"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart."
I am taking a break from baseball and baseball writing.
See you in the spring!
"I was counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight."
- A. B. Giamatti, "The Green Fields of the Mind"
"I think about baseball
virtually every waking hour of my life."
- Bill James
Good face. Good jaw.
Five tools. Clean stroke. He’s cheap. Buy wins. Buy runs. The what? Rich teams. Poor teams. Who’s that? That’s Pete. So what?
Yes. Please.
Shake things up. Who are you? Yes, he does. You do not. Pile of crap. Who’s that kid? Friend of mine. He can’t throw. He just did. You do not. Teach? Which one? So? So what? You got kids? I’ll tell him. What’s the point? What was it? What was it? Is that it?
You did good.
Pops off the bat. He gets on base. What do you do? I went to Yale.
I asked you to do three. Text me the play by play. I don't watch the games. Well, hey, good luck with that.
What a dump.
It’s hard to see, but it’s there.
We will have changed the game.
________________
“Moneyball” is a film full of men speaking largely in monosyllables. This could mean that its screenwriters possess a vocabulary roughly equivalent to that of a five-year-old, which is clearly not the case, or it may suggest that the world of baseball is full of Neanderthals who grunt for a living, which on some level might be true. But I think there’s more going on here.
The complexity of baseball is belied by the apparent simplicity of its vocabulary and its basic numbers, such as 3, 9, 6-4-3, and 0.
Monosyllables function eloquently and purposefully in “Moneyball.” They are deceptively simple words that create important, urgent, and witty rhythms; they cut through nonsense in getting at the essence of baseball; they represent an earnest attempt to apprehend the truth of a game and its people, and perhaps an accompanying desire to manipulate these truths.
When voiced as a question – as, for example, when Billy Beane first encounters the bright young economist Peter Brand - monosyllables can establish a sense of impatience, urgency, and passion. They are especially effective when voiced by a competent actor: “Who are you? What do you do?” Repeating his simple question in a tone of eager curiosity and wonder rather than condescension or disdain – “Who are you?” - Brad Pitt emphasizes “are” instead of “who” or “you.” It’s an early sign that this film is seeking to venture into more serious ontological territory.
One of the most famous speeches in our language, after all, is a soliloquy that wrestles with the idea of being. The lines of that speech are memorable in large part because Shakespeare chose monosyllables for the soliloquy's first line in lieu of fancy King Jamesian language and arrogant political rhetoric. To be or not to be. Language doesn’t get much simpler than this.
Monosyllables effectively establish the rhythm of human conversation and convey personality as well as any costume, facial expression, or idiosyncratic gesture. “Yale. I went to Yale.” The monosyllables in “Moneyball” succinctly articulate theories to be argued or refuted: buy wins and buy runs, for example.
Monosyllables and awkward pauses are a very real part of ordinary discourse, and many of us speak best in silences: “All moved in?” “Yeah. Yeah.”
Suddenly, however, a polysyllabic word breaks the monotony of simple speech, and it makes all the difference in this film, both rhythmically and conceptually. “Economics. I studied Economics.” The audience takes heed. Billy is acutely interested. A friendship is beginning, an engaging character taking shape. Here in a cubicle in the middle of Cleveland is a bright young man who is clearly holding something back; he cannot wait to bust out with the excitement of what he knows about baseball.
Monosyllables are important in “Moneyball,” because it is against the backdrop of simple language and old ideas that bigger words and newer ways of thinking about the game begin to make sense and gather momentum: “We create him in the aggregate.”
“The what?”
The veteran scouts sitting around a conference table at this “dump” of a major league facility are real men playing themselves, speaking in monosyllables as they evaluate other human beings, and the screenplay is better for it, gruffly and endearingly so.
As numbers become higher and the formulae more challenging, the characters' syntax grows more complex, as do their relationships. In Bill James’s world, numbers are language. When Billy Beane challenges his new assistant, an easy numeral comically gives way to higher digits. At the same time, the film’s language moves from monosyllabic speech to phrases that are more sophisticated both syntactically and morally, and the new partnership subtly shifts to a higher intellectual and emotional level.
“I asked you to do three. How many did you do?”
“Forty-seven … actually, fifty-one, I don’t know why I lied just then.”
Brad Pitt spends a fair amount of screen time with bits of food as his prop. Seeds, coffee, popcorn, junk. “I’ll tell him,” he says, while stuffing an entire Twinkie in his mouth. “Well, hey, good luck with that,” David Justice says to Scott Hatteberg while munching on cereal in the clubhouse. Monosyllables are especially entertaining when voiced with food in the mouth.
Quick words create one engaging scene after another in a fast-paced script. The rhythm of “Moneyball” is one of drive and urgency. At various points along the way, fewer words allow for better facial expressions. It is during the silences of the film that we notice an economist moving his eyes, a mind at work, a coach who feels devalued.
Whether a scene is comical, or tense, or bittersweet in nature, monosyllables give the actor important opportunities for expression. When Carlos Pena learns that he has been released, his reaction - like that of the assistant general manager - is astonishingly simple:
“Is that it?”
“Yes.”
Whether or not this is an accurate transcript of what actually occurred between Pena and DePodesta, the scene works, because its compact, monosyllabic lines leave plenty of room for pain. Upon learning of the Giambi and Pena trades, Phillip Seymour Hoffman blinks twice while listening to Pitt; then he moves his eyes sideways, prior to raising a question that he actually voices as a fait accompli statement.
“You traded Pena.”
No hysteria, no screaming outburst, no exclamation points, no grandiloquent speech. It’s baseball talk – understated, full of tension and emotion.
The monosyllable often rescues Billy from sentimentality in the nick of time, just as he’s about to display a more tender, vulnerable, or noble emotion: “What a dump.” Beane’s parting words to Pete near the end of the film are all monosyllables. His is a simple, colloquial, yet heartfelt farewell.
Male voices dominate this film, but a female presence softens it. Curiously, though, it’s not a wife, girlfriend, or personal assistant who provides the love interest. The movie doesn’t really need a romantic subplot. There’s no Glenn Close gazing beatifically from the outfield toward home plate, no Annie Savoy reading Walt Whitman to a frisky player. In fact, as in Moneyball the book (which names only four women in its index – count them: four), the female characters in this film are fleeting presences. They brew coffee, issue bitchy remarks in the clubhouse (“Hey, get outta my shot!”), whisk a child away from a business meeting. Portrayed in less than a minute of screen time by the ever-lovely Robin Wright, Billy’s ex-wife receives him in her cosmetically perfect living room whose Zen décor seems to cry out, “I'm so glad I don't have to live that baseball life with you anymore,” though one might sense a hint of ambivalence and regret in her enigmatic expression.
Incidentally, Bill James’s wife Susan McCarthy makes an appearance in the footnotes of Moneyball: “Bill hid his interest in baseball when we first started dating. If I had known the extent of it, I’m not sure we’d have gotten very far.”
When Billy Beane returns to Oakland after his off-season meeting with John Henry in a dreary Fenway Park, it’s Peter Brand who assumes the place that a woman might normally occupy, upon welcoming the main character home. Their conversation reads like a script intended for a couple sitting at the kitchen table late at night and speaking intimately about their future, but in Billy’s world, the important moment of connection exists between men, and it takes place not at home but in the dim light of a clubhouse:
"What was it?" Pete wants to hear a dollar amount.
