Memory & Desire on the Diamond #2

A bar in Burlington, Vermont, an October afternoon—a beery atmosphere, a slight cigarette smoke haze to the proceedings. There’s a television to the left of the bar affixed to wall, tuned in—as is the case whenever possible—to sports, in this case, a one-game playoff between the New York Yankees & the Boston Red Sox to determine which team will win the American League Eastern Division for the 1978 season.

The crowd in the bar is divided in its loyalties—this is western Vermont, a no-man’s land in the long-standing northeastern feud between the two teams; local cable TV broadcasts both a station that carries Yankees games & one that broadcasts the Sox (as well as Canadian Broadcasting, which airs a mix of Montreal Expos & Toronto Blue Jays—in those days before the proliferation of available games on cable & satellite, this was a true bonanza.) I don’t recall which station was on that day, but I was in that bar with three friends: two Yankees fans & one Red Sox fan; & my loyalty ran very much toward Boston.

Last week when I wrote about memory & desire in baseball, I focused on the romanticism of finding the artistry of past players reincarnated in present players—an aesthetic appreciation, a positive articulation of memory. But baseball contains so much other memory—it’s a game that’s fraught with failure & disappointment. The old adage points out that the best hitters will fail to get a base hit about 70% of the time, & while some of the outs recorded in that 70% will actually produce positive results, even if one counts all the positives, the greatest hitters fail well over half the time. While the percentage of failures are lower for pitchers, all of them have bad games at least occasionally. 

& baseball is uniquely a game of individual failure (or success.) The batter is a solitary figure at the plate, the pitcher a solitary figure on the mound.  We focus on them. The experienced fan, if he/she is at the park, may also watch the movements of the fielders or any base runners, but by & large the focus is on this one-on-one confrontation—certainly that’s how the TV cameras are directed.

The Red Sox lead 3-0 in the top of the 7th inning—but the Yankees have two base runners on with 2 outs. The batter is the Yankees’ 9th place hitter, Bucky Dent, a light-hitting shortstop who’s hitting .243 for the year with only 4 home runs; in fact, Dent has been in a slump, hitting a mere .190 over the past 20 games. The Red Sox starting pitcher, Mike Torrez is on the mound. He has the second most wins on the team, 16 behind Dennis Eckersley’s 20-win campaign. On the other hand, he’s given up more hits than the number of innings he’s pitched, & he’s walked almost 100 batters. But on the plus side, he’s given up the fewest home runs of any Red Sox starting pitcher—just 19, despite playing in a park that’s notorious for yielding home runs.

Of course, that shouldn’t be a consideration in this case. Dent is not a home run threat, & he also fouls Torrez’ second pitch off his foot, causing an injury delay while he walks off the pain. Apparently during this time, the on deck hitter, Mickey Rivers, noticed that Dent’s bat was cracked, & so loaned Dent his bat. Dent returned to the batter’s box & promptly served Torrez’ next pitch into the netting atop the left field wall for a 3-run home run. The Yankees took a 3-2 lead & held on to win the game 5-4, with their fearsome reliever Goose Gossage inducing Red Sox Hall-of_fame left fielder Carl Yastrzemski to hit a pop fly out to third with 2 on base & 2 out in the bottom of the 9th inning.

The fact that in most major league ballparks, which have much less cozy left field dimensions than Boston’s Fenway Park, Dent’s ball would likely have been caught for the third out only rubs salt into the wound—the Red Sox lived by the “Green Monster,” as it yielded home runs & doubles for their team—& in this case, died by it.

Over the course of many years of watching baseball, I’ve experienced other disappointments as a fan as keen as I experienced that afternoon; & now I don’t recall if the beer made the disappointment more sour or not—I expect it probably did. There was the evening in 1986 in a rental house in Albemarle County, Virginia when I witnessed Bob Stanley & Bill Buckner’s 10th inning meltdown for the Red Sox costing them what would have been the deciding game of the World Series against the Mets; there was the evening in an Idaho farmhouse, October 2002, when I saw Giants manager Dusty Baker pull starting pitcher Russ Ortiz after 6-1/3 innings in another game 6, Giants leading 5-0 with a lead of 3 games to 2 in the best of seven series, only to see the Anahiem Angels erupt for 6 runs in the next two innings against a Giants relief pitching staff that had been masterful all year. 

