Welcome to this thing, yet another old thing reconfigured as a new thing. It’ll be mostly about baseball, but I have a wandering mind, so it’ll likely occasionally stray pretty far afield –at some point, I suppose, I’ll feel compelled to talk about other random nonsense as well. Sometimes the random nonsense and the baseball will intersect in strange ways. I might, for instance, tell you about the time I saw Boxcar Willie throw out the first pitch in a Southern League game.
Willie was wearing overalls, of course, and uncorked a wild pitch to the screen. I could then seque into the story about being present on another occasion when Boxcar Willie had a street named after him in Branson, Missouri (he was wearing overalls). Every time I see a celebrity of even the most forgotten, nearly-dead sort at a baseball game I’m for damn sure going to tell you about it. Like this: I once saw Don Knotts and Norman Fell at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City on the night Paul Molitor got his 3000th hit.
I might ask you to tell me the strangest person you’ve ever seen throw out the first pitch or sing the National Anthem at a baseball game. What the hell, as long as I’ve already mentioned it we may as well get that out of the way right now.
Mostly, though, as I said, I’ll write about baseball, because baseball is one of the few things I’m passionate about in a world where the things I’m passionate about are diminishing by the day.
I say this even though baseball has nearly destroyed my life, and may yet manage to finish me off. I think it was F. Scott Fitzgerald, talking about Ring Lardner, who once observed that baseball had ruined more good writers than alcohol. I’m not going to pretend to be a good writer, but I can tell you that I’ve done more than a little dabbling –dabbling is almost certainly not the right word– in both baseball and alcohol, and I’m pretty sure baseball has taken more years off my life.
Perhaps not all truly obsessive baseball fans are stunted oafs, but a great number of them are, and I don’t suppose I’m any exception.
I once ran away from home to work at a spring training ballpark (sure, I was 25 years old, but like I said, I was a stunted oaf). I’ve been to more baseball games than I could count, although I’ve scored every one of them, and the scorebooks are heaped in my basement along with several thousand baseball books, a couple hundred mitts, and scads of other baseball-related nonsense.
I’ve tried to wean myself over the years, but to no avail. The overpaid, cheat-at-any-cost bastards and their cretinous overlords have got their hooks in me for good. If I were to wake up one morning in April and read in the newspaper that Derek Jeter had been arrested for having a freezer full of human body parts, dead cats, and growth hormones in his basement I’d immediately skip happily along to the boxscores and by six-thirty I’d be in my seat at the Metrodome with a scorebook in my lap.
I have nothing whatsoever against complete monsters as long as they can swing the bat and make the necessary plays in the field. As soon as their production starts to slip, you’re welcome to lock them up for the rest of their lives as far as I’m concerned.
I could tell you about all the reasons why I love baseball despite its many serious flaws and blemishes (unsightly steroid rash, most prominently, and Bud Selig), but people do that all that time, and you’ll surely have noticed by now that they’re always essentially the same reasons: the perfect accounting of the game, the absence of a clock, the rich history and repository of statistics, the easy and expert comparisons those statistics make possible for even the most casual fan, the lulls that allow time for plenty of idle conversation, the quirks and characters and long season.
That’s all absolutely true, but Roger Angell and George Will and a host of others have been going on about that sort of thing forever, and sometimes it can almost make me resent the sheer perfection of the game. If it were a little less tidy and entrenched maybe most of the highbrows would go back to their chess boards and fat volumes of political philosophy and Civil War history.
Mostly, I have to admit, I love baseball because it takes up so much time that would otherwise have to be taken up with something else, and I don’t have much in the way of something elses in my life. Spring training, 162 games, the postseason –that’s essentially eight months steeped in obsession, and over a lifetime that adds up to an awful lot of the most basic sort of prison subtraction.
I like the way we’ve all come to take for granted the ridiculous uniforms of the sport. I love the fact that there are no cheerleaders. I love the suicide squeeze (and despise the sacrifice bunt) and the grand slam –or, as my wife calls it, the four-run thing. I love the various plot lines and dramas large and small that play out over the course of a season, the countless opportunities for pure joy and abject misery.
I’m not sure baseball builds character, but I do know that it creates characters, and I adore characters. The game also doesn’t necessarily reward devotion, but it does reward attention, and for the attention deficient it’s like a daily Ritalin injection directly into the heart of the cerebrum. I can’t think of any other thing that can make me sit still for four hours at a time.
And after four months of bouncing off the walls I can’t tell you how good it’s going to feel to be able to sit still again, even if I once more end up with my heart yanked out of my chest and kicked into the gutter with the last leaves of autumn.
This, though, will be about those months when my heart will still be beating, hopefully like a man’s with a gun in his mouth. Seriously, that would be a good thing. That would be a seriously good thing.
I’ll be here –and elsewhere– all year. Feel free to drop me a line any time. I’d be happy to hear from you.
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