"Doesn't matter."
"What was it?"
"Does - n't mat - ter."
Billy’s daughter is his sweetest and simplest love interest; she is the antidote to the film’s harsher outbursts – the throwing of chairs across a room, the upturning of coolers in the clubhouse and shattering of glass, the lonely moments of cruising and reckless driving. Casey predictably follows these more violent scenes, and it’s her job to show that Billy is capable of sustaining a personal relationship outside the world of baseball. It is in his daughter that we see Billy’s capacity to love another human being.
Their interactions take place in a music store, an airport terminal, and in the kitchen where they eat ice cream together. She’s kept at a safe distance from the field, however, and beyond the confines of baseball, as if protected from the world of men, as if the film doesn’t know quite where to place her. She exists outside the main plot, and her influence is strongest when manifested as a sweet voice in Billy’s car when she’s not even physically present.
These interludes are endearing, but in my view, the parenting scenes seem to have been lifted from another film. They interrupt the honest momentum of the story, robbing it of other potentially dynamic and meaningful baseball moments. Maybe the audience welcomes the quiet relief of a domestic scene, but this is a story that can’t afford to slow down too much. And you can’t rush or force a relationship with a daughter.
Much as I yearn personally to see admirable women in baseball movies and solid father-daughter relationships, I’m not convinced that these components are essential to Moneyball’s success. The relationship between Billy and Casey is believable and sweet, but in terms of energy and chemistry, it doesn’t come close to matching the gruff tenderness we witness among men, or the surprising depth and curious intimacy that evolves so much more authentically and satisfyingly between Billy and Pete.
A child’s pure voice offsets the grittier world of baseball with lyricism and tenderness, but the lyrics of her theme song (aptly titled “The Show") seem made for a different kind of film. You may have heard the tune a few years ago, in fact, in an Old Navy commercial. Kerris Dorsey's rendition in "Moneyball" is undeniably lovely:
I'm just a little bit caught in the middle
Life is a maze and love is a riddle
I don't know where to go I can't do it alone I've tried
And I don't know why
Slow it down
Make it stop--
Or else my heart is going to pop.
Her solo brings tears to Pitt’s eyes, but the song’s “dum dee dum, duh-dum dee dum” refrain dumbs down the film intellectually if not emotionally and seems incongruous in a drama whose cerebral center is Bill James and the ideological shift toward sabermetrics.
Far more effective is a subtle yet powerful musical theme that plays quietly at key moments in “Moneyball” while the plot drives purposefully forward. The haunting leitmotif begins tentatively as five simple notes. It’s a warm, tender, benevolent music from elsewhere, hinting at possibility and shimmering with anticipation. The intervals are unusual – not your standard harmonic progression in predictable thirds or fifths, and it’s not easy to determine whether the key is minor or major: F# - F – C# rest. G# A#. (It took me a while to figure out this sequence while playing it on the piano after seeing the movie a second time. I was a little obsessed with the melody, in fact.)
You could say that this theme is the musical equivalent of monosyllables. It’s deceptively simple. Try playing it if you have a keyboard. Take time with each note, repeat the phrase, then waver slowly between G# and A#, and you will experience not just an important part of the “Moneyball” soundtrack but the soul of the film.
This music was borrowed from a curious source, a post-rock band that recorded “The Mighty Rio Grande” in 2007; it’s a brilliant choice for “Moneyball,” especially when intertwined with the soulful cello and warm ostinato of Mychael Danna's moving orchestral score.
The gentle tapping of a muffled drum joins this very basic angular melody in a primitive sound that resembles the beating of a human heart. One feels a growing sense of urgency and quickening in the film as an exciting mathematical idea begins to take shape. Music builds suspense unobtrusively and subliminally throughout “Moneyball,” advancing and enhancing much of the rough action with accompanying lyricism. The “Rio Grande” melody functions as the film’s dominant theme and serves as a musical metaphor for its central idea: “We will have changed the game.” Future perfect tense.
Near the end of the film, Brad Pitt voices a sentimental question: “How can you not be romantic about baseball?" The line is cloying, out of character, and entirely unnecessary, in my view, because the romance of the film comes across nonverbally in the game itself, in baseball’s imagery, in the expressions on Billy’s face, and Peter’s too, in the tension and affection among men, and so poignantly in the quiet richness of a musical score that builds toward the film’s stunning climax.
Baseball is not just a tactile and visual thing, nor is it a purely mathematical idea; the game is also auditory in nature. When one is watching a good baseball movie, it isn’t enough to hear the crack of the bat and the cheering of a crowd at its climax. Music and silence are essential in reaching the psyche and lifting the material to the level of art.
The intelligent thesis of Michael Lewis’s best-selling Moneyball (2003) is now old news, and Jamesian sabermetrics are no longer the exclusive intellectual property of Billy Beane, the Oakland A's, and other teams with inferior resources. Moneyball is not the silver bullet, after all, and there is no single magic formula. The intangibles still matter, and so does character. Just ask anyone in Boston.
"Moneyball" is not a documentary of one season, nor is it simply Hollywood’s version of a good book. Film is not real life. It’s not biography or ESPN. In two hours, a movie cannot begin to tell all the complex human stories that combine to form the truth of baseball in our time.
Film is art, and as such, it has to become a metaphor for baseball and the human condition, just as an amusing video clip enables Pete to teach Billy Beane a lesson about himself:
“It’s a metaphor.”
“Yeah, I know it’s a metaphor.”
We sit in the darkness of a theatre, hoping to experience something that resembles baseball. Good baseball movies like “Moneyball” have to feel like the best ballgames we've ever seen. They have to capture the tension and the joy.
“Moneyball” seeks to take us into a territory that ultimately transcends numbers and personalities and our best efforts to measure and control these things. Built upon monosyllables and amplified with a rich musical score, the film invites its audience to participate in the authentic excitement of a new idea, and then moves toward a higher plane of intangibles and into the realm of art, which in the end is what all good baseball becomes at its best. This is where “Moneyball” takes me, as Scott Hatteberg drives the ball out into a vast darkness.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.”
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
________
The Cape Cod Baseball League's 2011 season ended with the Harwich Mariners taking a three-game series from the Falmouth Commodores to win the championship. Players from the Chatham A’s had packed their bags and left town long before that final victory. Once the winningest team on the Cape, our hometown Anglers (formerly known as the Athletics until the MLB moved in and dictated change) didn’t even make the playoffs this year, and now they are gone.
The season is done. The stats are in the books. Field managers are already looking toward next summer’s rosters, considering elite pitchers and top prospects who might bring to the Cape their strong arms, big bats, and a winning season.
There’s still plenty of baseball to be played on other fields, in other small towns, and in big cities everywhere. All the college boys whose wood bat seasons just ended will soon take the first swings of fall ball. In many ways baseball never really ends; more and more it seems to me that this is true. But our town has undergone a sea-change. The field near my house doesn’t look the same. Main Street doesn’t feel the same. All our evenings play out so differently now, the rhythms of life substantially altered.
