Day 8

When I was a kid, I loved baseball. I started playing on an organized team in the first grade, and this wasn't t-ball or machine pitch or coach pitch, but real 9-player baseball. I played little league from the time I was 7 until I was 15, and played on the Junior High and High School teams as well. Two different years, I played on little league teams that went to the National Tournement. The first year we took fourth; the last we took second. It was kind of like the movie Hoosiers in the sense that in a small rural town there was nothing to do except play baseball.


Even when we weren't playing organized ball, we were constantly riding our bikes to someone's house to play with plastic balls and bats wrapped in black electrical tape. Each yard had different ground rules: over the hedge at Billy Gulledge's house was a homer; my house was open and included the neighbor's yard in the field of play. You could catch flies off of trees, powerlines, houses, or anything else as long as it was between the foul lines, which were marked by any number of landmarks like bare spots in the grass or the concrete of the back porch.


And then when I wasn't playing ball, I was thinking about it. I took a subscription to the Sporting News when I was probably 9 or 10 and memorized team stats. I'd record myself on a tape player announcing 9 innings of an imagined baseball game. I'd read old tattered novels from our school library with titles like 'Gutter Team', which essentially had the same plot as the movie 'Major League'. I had the fortune being ten years old when the movie 'The Natural' was released. I still get chills when Redford's character knocks the cover off the ball or busts the clock or shatters the lights in the fantastic firework ending. It's complete fantasy, and yet that's how you feel playing baseball.


But as I got older, I stopped following the game as closely, mainly because of time constraints. When I was a kid, I could take three hours out of my day and watch an entire baseball game, start to finish. If I have three hours free now, I'm not going to watch tv. I was able to hang on to the game a little longer with my first job out of grad school--a university press that ran a baseball writing series. We even published a later novel of Eliot Asinof, author of 'Eight Men Out'. Basically, all of the books were written by men who'd gone on to live their lives and yet still carried that boyish belief in the legend and mythology of baseball. Men like me.


Last month, I took my sons to see the Eugene Emeralds, our local San Diego Padres affiliate, and it seems to me that minor league baseball is where that legend is alive and well. It's hard to be sympathetic watching the pros. That isn't about baseball; it's about advertisement and marketing. Even the achievments of the last 15 years--like the homerun race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 98 was more about selling baseball to a new generation of ticket buyers than it was about greatness. It's the reason both of those guys were juiced during those years: because there was something at stake other than a game.


I think of Dizzy and Daffy Dean, famed brothers of the St. Louis Cardinals Gashouse Gang, and the fact that during the offseason, they would often get a factory job to pay the bills in order to play ball again come spring. I think of Cool Papa Bell, legend of the Negro Leagues, who was said to have been so fast he had to jump his own hit up the middle while going to second. I think of Phil Niekro, old man knuckleballer of the 70's who lacked the least shred of glamor, and yet still won ballgames. Would anyone of these make it in the majors today? Maybe, if they had the right agent.


But in the minors, that magic is there, because it's about the hope of something more. There's something at stake. It's not about whether you get another million tacked onto your contract, not yet anyway; it's about whether you get to spend one more day playing ball. For me it was about getting to sit in the stands and keep score on the scorecard and explain to my boys about why you don't swing on a 3-0 count or why it's a good thing to fly out on a sacrifice or why you learn to switch hit. For me too, it was about having another good day at the ballpark, surrounded by other people who loved the game, not because it was in a newly built facility or that it cost as much as a stay in a four star hotel.


I always felt a tinge of guilt on my turning away from baseball. Most people in the place I'm from remain passionate about sports into their dying days. My mother-in-law, who is not athletic at all, follows sports--baseball, football, basketball, tennis, swimming--religiously, with a clear understanding of the finer aspects of each. My grandpa Roy was a staunch University of Kentucky basketball fan, ignoring the scores on the 10 oclock news so he could watch the tape- delayed games afterward with suspense. My grandpa Gill, who was blind, listened to St. Louis baseball on the radio, with Mike Shannon and Jack Buck announcing, and to this day I think there's no better way to experience baseball other than being at the game. But for some reason, I wasn't able to keep up my commitment. Maybe there's a connection with this and my ability to keep my religious faith as well.


I think F. Scott Fizgerald articulated this in his essay "Ring", a send-off after Ring Lardner's death. Lardner was a literary figure who started in sports writing, and he was a close friend to both Scott and Zelda. Fitzgerald said, "It was never that he was completely sold on athletic virtuosity as the be-all and end-all of problems; the trouble was that he could find nothing finer. Imagine life conceived as a business of beautiful muscular organization--an arising, an effort, a good break, a sweat, a bath, a meal, a love, a sleep--imagine it achieved; then imagine trying to apply that standard to the horribly complicated mess of living, where nothing, even the greatest conceptions and workings and achievments, is else but messy, spotty, tortuous--and then one can imagine the confusion that Ring faced on coming out of the ball park." I understand that same confusion.


For me, when I watch sports now, that complicated mess of living is all too apparent. Steroids. Money. Media. Racism. Arrogance. Shallowness. That's what I see. So I go to Civic Stadium and pay six dollars to watch young guys in their early twenties play ball in the minors for the same money that I make at my job, watch them make great plays and bonehead errors in the same inning, all with a hope that somehow by buckling down and playing the game right, something better will come from it. That's the stuff that made baseball legendary. That's what made baseball life.