Joe DiMaggio began his storied career and where the Hamms Brewery sign was a dominant feature beyond the right field fence, and watched in awe Willie Mays make his effortless basket catches in center field and Stan Musial collect a couple of hits and Sad Sam Jones pitch the Cardinals to a 5-2 win.

In that match, the Cardinals' extraordinary third baseman, Ken Boyer, made a couple of exceptional fielding plays, and who could have thought at that time that 10 years later I would be seated wide-eyed across the aisle from Mr. Boyer and Don Drysdale on an 12-hour flight -- with a refueling stop in Kansas City -- on the Dodgers' prop-jet called the Kay-O as it headed to New York and I headed for my first major journalistic assignment.

It was what happened before a game at Seals Stadium between the Giants and Dodgers in May of 1959 that would inalterably change the pathway of my life as I sat with my father in his company's box seats behind the SF dugout and watched the teams go through their hitting and fielding rituals.

I noticed a bunch of men in hats and sports coats with pens and notepads behind the batting cage watching the action unfold, and asked my father who they were.

"They're sportswriters, and many of them travel with the teams," he said.

Since I knew I would never be skilled enough to make it to the majors, which of course was my childhood ambition, I thought the next best thing would be able to get paid to attend games and maybe even be able to travel with a professional team.

From that moment on, I passionately desired to become a sportswriter -- and soon became one for my high school's weekly paper and then became a prep writer for the Fresno Bee and then, after long forgotten and painful apprenticeships in Pacific Palisades, Camarillo and Tulare, joined the Los Angeles Herald Examiner in April of 1968 and the Long Beach Press Telegram in November of 1989.

Doug Krikorian displayed his passion for baseball when he played center field in a 1974 celebrity game at Dodger Stadium.

In a melancholic recollection that to this moment stirs gladness in my soul, the sporting highlight of my youth came on Oct. 3, 1962, when my beloved Giants overcame a 4-2, ninth-inning deficit with a dramatic four-run eruption at Dodger Stadium in a deciding Game 3 playoff to emerge with the National League pennant.

I'll never forget watching the proceedings on my 14-inch black-and-white TV in the bedroom of my Fowler residence, and shrieking with joy and weeping with emotion.

The Giants finally had beaten their bitter rival Dodgers!

Alas, the euphoria of such a historic conquest soon would disappear into the glove of the New York Yankees' second baseman Bobby Richardson when he would latch on to a sizzling two-out, ninth-inning line drive by the Giants' Willie McCovey with runners and second and third and preserve the Game 7, 1-0 win to assure the Bronx Bombers of another World Series championship.

But. as I often say to friends with I suspect a cloying repetitiveness, nothing in this world remains the same.

And, as baseball opens its long-delayed season tonight (July 23), an abbreviated, spectator-less, contrived season playing out during the Covid-19 Pandemic to dredge as many millions of dollars remaining in the TV coffers, I find myself totally detached from the proceedings.

I honestly didn't even know the Dodgers and Giants were playing this evening at Dodger Stadium until I went to my ESPN app this morning, which I seldom do any longer.

I found the greed-driven monetary dispute between the owners and players throughout so much of the summer disgusting and reprehensible at a time when so many people are unemployed and so many people are hurting financially and so many have been afflicted with Covid-19 and so many people have been adversely affected by the forces ripping apart our country.

I'm not even sure I'll watch tonight's game, which would have been pure sacrilege for me during so much of my past.

The baseball for which I once had such a fondness and which moved at such a brisk yet leisurely pace in my youth is no more, and now games drag on endlessly and bunting and hitting-and-running and even base stealing are considered obsolete, and those ghastly Ivy League-created sabermetric terms like WAR, WHIP, OPS, ad nauseam, are in vogue, and runners are now placed at second base in extra innings in what is nothing more than a Little League rule.

I find my indifferent feelings for a sport that once enveloped me to be a profane sadness.

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