Perhaps the end of a baseball season - especially a premature ending such as this - prepares us for other endings and losses; there’s a sadness in it.
The refrain of a country song has been echoing lately on the radio inside my head. I don’t particularly like the song, but it keeps playing anyway, like a top-40 favorite on a local FM station: "Gone like a freight train, gone like yesterday . . . ."
You'll likely hear this song if you visit minor league ballparks and college stadiums. It's not an uncommon outburst after a home run ball travels over the wall. The Montgomery Gentry ditty is an odd choice, though, because the song's sentiment is wistful, melancholy, and full of regret - hardly celebratory in tone. The song isn't about a ball, of course; it's about a woman.
Gone like a '58 Cadillac . . . gone like all the good things that ain't ever coming back, she's gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.
There are no more kids at baseball camp every weekday morning, boys and girls in t-shirts truly believing they'll make it to the big leagues someday. No more college flags flying proudly in the gardens of families who opened their homes and refrigerators to young players, surrogate moms and dads who showed up faithfully at every single game. No more pickup trucks and cars with decals and license plates from far away: Baylor, NC State, Clemson, Tarheels, Gamecocks, Hogs, and the lone star of Texas in red, white, and blue. No more relievers sitting on the crooked bench they call a bullpen; no more uniforms of royal blue and white. They're gone.
In a few years, we’ll be watching television, my son and daughter and I, aunts and uncles and cousins, and we’ll see them again. And so will you. We’ll say we know them. Danny Espinosa at spring training. Evan Longoria at the All-Star game. Andrew Miller on NESN. Chris Getz playing second base, Matt LaPorta at first, David Huff in an Indians cap, taking a line drive in the face. “Hey, I know him!” At least we felt as if we knew him. He played ping-pong with my son the batboy, once upon a summer evening, inside the VFW hall out near the town dump.
"We saw him play . . . I watched that kid pitch . . . We remember that win . . . I was there . . . .” Almost every fan remembers baseball this way. The achievements of others lend dignity and meaning to our own anonymous lives. The human connection, however brief, resonates for years. Hey, we knew him.
They’re here; then suddenly come August, they’re gone. Gone like a freight train. Playoffs or no playoffs, the abrupt ending always startles us. It's enough to knock the wind out of you for a few seconds at unexpected and random moments. Gone like yesterday.
The country song is playing again, this time in counterpoint with a Neil Diamond elegy dating back to my high school years.
Jesus Christ, Fanny Brice, Wolfie Mozart and Humphrey Bogart and Genghis Khan and on to H. G. Wells. Ho Chi Minh, Gunga Din, Henry Luce and John Wilkes Booth, and Alexanders King and Graham Bell. Ramar Krishna, Mama Whistler, Patrice Lumumba and Russ Colombo, Karl and Chico Marx, Albert Camus. E. A. Poe, Henri Rousseau, Sholom Aleichem and Caryl Chessman, Alan Freed and Buster Keaton too.
And each one there has one thing shared: they have sweated beneath the same sun. Looked up in wonder at the same moon, and wept when it was all done. For bein’ done too soon. For bein’ done too soon. For bein’ done.”
Now obsolete, the Chatham A’s 2011 calendar is still visible in a sidebar on the team website. As my computer hums its dull sound, I’m looking at the early days of August, now gone, wondering at the ways in which we measure the passage of time. Wareham @ Chatham. Chatham @ Harwich. Orleans @ Chatham. Chatham @ Orleans. Followed by a bunch of empty days that say: Off. Off. Off. Off. Off.
Something tightens in my chest.
And then a few lines of poetry emerge from who knows where, bumping Neil Diamond out of the lineup: “What will we do? What will we ever do?”
"What shall I do now? What shall I do? / I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street / With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow? / What shall we ever do?"
The hot water at ten. / And if it rains, a closed car at four. / And we shall play a game of chess, / Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door." *
All the summer people still crowd our resort town with Land Rovers and Volvos and gleaming black Escalades with plates from New York and Maryland and Vermont, but the field is empty of fans. Ballplayers who were loaned to us have returned to their home fields, their lives at school and fall practices, their mothers’ kitchens, their apartments and girlfriends, homework and tailgate parties while we remain, trimming hedges, gathering bundles of clippings, sanding and painting the trim, then looking out at a changing sea.
The Cape League season winds down in rain and fog. The boys of summer depart abruptly, their vehicles bound for Chapel Hill, Richmond, Plano, Memphis. Their dugout is quiet, and we are left to gaze at an empty field. Never will this same group of young men live in town together, play as the team they were for one brief season, when warm weather and long days felt permanent.
Two parking lots stand empty behind the Community Center and The Red Nun Bar and Grill. Trees in full leaf near the snack bar quiver, but nothing is moving on the base paths nearby.
I park on Depot Street across from the fire station and survey a quiet field. The landscape is already altered, chalk lines stretching diagonally from infield to outfield, obtruding on the geometry and integrity of the diamond, defining boundaries for a soccer game, a sport that is played mostly without hands. My eyes are growing weaker with age, but as I look toward home plate without my glasses, I see a man standing in the batter’s box, swinging an invisible bat. He has a strong grip and a decent swing. His back foot pivots slightly in the dirt. The announcer has just called his name for all to hear. The hitter is a key player in the line-up, an athlete at the peak of his career in the prime of life, excited about a winning season and a promising future.
In truth, the person I see is a man alone. He is well past his prime, and there is no team. The field is empty but for him, the press box shut tight. He holds an imaginary bat in a game that is not real.
The team is gone, the season done, and so many players will never warm up on this field again. There’s an ache in that thought. Something akin to sorrow and loss and emptiness, though I’m not sure that emptiness can actually ache.
A couple days later, and I'm on the road again. While running errands around town, I make a point of driving by the field as I often do during the off-season - just to see the place, pausing to remember and preparing to feel sad again. But this time the ballpark isn't empty as I expected it would be. Nor is there a lone fellow protecting the plate. I pull over, stop the car, and park beside the hill that rises above a lovely green expanse of grass.
Just below me down in center field, an important game is taking place. A young father is pitching, and his small boy is swinging for the fences. (The fences are about twenty feet from home plate.) A folding beach chair serves as backstop and catcher.
Nothing has ended, after all. It’s simply beginning again.
* selections from T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922. facsimile edition.
The signs I viewed soon after touching down in central Mississippi sounded nothing like home. A town named Pearl. The Chunky River. Holy Revival Tabernacle and Minnow Bucket Road.
Two quick flights from Boston had taken me to another world.
In retrospect it seems odd that I didn’t notice a single ball field during my visit to the Deep South, a region I've long associated with athletics: Archie Manning and the SEC, Eli Manning and the Ole Miss Rebels, Jerry Rice, Boo Ferriss, the Bulldogs at State, and that retired guy from Hattiesburg who throws a football in Wrangler commercials.
Oh, I saw plenty of uniforms on this road trip, but they had nothing to do with football or baseball. So many uniforms. Atlanta, Charlotte, Jackson, Meridian: so many men and women in uniform. Combat boots on young recruits, women with crisp caps and hair pulled back tight, infantry and Air Force and Airborne. Camouflage, flight suits, and Navy blue.