 
Those are the most egregious examples, but on any given day, the fan experiences disappointments & chagrin as the vicissitudes of the game alternate between success & failure. Of course, in my own small way, I found this to be true when playing the game as well—the difficulty to remain confident & unjangled following a bad play in the field or a bad at bat. This is something I was never good at in the least, & I believe it encapsulates why I played better in the pick-up games where much less was “on the line” (at least in my imagination) than when my friends & I fielded the Mission team in the Roberto Clemente league.

Because, after all, these vicissitudes of success & failure are imaginary as the game is itself—an imaginary game with a hardball & spikes & hardwood bats & leather gloves; an imaginary game in which it’s impossible—on one side of the ball—to succeed even half the time, & on the other side of the ball to have your failures magnified by the cost to your team.

The moral of the story: the “point” towards which this ambling, digressive post has tended—is that as a fan experiencing baseball, the possibility of experiencing memories of failure—not just failures in past games, but failures in life far removed from the imaginary narrative of a sport—is pungent; the game can truly take you to a Wasteland of the spirit; you become the Sybil of Cumae telling the boys “I want to die.” There is talk of curses, a sense that the universe has some stake in your failure & that of your beloved team. This is a dark side of the memory & desire quotient, & a side that makes the desire all the more desperate: that the team will win against all the odds of failure, & you as fan will somehow—again imaginatively—be justified in that winning. 


 
Since 2002, I’ve found myself as a fan becoming more dispassionate, more of an observer. I can’t say this is altogether a positive turn of events, but perhaps it’s a necessary one. In my late middle age, I no longer gravitate toward the strong passions of my youth. But I was elated when the Red Sox improbably finally won their first World Series in 2004 & again in 2010 when an underdog San Francisco Giants team took its first Series since 1954.

But I’m happy—I believe—to say that I was not justified; I didn't feel any personal curses lifted. Because I’ve always questioned the “truth” of Eliot's final lines of “The Wasteland.”

All pix link to their source

top pic: The epigraph to "The Wasteland"

pic 2: Dent's Home run swing

pic 3: the "Green Monster"

pic 4: Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner boots Mookie Wilson's grounder in Game 6, 1986 Wold Series, allowing the winning run to score for the Mets

pic 5: Meeting on the mound for the Giants as Dusty Baker relieves Russ Ortiz in Game 6 of the '02 Series

pic 6: the Bambino-Babe Ruth-as a Red Sox pitcher. The sale of Ruth by Red Sox owner Harry Frazee in 1920 to the Yankees-as a way of raising money to finance his production of "No, No Nanette"-was he source of the so-called "Curse of the Bambino" that supposedly kept the Red Sox from winning a World Series from 1918-2003.
Pic 7: Red Sox relief pitcher Keith Foulke & first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz engage in levitation & jubilation following the final out of Boston's decisive win in the 2004 World Series

Memory & Desire on the Diamond #1

 Of course we all know Eliot’s lines about April & memory & desire—& if I twist them to make a point about baseball, then we can also agree perhaps that I’m doing nothing more egregious than has been done in countless undergraduate English papers over the last 50 or 60 years.

But I said in the initial post that baseball is all about memory, & a good friend said she’d like to hear more about that. This friend is a brilliant poet, & I believe she holds Eliot in high regard, so the connection was clear to me: baseball season beginning (traditionally at least) in April, & that season indeed “mixing memory & desire” as we consider past seasons & look forward to the successes & failures & the narratives surrounding them all in the season ahead.

& of course these narratives are perennial: we expect certain patterns of disappointment & success based on both the overall lore of the game—the patterns of surprise & regularity in terms of performance that have been repeated season in & season out for nearly 150 years. In a country as young as the United States, baseball is primordial, springing up in a form more or less recognizable as the game we know today during the Civil War era—another even more profound primeval event—& in fact spawning the first professional team in 1869, just a few years after the end of the fighting in that war, & still very much in the midst of the decades of turmoil the war would precipitate.

Thus, an 1876 box score is recognizable to us; in fact, while there would be many unfamiliar aspects to the games, we would recognize a pennant race from the earliest leagues in the 1870s—the long season (tho it wasn’t until the 1880s that the season extended to 100 games, & not until 1890 that it expanded to 150; the current 162 game season started in the early 60s); the changing vicissitudes of the teams; the players who remained consistent & the players who played well “in streaks’; the players who exceeded expectations, & those who failed to live up to advance billing.

