Something different than the high-stakes times we are living in.
Last night was Game One of the World Series. As a kid and for all my mates, this was important viewing.
This year? Los Angeles vs. Yankees. I have already written about my feelings regarding LA and the Yankees are well, New York; normally I would wish a pox on the both of them. Unfortunately this year there doesn’t seem to be any proper villains on either team, they all seem likable guys. Darn.
However I will confess that my two best World Series memories both involve the Yankees. The first was when the D-backs beat them in 2001 on a miracle Luis Gonzalez walk-off hit in Game 7. I call it a miracle because if you know anything about Arizona sports, you had the sense at the time that we were destined to blow the game and the series after taking a 3-1 lead.
The other memory? I happened to be in New York in 1996 when the Yanks beat the Braves to win their first World Series in 18 years. The sheer joy of the city coming alive after the win was mesmerizing. My friend said, half-jokingly I assume, that now he knew what Paris was like on the day it was liberated from the Germans.
Of course these days, football is America’s game. However, does it matter? First, the best baseball over the past 20 years was not played in MLB but rather in the World Baseball Classic. The atmosphere during last year’s WBC was like nothing I had ever seen since the great Canada Cup series of the 1980s. It was a reminder that America’s game has gone forth into the world and returned home to its origins in the form of the great baseball nations of Asia and Latin America, America’s cultural influence at its finest. The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Japan…
My other baseball memories are tied to the more mundane. A lot of ink has been spilled by George Will and others about the “spirituality of baseball.” I don’t know about that and I stopped reading Will and his ilk years ago. However, baseball does seem to be the sport best aligned to the seasons; it starts slowly with spring training, which seems more of a national celebration of the end of winter, plays its 162-game season primarily during the long and lazy summer days, and then builds to a crescendo with the onset of autumn.
Of course living in Arizona means the spring training experience. I once had an office around the corner from the Angels’ spring training facility and I would go out to the various practice fields. Sometimes I would recognize a coach from his days as a player and I would try my networking skills to start up a conversation, getting his take on a past play or their recollection of a past teammate or manager. Like spring training itself, low-stakes stuff and I think they enjoyed the conversation as much as I did.
My kids caught the baseball bug. Starting when they were three and six, we would take them to D-back games on Sunday afternoons, sit in the cheap seats so that they had room to get the wiggles out, and bless their hearts they always made it to the end of the game. To them, and for us, the game was about family and memories.
Baseball is a game made for radio. The sport itself is played to a rhythm that lends itself to stories, each with their distinctive arc: the batter facing the pitcher, ending in the climax of either an out or reaching base; a ball hit to the field brings the possibility of adventure. Unlike TV, with radio you are forced to interact with the game solely through the announcers and your imagination. Given that games are played nearly every night, the radio announcers became your nightly story-tellers. A friend of mine told me, “Football is an event, baseball is just part of the everyday.”
To this day whenever we are in the car during an afternoon or evening, no matter what part of the country, we will try and find a game and for a few innings we are transported into a different world, a different story-line. Better than any audiobook.
George Will with all his ink never put it as perfectly as A. Bartlett Giamatti in his opening to “The Green Fields of the Mind.”
“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”
I used to feel that way about baseball, but I can’t summon the emotion anymore. The game changed, the announcers changed, the players changed. I changed. All the care just drained out of me. And sometimes I miss it. I wish I got excited when someone mentioned that pitchers and catchers were reporting soon. I wish the interstitial moments of life were filled with baseball instead of the internet or my phone. I still check in on BaseballReference.com to see if anyone has died or to look at a glorious career, like Henry Aaron, or try to find the high points in a short career, like Steve Jeltz’ two-homer game where the Phillies came back from 10-0 after the first.
It seems like my appreciation is all nostalgia now. I watch Cubs games from ’84 on YouTube, because that’s the year my family got cable and the Cubs were terrific that year (until Kurt Freakin’ Bevacqua). I watch old NBC Games of the Week to hear Vin Scully’s voice again and say God Bless America that a man could make a living watching baseball games all his life.
I don’t know what could happen to make me interested again in games where I don’t already know the outcome. Maybe a return to contact baseball, base-stealing, hit and runs, and the suicide squeeze? Maybe if innocence could actually make a comeback, having departed so long ago?
Finally, agree completely about radio. The game can be a soundtrack to a summer day. You barely hear it as you work, crowd noise, announcers’ patter. But then that crack, and “There’s a long drive!” Whatever you’re doing is secondary and you focus on the vision of what’s happening so far away. That moment of attention shifting is what makes baseball live.
My only, in person, ML game was a home Rangers game last summer with a group outing. It was not a good game for the Rangers. It’s lucky for me that no one offered a substantial bet that the Rangers would win the World Series, I would have taken a high school JV team over them.
My other memory is a long summer more than thirty years ago when I was visiting my father, in first, the VA and then rehab sixty miles away every night after work. The only tolerable thing on the radio late was the Ranger games. I still remember a night Nolan Ryan looked like he might throw another no hitter.
The Baseball bug never bit me and my mild pursuit of the NFL ended when it became a political statement that I didn’t agree with.
I will always root for Mookie Betts
Baseball lost me with the gimmicky rule changes. Pitching clock? Enlarged bases? Not the same game.
I played baseball every day during the season in 7th and 8th grades. (No, I didn’t play right field…) when the season changed, we changed sports. After 8th grade, played baseball or softball very little. I concluded that I didn’t have the eye-hand coordination to do well in the sport, so I dropped it. In addition, high school provided different activities.
As a child, I went to some games at Fenway Park. I had a student teacher for my high school gym class who had pitched for the Red Sox. The 2004 season, culminating in the first Sox World Series crown in 86 years, was immortalized in my brother’s Xmas card– which my niece drew. Great card, great season. But 2 decades later, I am indifferent to the success or non-success of the Sox.
(I have read several biographies of Ted Williams. Announcer Kurt Gowdy said that Ted was the brightest person he had ever met. He wasn’t the world’s greatest husband or father- nor did he have the best of family environments growing up. But that dysfunctional childhood may have spurred him on to his accomplishments in baseball, fly fishing, pilot, etc. Say what you will, Teddy Ballgame wasn’t boring. And his record of consecutive games on base of 84 games will never be matched. )
One thing I didn’t know about Ted Williams until much later was his service in the WW II and Korea as a Marine aviator; he flew more than 30 combat missions in Korea and was John Glenn’s wingman
Williams said once that his three favorite songs were “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “The Marine Corps Hymn,” and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”
So accordingly I will grant him the same status of Luis Tiant (loved his windup) as the only Red Sox I had any warm feelings about. Well okay Carlton Fisk as well