Many faces displayed an otherworldly expression, as if they were gazing at something far away.
At Logan Airport, I watched one mother bid farewell to her U. S. Army son. There was nothing she could do as he disappeared inside the sterile jetway. She left the gate area slowly, leaning toward someone who might have been the young man's dad, seeking comfort and strength. I watched until she too disappeared from view.
When my Delta flight landed in Atlanta, most passengers remained seated and silent. No one rushed to stand up and grab belongings at the sound of the bell. Military personnel had been invited to deplane first, so that is what they did, while the rest of us solemnly applauded. A handsome young man in camouflage departed, his final destination: Kuwait. “Thank you, ma’am,” he nodded, and I watched him go. He looked so young, so very young. Thank you.
They journeyed alone and in small groups; said their goodbyes; boarded their flights. Inside a quiet terminal in Jackson, Mississippi I witnessed a poignant homecoming, the scene like so many others even more affecting because it was so subdued: three small children formed a circle around their dad, sheltered by a larger gathering of loved ones surrounding a lieutenant now safe at home.
I traveled with a pair of dog tags in the pocket of my jeans.
As I walked and as I watched, passing all the snack bars and ticket counters, rest rooms and Hudson newsstands, so much seemed superfluous. Newspapers, magazines, cosmetics, bestsellers, the sports pages. That world ceased to matter. I was traveling to meet my son, and it never occurred to me to check the box scores or MLB standings. Baseball headlines and trade deadlines suddenly seemed remote and insignificant, and the seriousness with which others approached those subjects struck me as amusing.
I watched a single mom happily diapering her baby boy, just as I once tended to my own children. The infant's name was Marcus, a distinguished and manly name, or so it seemed to me. A young father struggled with his diminutive twins, one of them screaming a newborn cry, a sweet and fragile sound that instantly took me back to blissful mornings and wakeful middle of the nights.
My children had always traveled well. The oldest loved an airport experience, no matter what our destination. Delayed and connecting flights never upset him; he'd stand patiently at picture windows, studying the activity on the runway and imagining flight. Nothing engaged his attention more than pilots in cockpits preparing for takeoff; orange sticks waving an aircraft into the gate; the slow rollback.
Last Thursday morning he greeted me early, a grown man all dressed and ready for work. He wore a khaki flight suit, Marine Corps dog tags laced into his boots.
Two hours later, I stood on a short runway in Lauderdale County under very uncertain skies as a T-45 Goshawk approached, its beam of light shining golden just as it should, a Navy jet swiftly touching down, then taking off again.
Inside a small hut beside the airstrip and outside it as well - just steps from those painted lines you see in the photograph - I stood and watched six young men rehearse and refine their touch-and-go landings. Their jets came straight at me, one after another, a golden light on the nose of each aircraft assuring me (and their mild-mannered yet acutely focused flight instructor) that if this patch of asphalt were the more fluid terrain of a carrier out in the middle of the sea, they would catch a hook.
The strike zone matters.
For two whole days, I didn’t think once about baseball. The subject never even crossed my radar screen. I saw no highlights or web gems on tv, checked no game summaries, and I survived without wireless newsfeeds from my colleagues in the business. Players' names became faint sounds in the distance, like friends I had known long ago . . . .
From time to time I wrestle with some questions, and maybe you do too. Is baseball ultimately just a frivolous pursuit, or is it worthy and significant? Does the game lift me up and fill an empty space, or does it drag my spirit down? Is it mostly an escape from pain and trouble, and thus unreal? Or is it real?
Maybe baseball isn't the huge thing I've made it out to be. In the end, it really isn't the thing I love most in life.
For the past week or so, the field of my dreams has been an airfield, its painted lines configuring a new geometry, a stretch of asphalt functioning as a metaphor for fluid runways that move in the middle of turbulent oceans where there is no manicured grass to be seen.
Last Thursday morning I wore foam earplugs to muffle the exhilarating noise of jets touching down so close we could almost touch them, then swiftly taking off again in well-choreographed, intelligently-executed patterns of touch-and-go. The powerful music they generated didn't manifest itself as something to be heard. No. Sound waves became a tactile thing felt palpably in the chest, not anywhere near the ears. An intense rumble of vibrations very close to the heart.
In less than 48 hours my son would touch down on a moving runway in the middle of the sea - not just once, but ten times. Alone in the cockpit, he would be G-suited, helmeted, and belted in for landing and takeoff, protected beneath a transparent canopy and furnished with an ejection seat. Touch and go. Lap around the boat. Catch a hook. Then catapult off the deck, accelerating over uncertain waters in a manner that most of us will never know, from 0 to 120 knots in approx. two seconds.
Upon finishing his required carrier landings, he sent a message home, delivered in words that were typically succinct and matter-of-fact: CQ complete. And then came a photograph of USMC wings pinned close to my son's heart, his name inscribed in letters of gold.
"They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint."
- Isaiah 40
When you drive young boys to a baseball game, you don’t have to supply much conversation – they do all the work.
Back when the kids in our family were much smaller than they are today, I’d often pack a portable supper and round them up early. Tommy, Will, Gomo, Jack, Greg, Jesse, Justin. Cousins, batboys, summer friends, and neighborhood kids. “Yo, boys!” I'd call while driving slowly up my sister’s long gravel lane. As I honked my horn, out the door or across the yard they came, dropping their wiffle balls and yellow plastic bats.
Safely belted into the back seat of my Chevy, they'd fold down the center console and cupholders expectantly. “Let the dining begin!” my nephew once exclaimed, plastic fork in hand. I remember how they devoured a huge picnic while we traveled for forty minutes to McKeon Field in Hyannis: steak tip subs, sun chips, yogurt, brownies, and chocolate milk. Once they finished eating, they played some type of game with seedless grapes. Fruit flew out the open windows of my car, and I let it go.
We were usually in a hurry to get to the field. I’m almost always in a hurry to get to the field. It’s a baseball thing. On one particular afternoon (Chatham @ Yarmouth-Dennis, early 5pm start at a high school venue that has no lights), Princetonian Ross Ohlendorf, R-R, 6" 4" 220, was scheduled to face the Y-D Red Sox, and I was in a hurry to see the first pitch.
The boys delighted me with conversation all the way to Yarmouth, their anecdotes and stories far better than any I might dream up to entertain myself. The skies over the lower Cape grew very dark that afternoon, heavy rains threatening to postpone the game. One of the kids got to talking about a rain delay he’d recently experienced at Fenway Park when a huge and sudden storm sent downpours into the stands and drove most fans back into a steamy, sticky concourse.
The rainfall felt refreshing to the kids, who chose to linger outdoors in their seats above first base. They didn’t mind being drenched at a big league ballpark on a hot summer day. They gazed at a soggy outfield, puddles in the base paths, and then looked sideways toward the concrete stairway that rises parallel to Fenway’s equipment alley. Steady, driving rains had transformed the steps of an old ballpark into a powerful waterfall. “There was so much water, it came rushing down the stairs, and it was so disgusting, all these cups of beer and soda and straws and other bits of garbage were floating in a massive gush of water, and you could even see chunks of hot dog . . . .”
