(This column ran originally Sunday June 16 in The Times and The News-Star.)

An online baseball group I asked to join asked me a question, maybe to determine whether or not I was a robot and maybe to see if I really wanted to join.

The question: “What was your most interesting baseball experience?”

Not counting the trips I’ve made with Little League teams — coached my final game 15 years ago next month — my most interesting baseball experience was Dog Days of Summer, a few early-1990s trips with about 10 other guys who, like me at the time, were Promising Young Men. We lined up a few ballparks over the span of a few days and off we went.

That’s what I told the online group, and those were enough credentials to get me in.

(There are, by the way, hundreds of online groups. Put An End To Radishes is one, no joke. Squash Brussels Sprouts is another. I’m in some baseball ones that discuss stadiums, jerseys, a certain era…I never comment, but just look at the pictures.)

Dog Days were good days. We made the front page of USA Today and everything.

All this came to mind because of Tom Seaver, the Hall of Fame pitcher who led the “Miracle Mets” to what the Associated Press called “one of the most improbable championships in American sports history” in 1969. Seaver’s family and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown revealed in March that the 74-year-old righthander is suffering from dementia and will not make any more public appearances.

Hurt me.

I was no Seaver fan as a 10-year-old in 1969 because the Mets’ miracle season ended in the Series when they beat My Team, the Baltimore Orioles, who used to be good, believe it or not. Took the Mets only five games to beat one of the best Orioles teams ever.

My guy was fellow righthanded pitcher Jim Palmer, who was 16-4 for the Orioles in 1969 and would rattle off five straight 20-win seasons beginning in 1970. He finished his career with eight 20-win seasons, is the only pitcher in history to win a World Series game in three different decades, and entered the Hall of Fame in 1990, two years before Seaver.

I buried the Seaver hatchet in March when Palmer tweeted this after hearing about Seaver’s condition: “I always strove to be like Tom both on and off the field. He’s ‘Tom Terrific’ for a reason.”

I first softened to Tom Terrific back in 1992, one of our early Dog Days trips. We’d been to Shea Stadium that afternoon, then had traveled in a rented van to Cooperstown and a hotel by the lake, maybe three blocks from the Hall. But this next thing was, to me, the cherry on the hot fudge sundae:

The woman who ran the hotel of course didn’t know us. I’d told her we might be midnight getting there. She said on the phone, “Raise the window of your room and I’ll leave two keys by the lamp.”

I did. And she did. We had two rooms. One was Room 41. Same as Seaver’s jersey number. He was inducted into the Hall later that summer.

Timing. Sometimes it just all works out.

Baseball was the thread of those trips, but the time itself was really about being with people you like, sharing an experience. “Baseball” — or whatever you enjoy, like the beach or mountains — is just the “excuse” to go.

I don’t remember much about the actual games. Instead, we go places with people because it’s about the way they make you feel. If a dad takes his son to spring training or you ride the train to St. Louis to get into Busch Stadium, it’s a little of both. But mainly, Dog Days was a feeling. Still is.

I have the guys who flew or drove in from different places and joined us in different spots to thank for that. Dog Days grew from a 10-year-old’s memory of guys like Seaver and Palmer, so I have them to thank too.

Friends who go deep-sea fishing today as men, most of them go because their dad’s or grandad’s took them long ago. No matter who’s in the boat today, that’s really who they’re still fishing with.

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