I’ve agreed to this nonsense with the utmost reluctance, and if you studied the conditions of our arrangement that Zellar outlined below I think you’ll agree that I drive a hard bargain. Even so, I can’t pronounce myself satisfied. If I live to be fifty it’s not likely you’ll hear me pronounce myself satisfied.
There are some things I should get off my chest right off the bat. First of all, I don’t love baseball. I tolerate it and I couldn’t live without it, but it’s been an abusive, dysfunctional relationship right from the start. It’s an impossible game that’ll break your mind and crush your spirit, and it will pick you up only to knock you back down on your ass.
I also don’t buy into a single scrap of the nonsense that fools get paid to spout about the sport. There are no aesthetics to the game, and the only reason I’m familiar with that word in the first place is because for years I’ve had it shoved down my throat in connection with baseball by scrawny little blowhards like George Will and Bob Costas.
I don’t have anything at all against the Metrodome –well, other than that it occasionally fills up with people whose company I find more than unpleasant, and I suppose also the fact that a couple years ago some overzealous security geezer confiscated a can of Vienna sausages from me on opening day. But whatever it is that people call atmosphere or amenities mean less than nothing to me. You can go right ahead and take the wrecking ball to Fenway Park and Wrigley Field for all I care. Every kid who ever played baseball should understand that it makes absolutely no difference where you play the game –you can play it in a dirt lot or a parking lot or a gymnasium. The challenges and frustrations are essentially the same.
I’ll tell you what baseball really is. It’s not, as Zellar alleged below, play, and it’s not work. It’s not even properly a game, although I’ll use that word for lack of a better one, and because in the darker psychological sense of “playing games” or “mind games” it makes a certain sense.
What baseball is, though, is nothing but concentration, a series of moments of intense concentration –concentration frustrated and concentration rewarded, in a ratio that is cruelly one-sided. That’s as true for the people who merely appreciate the game as it is for those who play it. Every single thing that happens on a baseball field is an incident of extreme concentration or a lapse thereof. That’s all baseball is, and anyone who says otherwise is a pie-in-the-sky idiot.
I also have almost no interest in statistics. Anyone who cares enough about baseball to be interested in statistics should be plenty qualified to judge the merits of a ballplayer, and to distinguish between the horseshit, the mediocre, the merely good, and the truly great. I don’t need some pencil-necked, number-crunching geek to tell me that Johan Santana is a better pitcher than Mike Morgan, or Mike Mussina for that matter.
The other clear problem with stats is that they don’t deal with the harsh realities of the game, and consequently with its terrible beauty. Baseball is a day-by-day, at-bat-by-at-bat game, and on any given one of those 162 days, and in any one of those at-bats, Nick Fucking Punto can be a better player than Joe Mauer, and Terry Mulholland can be a more valuable pitcher than Santana. If I pay my hard-earned money to see Albert Pujols play and he goes 0-5 and strands six runners and the Cardinals lose 7-2, well, sorry, but that day Pujols is a horseshit player. Projections and suppositions and probability mean less than nothing within the context of a single game. I’ve been kicked in the nuts by so-called superstars too many times and had too many miserable days salvaged by footnotes to doubt the sound logic of this assertion.
Baseball is all about ‘what have you done for me lately?’ And, actually, not just lately, but today. I don’t care who you are or what your numbers look like, if you can’t get the runner in from third with less than two outs you can kiss my fat ass.
Just in case I’m alarming you, or somehow giving the wrong impression, I should make it clear that for all the misery it’s caused me and will continue to cause me, baseball is still the only so-called sport that’s worth a dick or a dime. Virtually every other major sport –football, basketball, hockey, soccer, and tennis– is essentially a version of ping pong or foosball played by people in ridiculous outfits. Tennis may be the only sport where the female combatants look more physically imposing and menacing than the men.
And the only thing I despise more than golf or automobile racing is the Olympics. They did, as I have often pointed out, once serve at least some purpose, back in the days when McDonald’s would give you a Big Mac if, say, some anonymous jackass won a gold medal in the high hurdles. But as I’ve also frequently said, if I had to go to bed every night dreaming of a gold medal in the triple jump I’d put my head in the oven faster than you can say Nestor Chylak.
I also take exception to the notion that baseball is some kind of rite of generations, all that horseshit about fathers playing catch with sons, blah blah blah. My old man was a saint who busted his nuts his entire life, but he once famously told me he’d rather have Liberace’s name tattooed on his ass than sit through a game of baseball. I didn’t blame him, and I also never held it against him that he never saw me play ball. I’m not even sure the guy ever had a baseball mitt on his hand.
So, look, we have all this straight, right? I hate the game, but it’s seriously the only anchor I have, and it’s too late to climb off the black bus now. I’ll be there tonight in my usual seat in left field, hunched over my scorecard and, barring security interference, munching on my customary bag of peanuts and tin of Vienna sausages. I’ll be the big guy in the top row wearing an old Mike Cubbage jersey.
Leave me the hell alone.
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