I envisioned the chaotic scene he brought to life, oblivious to a succession of bold yellow road signs that periodically reminded me to slow down as I shuttled the boys along Pleasant Bay Road toward Route 137.
Thickly settled. 30 mph. SLOW. Caution. Children.
We crossed Pine Orchard Road and Hall’s Path. My Chevy Tahoe accelerated down an incline toward Harding Lane, curved at Standish Woods, reverse-curved at Perry’s Way, then a pleasing straightaway past picket fences and pink shrub roses in full bloom on Elm Street. The neighborhood wasn't very thickly settled at all.
SLOW. School Bus Stop Ahead. 30 mph. Blind Drive.
We were happily cruising to the game, nearing the Mid-Cape Highway that would take us all the way to Exit 8 and Station Avenue and Red Wilson Field, home of the Yarmouth-Dennis Red Sox.
My car was full of laughter as one boy’s colorful story transported us instantly to Boston; we were no longer on Cape Cod, and for all intents and purposes I was no longer driving on Pleasant Bay Road. No, I sat above first base during a weather delay, watching in fascination (through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy) a cascade of flooding July rain mixed with beer and straws and souvenir cups and wet napkins and soggy buns and chunks of Fenway franks. I heeded no signs along the way and never considered the useful circle of numbers on my dashboard: 30, 40, 50. I was too busy laughing about one ballpark, and so happy to be speeding toward another.
He was waiting for me at the bottom of the incline just before Olde Homestead Road, his Crown Vic parked in the quiet shade of scrubby pines. He waved me over, and the boys grew still.
He studied my license and registration, then considered the small passengers sitting behind me in a silent row. All three kids were dressed in Chatham A’s baseball shirts of white and royal blue. I explained to the man in uniform that we were on our way to the game, and his face appeared to soften.
He walked back to his cruiser for several minutes while I worried about money, and when he returned to my open window, he issued a verbal warning and told us to have fun at the game.
I travel Pleasant Bay Road nearly every day and in every season, but I drive it slowly now - usually in keeping with the 30-mph limit. When following that route, I hear children’s voices. I remember how three boys once kept me company on that road, and how we hurried to a field where the Y-D Red Sox hosted the Chatham A's.
Years later, one very happy summer returns in the slow motion of memory.
I deserved a full-blown ticket, I really did. I was driving a little too fast on a country road that warned me of children and blind drives. Had I been alone in my Chevy on that summer afternoon, Chatham’s finest surely would have issued a citation, and the game at Y-D might have cost me well over a hundred dollars. But a trio of baseball boys accompanied me – kids who wore their Cape League camp shirts almost every day and all day long, the same t-shirts I gladly laundered from June to August and hung out in the sunshine to dry.
The boys of summer saved me that afternoon and kept me laughing all the way to the game.
"It all came together, the sunshine and the music and I said to myself, 'Man, how fortunate you are to be playing this beautiful game in this beautiful country!'"
"I truly, truly love baseball."
Land of the free
God bless America, my home sweet home.
Ernie Banks citation courtesy of Seth Swirsky, Something to Write Home About: Great Baseball Memories (Crown Publishers, 2003)
It matters how you get there - how you approach the ballpark and when you arrive.
Like the route you take to the beach house every time, choosing the scenic road that winds along water instead of cutting a more direct angle inland past a strip mall, drawing near the cottage in a way that feels and smells familiar, all the hills and curves and placid coves greeting the senses once again, now that July has finally come. It matters how you approach and how you begin, like being in the theatre when a movie starts, because if you don’t view the opening credits, that first image, the title frame, or hear the first sounds that break silence and darkness, you won’t have an accurate sense of the whole.
No matter what the ballpark and whatever the field, baseball is a singular journey to a significant place, a work of art with a distinctive beginning, its light and action emerging from nothingness. Like the anticipation of all pleasures and events in life that matter - birth, dinner, love - drawing near the experience is the beginning and part of the joy. And so it matters how you get there.
I know a grown man who refuses to enter Fenway Park without a bag of roasted peanuts. He’s a formidable man, an impossibly tall, intimidating Marine. He buys his peanuts from the vendor on Yawkey Way outside Gate A. He has to buy his peanuts on Yawkey Way. He has to buy them before the game. He won’t walk through the turnstiles without a small brown bag in hand.
The beginning matters. I can see this in his eyes, and it needs no explanation.
We like to arrive at Fenway Park several hours before game time, my daughter and I. Unhurriedly our vehicle winds along the familiar curves of Storrow Drive, and we turn our faces toward bright sails running with the wind and reflecting the hot mid-afternoon light that ripples on the Charles. Suddenly we behold the gigantic Citgo sign, a vivid triangle that is much more than an ad for gasoline, and Caitlin shouts, "There it is!"
I know what she's talking about; her joy requires no explanation.
At the beginning of Bull Durham, Annie Savoy walks seductively through town to a ball game, single and free. She saunters along a Carolina street at dusk, poodle skirt swaying purposefully beneath a full bosom.
At the height of summer I once walked to a game by myself, alone and seemingly free like Annie (minus the poodle skirt, etc). No rush hour and hardly a car in our seaside town. The better part of the day had ended for most summer people - boats moored, sails rinsed, rubbed fish ready to grill. Up the lane I went, turned left onto the harbor road past houses with weathered shingles and salty life vests drying on clotheslines and generous glimpses of the bay, its water still a soft shade of blue in the late afternoon light, blue as a ballplayer’s eyes. Children’s voices echoed in the hawthorn trees, beams of watery light glinted off beetle cats and dories, and a translucent coastal light progressed ever so gradually from late afternoon toward dusk as the sky turned billowy pink and the hulls of boats turned bright white just before the sun fell below the trees and distant hills.
It matters how you get there. The Cape Cod air was sweet, and everything I saw and heard that evening was endowed with a special richness, "bathed in joy" (as Woolf might say), because I was walking to the game.
I like a game that is bookended by walks to and from the field.
On Sunday mornings in midsummer (several hours before the first pitch), the neighborhoods surrounding Fenway Park are quieter than most churches. Very few sounds flow from outdoor cafes along the leafy avenues; red geraniums and ivy spill out of window boxes; elegant boxwood topiaries grace the entrances to silent brownstones.
Who will win? What will I see? How long will it last? Where are the seats and what will be our angle on the field?
82 degrees, sunny.
Wind: 7 mph, in from RF.
T: 3:26.
Att: 37,688.
These are the simple ingredients. These fundamentals, plus the happy company of a baseball friend who woke up on Monday morning and wrote: "I came to the conclusion yesterday, on a perfect day at Fenway, that the universe was created so that we would have a place to put baseball parks."
I was the lucky recipient of a little piece of cardboard that took me to Section 24, Row 06, Seat 7 at "America's Most Beloved Ballpark." GRANDSTAND-THIRD BASE. Game #47. 1:35 PM. Enter GATE A. Yawkey/Brookline. I was the lucky one who walked to and from this beloved space in the universe, treasuring the gift of a ticket, then savoring an important win and an ice cream cone (8-6 just before the All Star break, Emack & Bolio’s "Serious Chocolate Addiction," kiddie size), an unhurried walk along the leafy avenue as evening came, and back to the Clarendon Street garage where a validated ticket got me a parking spot for just nine dollars.