In that sense, the system is a liturgical event—a year in which we know all the festivals & all the hierarchies of saints & angels (not to mention the infernal characters from the hated rival teams); a medieval mystery play cycle that doesn’t take place simply during the few days of the Corpus Christi festival, but extends from spring thru fall—& a cycle in which we always recognize Noah’s shrewish wife or the clownish Nativity shepherds or boastful Herod, even if the names of the actors change.

When a right fielder throws a “bullet” to third base to cut down an advancing runner, we return to memory—depending on our age & frame of reference, we not only see that fielder, but we may also see the great Roberto Clemente performing the same feat; if the batter strides into his swing with a big leg kick, we may think of the Mets Darryl Strawberry, of prodigious power & troubled fortunes; if a pitcher turns his back to home plate during his wind-up, how can those of us who followed baseball in the 60s & 70s not think of Luis Tiant?

But this is just the surface—in watching baseball or listening to it on the radio, there’s always a well of memory that comes accessible to me. Why is this? Because it’s been a constant thru the better part of my 55 years; because in the emotions of spectating (or even when I used to play in my own small way), I had access to related emotions that resonated with those the game evoked—for better or worse.

You see the impossibility of dealing with this in a single blog post! Hence the #1 in the title. See you next time.

Pics from top (all link to their source): The 1875 Hartford Dark Blues, charter members of the National League

Opening lines of "The Wasteland" (you knew that)

The great El Tiante, I believe during his days pitching for the Cleveland Indians

Beer League Box Score

Standing in left field at the Portrero Rec baseball field—a weekend afternoon, under a clear San Francisco afternoon sky; there was a mild breeze blowing toward right field. I can picture this moment so clearly in my mind’s eye, tho it happened about 15 or 16 years ago.

& of course, it was a moment when “nothing” happened—there was no crack of the bat, no race to field a ball, not even a pitch being thrown; all of those things happened at some point before & after this moment, but I don't recall the specifics. It must have been between batters—I don’t even remember the context, other than it was one of the many pick-up baseball games I played between 1994 & 1997—& many of those were at the same ballfield atop Portrero Hill.

I should hasten to add that I was never a skilled baseball player—this blog is certainly not the memoirs of an aging jock—by no means!  I had my moments: a hit I recall here & there, a decent catch or play in the field, but by & large these were the exception. I had a “slow bat,” & when I did hit it tended to be to right field—the so-called “opposite field” for a righthanded hitter—not by design or strategy, but simply because I couldn’t get around on a decent fastball. In the field in pick-up games I may have worked my way to marginally passable as a defender, but that’s about it. I did have a pretty ok arm.

The pick-up games were the highwater mark of my baseball experience, & that experience reaches back into the 1960s. My sister, who was a much better athlete than me, was MVP of her high school fast pitch softball team as a pitcher, & she idolized Sandy Koufax. Of course, given the divergent paths she & I have traveled, it would make sense that she loved a Dodger—I’ve found myself rooting for the Giants since the late 1980s! But my first baseball glove was a Sandy Koufax autograph model, & was a gift from her, probably from the sporting goods store & soda fountain across the river in North Walpole, New Hampshire. I can still remember long ago Sunday evenings leaving that store—the name of which now escapes me—with ice cream cone in hand & my dad driving the family VW bus back across the Arch Bridge to Bellows Falls, Vermont. But I digress.

But after all, baseball is so much about digression. We anticipate a thread of dialogue, but as one of the most multi-layered sports, there are so many threads of dialogue happening at any one time, we can be constantly surprised by the next one that surfaces. Baseball is also a game about memory, perhaps more than any other.

So: “another poet/musician’s baseball blog”: yes, that’s what I am, a poet & musician on the threshold of my “golden years,” who decided one rainy spring afternoon that he wanted to do something he’d always wanted to do: write about baseball. What will I write?

Memory—thoughts about what baseball “means”—curiosities of the game—the stars & notable players I remember from my youth & those I remember from later years—the times I strayed from baseball, & why—pick-up games, & playing in a “beer league”—because, yes, eventually the pick-up games led a number of us to do that—box scores & statistics & damned statistics & liars, because memory is a great source of lies, whether intentional or not.

& why a relatively non-athletic poet/musician would fall in love with the game in the first place. If you love the game too, take a seat, & let’s talk some baseball.

Pic shows a box score from 1876; from Wiki Commons—links to its source. Image is in the public domain.
 

The pic in the banner shows the Winter 1994-1995 Mission Team from the Roberto Clemente League in San Francisco. Yours truly is at the far right of the second row—the bearded guy.