It was the kind of day that makes life truly worth living. Eighty-one more games to go, I thought, looking back one last time at the big red sign that is much more than an ad for gasoline.
"Jefferson is the only president of the United States who was also a great artist. Other presidents have noodled at the keyboard or daubed at easels. But Jefferson was a building architect of large ambition and achievement, as well as a landscape architect and an interior designer. There are no exact parallels, at least in Western culture, for this combination of political and aesthetic prominence. To combine the prose of power and the poetry of art, at a high and continuing level, is something no one else did.
His greatest artwork was the cluster of buildings in Charlottesville that he called his 'academical village.'
As his own body's fabric was disintegrating, he poured his spirit into a physical expression of intellectual activity."
- Garry Wills, Mr. Jefferson's University
Davenport Field. Charlottesville, Virgina
When it comes to watching the College World Series on television in our house every June, we're always amused to hear the distinctive voice of Robin Ventura. From year to year we remember him fondly, my son and daughter and I, not so much for his big-league career with the White Sox, Mets, and Yankees, nor for the prestigious Golden Spikes Award he won in 1988, his Dick Howser trophy, and the impressive stats he recorded as a student-athlete at Oklahoma State. Every June we remember him affectionately and with laughter, thanks to a certain conversation that took place between Ventura and his colleague in the broadcast booth at Rosenblatt Stadium during the summer of 2009.
Providing the color commentary during the second round of CWS play, losers bracket, Mike Patrick commended one of Virginia's players for his high GPA, meaningful acts of community service, leadership experience, keen intellect, and strong character. The dialogue went something like this:
". . . and he lives on the Lawn."
"Uh-huh." Ventura responded opaquely and seemingly in agreement, though it was obvious that the full import of his co-anchor's comment had eluded him. A few moments of confused silence ensued.
And then: "He lives on the lawn?"
The Oklahoma State legend paused to imagine a scene: the kid was living for free in somebody's front yard; or maybe he liked the game of baseball so much and spent so many of his waking hours at the field, he figured he might as well sleep there too, heck just camped out in shallow center field every single night in spring; or perhaps he had opted out of dorm living and erected a tent somewhere on campus, Greenpeace-style and short on cash; maybe he'd had no luck finding space in an apartment on Wertland or 14th, where so many other third- and fourth-year students chose to live.
As the 'Hoos pitcher threw over to first, Mike Patrick briefly described UVA's historic Lawn and its venerable significance, whereupon Ventura realized that the sorry habitats he'd conjured for this ballplayer were off the mark. "Oh, I thought you meant he pitched a tent somewhere on campus and lived in it."
Broad rectangles of terraced Virginia land flow outward, generously and invitingly, from the grand steps of Jefferson's Rotunda. The public lawn is bordered by ten masterfully designed, imperfectly symmetrical pavilions graced with colonnades, an elegantly curving serpentine wall of antique brick (the laws of physics dictate that it must curve since it is only one brick thick), and a delightful variety of shade trees and enclosed gardens. Numerous honors students and outstanding young individuals compete for the coveted rooms that open onto the university's magnificent expanse of grass.
"Thomas Jefferson designed the University of Virginia's first buildings to mirror his vision of higher education. As he conceived it, the college experience should take place within an 'academical village' where shared learning infused daily life. He developed plans for ten pavilions—stately faculty homes with living quarters upstairs and classrooms downstairs—attached to two rows of student rooms and connected by an inward-facing colonnade. Each pavilion was identified with a subject to be studied and inhabited by the professor who taught that subject" (virginia.edu).
Students and faculty at The University of Virginia do not refer to their surroundings as a "campus." The academic buildings, together with the surrounding Lawn, pavilions, gardens, and open spaces are known reverentially and almost mystically as "grounds." Although the mention of Thomas Jefferson's name may not instantly elicit an attitude of unqualified awe as it once did, the artistic and intellectual vision of America's third president is palpable when one walks the grounds and contemplates the deeply satisfying realization of one man's ideal. To stand on this Lawn is to inhabit a venue in which philosophical and aesthetic promise have been passionately executed and fully realized, its maker's spirit enduring and ever present.
In lieu of a school chapel, Jefferson wanted the grand Rotunda - and the library housed within it - to be his university's center. To this day, students symbolically face the domed building during Convocation exercises that mark the beginnings of their university education. In fitting contrast, the full academic procession of Commencement moves in the opposite direction: students descend the Rotunda steps and walk the entire length of the Lawn, heading south toward Old Cabell Hall, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the world beyond, leaving their undergraduate years symbolically behind them.
In a popular list of "100 things to do before you graduate," students are unofficially encouraged to streak the entire length of Mr. Jefferson's lawn. Three o'clock in the morning during the month of December is probably a good time to attempt this activity.
Undergraduates and professors who live on the Lawn are among the university's most distinguished leaders and scholars, the community's elite. "I could not find anyone, male or female, who regretted having bid for the honor of living where they do for one (their senior) year. To win a place, they must submit applications to a screening board, presenting their academic qualifications and their record of service to the university. There is an extraordinary camaraderie among those who take the lodgings 'Mr. Jefferson' designed for them. This is felt not only by those living on the Lawn at any one time. It is a social tie felt across generations," writes Garry Wills, who came to regard the magnificent design as a true reflection of Jefferson's "entire personality, its naive flaws as well as its towering strengths."
UVA students consider the Lawn to be "the soul of the place." Indeed, just as we are moved when experiencing our nation's most important monuments, hallowed shrines, and even its loveliest ballparks, visitors may feel in the Lawn and its environs something mysterious yet palpable that can only be called "a soul."
Students' quarters are at once elegant and rustic, each offering a charming brick entryway, weathered rocking chairs, tidy piles of wood, working fireplaces, high ceilings and elegant moldings, inspiring views of the Lawn, but no plumbing and limited privacy, since all rooms open directly onto the common ground which continues to be the scene of spontaneous play, outdoor classes, admissions tours, anti-war protests, concerts, and many public gatherings both formal and informal.
Ballplayers, a capella singers, student government leaders, legacies, poets, all ethnicities (black students were admitted to these rooms before women were invited to apply, the latter delayed thanks to inadequacies of plumbing). Students must travel outdoors and in public when accessing shared bathroom facilities. In one sense, a Lawn room is just one step up from living in a tent or cabin; on another level, however, it affords students a quality of life redolent with elegance, charm, architectural greatness, and living history.
While pulling for the Cavaliers (a.k.a. 'Hoos) in this year's College World Series, we've enjoyed laughing about Robin Ventura's misconception of the Lawn, but it's all in good fun. I imagine him today, sitting in the broadcast booth with a perfect view of the field. He surveys a meticulously groomed lawn, a brand new state-of-the-art facility with its underground cooling system, gleaming stainless steel, and immense standards of lights that eclipse constellations. From his seat high above, he looks down upon the coach named O'Connor who has turned a struggling college program around, nurturing talented young players like Ryan Zimmerman, who himself then turned around and gave a quarter of a million dollars back. Ventura looks out toward left field and notices a few young men clowning around. He sees the number 2 pick and seven others recently selected in the 2011 first-year player draft. The kids are stretching and sprinting on the lawn.
A college player once told me that the whole concept of student-athletes is a joke. Admittedly, these individuals are expected to maintain a ridiculous schedule, an unrealistic balance of work and play. But I like to think that on some level he was wrong about the entire thing being a joke, NCAA violations notwithstanding, and that something of an ideal remains. Otherwise, why college ball? Why college? Why Omaha?
TD Ameritrade Ballpark in downtown Omaha, Nebraska is located a considerable distance from Jefferson's Rotunda and the blue hills of Virginia. 1157 miles to be exact. The stadium does not yet qualify as an historic landmark or national shrine, just as Charlottesville's Davenport Field cannot claim to be a component of Thomas Jefferson's original academical vision, though both facilities speak to who we are as a culture and a nation of educated people. Nor, I daresay, did Jefferson ever contemplate the possibility of a few young scholars standing on a small diamond of grass, shouldering a rubber hose and preparing their lawn for a really big game of catch.
Those who play in the so-called losers bracket of the double-elimination NCAA Division I Baseball Championship are hardly losers. Sure, baseball is ultimately about winning and losing, but the special beauty of Omaha is that it represents the culmination of a long journey that blends academics with athletics, however imperfectly. The joy comes in lessons learned both on and off the field, in friendships forged through victory and loss, and in the privilege of representing a beloved school in a city far from home.
Once upon a time there was a ballplayer who lived on the Lawn, just as he played to his heart and mind's delight on another stunning expanse of grass a mile from where Thomas Jefferson once marked fertile ground for a new university. In the grand scheme of things, it strikes me that these two very different expanses of grass are part and parcel of the same Edenic dream or longing that is at the heart of our restless souls, at the core of what we sometimes call the human condition.
I can write only what I seem to know in my own soul. From whatever direction I approach it, walking the Lawn at the University of Virginia is an experience that takes my breath away in the very same way that a ballpark transports me to a higher plane of being.
This post is dedicated to the 2011 University of Virginia baseball team, now 2-1 in the losers bracket at Omaha, and to my daughter, who graduated from Virginia this past May.
Pavilion V, Academical Village, panoramio.com
Please enjoy this post from my 2010 archives while I man the grill.
Happy Father's Day!
It's not even a complete sentence. No command or question, no declarative statement, no imperative verb, no main verb at all. Just a phrase with an -ing participle (maybe a gerund) which indicates some type of action ongoing between two select people.
Fathers playing catch with sons: the lovely, familiar phrase may not be a complete sentence, but perhaps that's one reason why the words resonate poignantly for so many.
"Everybody that plays major league baseball, I promise you, had a dad that played catch with him." That's what Don Nava had to say last Saturday at Fenway Park after watching his son's first major-league at bat: a grand slam delivered by 27-year-old rookie Daniel Nava on an 0-0 count. What an amazing way to break into the big leagues after an unpromising eight-year journey; what an important moment for father and son.
My dad played catch with my brother almost every single day at lunchtime in a bygone era when kids walked home from school for their midday meal, then returned to their classrooms an hour later. Kind of like Jem and Scout and Atticus Finch. Like Atticus with his children, my dad made it his business to join my brother for a sit-down lunch in our small kitchen, and that quick lunch was usually followed by an unhurried game of catch in the front yard.
The only boy in our family following three sisters, my brother went on to become an outstanding player in our town's youth league. One spring weekend I rode a Greyhound bus home from college just to see him pitch. Working efficiently and striking out almost every batter in the lineup, my kid brother threw a complete game that Saturday afternoon. Mowed them all down with blazing fastballs and pinpoint control. He was just nine or ten years old at the time, but something about his consistency and confidence on a hill of dirt made him seem much older. I had left home, and my youngest sibling had grown up overnight.
My dad didn't play catch with me very often.
I never really coveted or envied the baseball times that my brother enjoyed with our dad, however. Truth be told, I didn't particularly want to play catch with my father. There was something else I wanted even more.
I just wanted to watch the game with him - wanted to watch baseball every single night.
There we sat, just my dad and I out on the screened porch, gliding side by side in the soft breeze of a sultry July evening, listening to Ralph Kiner, Lindsey Nelson, and Bob Murphy, and watching the New York Mets. Together we enjoyed the primitive, grainy images that brought baseball to life on a small black-and-white RCA television topped with skinny rabbit ears.
It's a miracle that we chose the Mets in 1963, but that's what we did. A team of losers (51-111) felt like a win to me, because I had just fallen in love with baseball, and I loved every single part of it.
When my father came home from work, the game began to assert itself as language, and that is how baseball felt most real to me. Its magical sounds, metaphors and idioms, syntax and rhythm, its diction both poetical and crude became integral pieces of our evening conversation, a comfortable mode of speech and thought, a language that I loved. While learning to speak English in increasingly complex ways in grades three and four, I simultaneously acquired the splendid vocabulary of baseball, as if it were an important part of the curriculum. The game felt like something basic and essential - as normal, natural, and necessary as speech itself.
Baseball took shape for me as language not as sport, partly because the man who nurtured my early love of the game was a Protestant minister. Using few words and allowing for long periods of silence, he taught me baseball, both its fundamentals and its poetry. In my mind's ear, an amazing vocabulary became inseparably entwined with familiar Biblical passages, both deeply embedded in my young psyche, and both becoming an essential part of who I am: "3-2 count," Love is patient and kind, "in the cellar," my rock and my Redeemer, "6-4-3 double play." And the Word was made flesh ... and dwelt among us, full of love and peace.
Many years have passed since those summer days and nights, but I can still hear the ever-modulating commentary, the sweet sounds of a televised broadcast, a soft breeze and buzzing in the trees, the gentle words of my father out on the screened porch once upon a quiet New Jersey evening. I was a lucky girl, because when hearing my dad's voice and while listening to the comforting music of a play-by-play, I knew for certain that I was safe and deeply loved.
I have always associated baseball with happiness and love. Thank you, Dad. I love you.
"There is only one man in this town."
- Albert Pujols (a.k.a. El Hombre)
canvas by John Falter, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
No act of biology automatically turns a boy into a man. There’s no set chronological age – say, 18 or 21 – at which a male launches with certainty into maturity; no cultural rite, be it wedding, bar mitzvah, boot camp or high school graduation, that turns a kid into a mature person. Is there?
The counterparts hold true for girls and women. I once taught an English seminar, “Heroines in Literature” (Twelfth Night, Emma, Washington Square, To the Lighthouse, Their Eyes Were Watching God), and in my classroom full of girls I loved asking an introductory question: When does a girl become a woman? After voicing that question, I’d pause for a long time.
We then spoke quite personally about various conditions and human situations that might turn a girl into a woman: physiology and hormones, loss of virginity, wedding day, birth of a child, an academic or professional title, a corner office. My students laughed at some of this, and I did too; the word woman felt so big, so serious.
We all knew that it was politically and biologically correct to address girls of a certain age as women or young women (sometimes annoyingly as “ladies”), less and less as “girls.”
At what point in your life did you feel that the term woman or man actually fit you?
“You make a good cup of coffee, woman.” I took those words as a compliment, because they were voiced with satisfaction, vigor, and no trace of condescension. If spoken admiringly or suggestively, woman has a certain fullness that connotes desirability. Voiced in a duller tone, however, the term sounds matronly, boring, middle-aged, and ill-fitting to those of us who sometimes feel a lively girl within.
“Don’t you love being with a real man?” My friend voiced her happy question in a dimly-lit café while nibbling on sweet potato fries. “You know, the kind who says aw, stay and have a beer, pops the cap off a cold one, offers you the same, puts his legs up on the kitchen counter, and is happy to have you stay and watch the game with him?”
A “real” man: the definition is more a matter of taste, jest, opinion, and circumstance than absolute truth. I picture a Harley, leather, and tattoos - is that what a man is? Then other images start colliding until I am confused: intelligent conversation, shelves and shelves of great books, an advanced degree, a bottle of fine wine; muscles; a Marlboro man; baseball on television or radio and a frosty summer ale; a good father who is respected by his children; a man in uniform, baseball or military; a kind person.
Ballplayers often seem to be a species of men unto themselves, and we know from Roy Campanella and George Will that “there has to be a lot of little boy in a man who plays baseball.”
Just watch any Little Leaguer or young adolescent. Kids swagger and spit just as grown men do, adeptly imitating every idiosyncratic move. You see miniature Jeters at the plate, Becketts and Halladays on the mound. The reverse is also true: watch any so-called grownup on the bench or in the pen and he’s blowing bubbles, cracking seeds, laughing til his sides hurt at something that’s just been said about a girl. Or woman.
What is it to be a man, anyway?
Is Stan “The Man” Musial more a man than that other ballplayer nicknamed “The Kid?” And if so, why?
In that realm of imagination where you are allowed to choose, would you prefer to spend time with a nice fella sporting a red blazer or a complicated s.o.b. who lectures you colorfully on the science of hitting while gracefully casting a fly rod?
The Man. Though secularly christened with an honorable nickname by adversaries who admired his talent and power even as they competed hard against him at Ebbets Field, what I’ve been hearing lately is that Stanley Musial’s “boring” life off the field doesn’t make for a very compelling biography. The concept of goodness isn’t sexy. It’s better for an athlete to be hot than good. Such is the general consensus among reviewers who have taken an appreciative look at Stan Musial: An American Life, by George Vecsey.
“Compelling” and “sexy” are qualities our current age has come to demand of stories; the terms are now almost synonymous. Compelling means “you have to buy this book.” “Sexy” indicates “you have to read this story (because it will make up for some of the excitement your own life is lacking).” Audiences want fireworks; they really like fireworks. Many show up at the ballpark because of the post-game fireworks, suggesting that the quiet action of baseball isn’t quite enough.
Stan Musial is like a ballgame without the fireworks. “He makes a better statue,” Bill James asserted in a 1986 abstract. I find those words to be untrue and incredibly sad.
“Even in matrimony, Musial was the boring one,” writes Vecsey. With all due respect to a longtime sportswriter, I wonder how any outsider can possibly render a judgment on another man’s personal life, especially one so private? Who knows what goes on behind the closed doors of a good man, especially if the door doesn’t open readily to fans who feel entitled to an intimate account or compelling psychological drama.
Nice, gracious, opaque, boring: these adjectives present to the biographer an artistic and intellectual challenge. There’s the added philosophical predicament that many individuals - athletes, celebrities, ordinary people just like us - are fundamentally unknowable, except perhaps to closest family and friends.
Among the most important truths of Stan Musial’s life are his baseball stats. Height: 6’0.” Weight: 175 lbs. One hundred seventy-five? A 24-time All Star (tied with Willie Mays); 3,630 hits; winner of 3 MVP awards; first major leaguer ever to record 5 home runs in one day; 3 World Series rings; Hall of Fame 1969, first ballot inductee. Speed. Versatility. Quick reflexes. That coiled stance. Explosive energy. Small hands for a .331 hitter. A wiggle. The ripple of muscles on his back that helped generate power. Never thrown out of a game.
What more do we need know? Why read any book?
Stats and traits make us yearn for more. We need numbers entwined with words, disparate facts shaped neatly into narrative. We want to understand what's beyond that curious stance and cheerful red blazer, some clues to thought and feeling. What were you thinking? Can you tell us what it means? How did you feel? Such questions are now routinely asked of ballplayers as if to ensure that when the time comes for biography or enshrinement, plenty of psychological and emotional content will be there for the taking. What was in your head? What was in your heart?
Stan Musial played the harmonica. He married Lil. He enjoyed a few drinks now and then. Faithfully attended Catholic mass. Co-owned a steakhouse in St. Louis. Carried baseball cards with pre-signed autographs. Missed one season of professional baseball while serving in the Navy during World War II. Showed up at Mickey Mantle’s funeral and sat alone, off to the side in a ray of sunlight. Received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. These are among the truths of one man’s existence.
As he crafts Stan Musial’s achievements into a richer human story, Vecsey’s methodology initially seems disjointed and almost haphazard, as if a straightforward, linear chronology would only make an already prosaic story even duller. The author rearranges time and juxtaposes geographic locations, bringing narrative complexity to a life that wasn’t on the surface very complicated. For some reason we want things to be complicated.
Readers expect continuity and momentum in biography, not unlike what a ballgame provides, but this is not what you will find in The Man. At various points along the way, Vecsey interrupts the direction of his tale, circles back to past events, jumps ahead, moves around in time and place, punctuating denser chapters of sustained narrative with quicker anecdotal sections that are nonetheless worthy in their brevity.
Occasionally there’s a jolt. “Skip ahead nearly two decades to 1958,” he commands his narrative to jump forward in a disorientating change of gears. There’s a method in the telling, however. What might strike the reader as a flaw in design ultimately makes sense. Stan Musial was, after all, “a man of action rather than reflection, a man of anecdote rather than narrative.”
The gentleman in the red blazer might chat with you for a moment or two, and then he’s gone. He’s accommodating and kind, yet private and “opaque,” guarding what few flaws he may have; welcoming, yet protective of his private life. Similarly, his biographer offers quick glimpses of the man’s world and his cheerful persona. Wunnerful, wunnerful and hey-hey, whaddayasay, whaddayasay capture Musial’s upbeat essence, but they are also a cloak, leaving the deeper psychological stuff untapped. The Man has not provided his biographers or critics with an abundance of quotable lines.
The words of others bring him to life, including those of Ted Williams reflecting on the question “Was Musial really as good as you?” The Kid offered a remarkable answer: “Yes, I really think he was.” Williams went on to say, “He was a better all-around hitter than Hank Aaron. He was a quiet leader on the field and in the clubhouse and was one of the most universally respected ballplayers of our generation. He wasn’t the biggest guy in the world but he was a lithe six-one and 175 pounds, and he was whippy.”
“Lithe” and “kind” are words that appear frequently in Vecsey’s biography of Musial. “Whippy,” as I recall, is uttered only once.
“All he ever wants to do is talk about hitting,” are the words Musial offered when speaking of Ted Williams in return. “I don’t say he doesn’t know about anything else, but that is always the first thing he wants to talk about.” There’s a critical and competitive edge to these words, a tone not entirely “gracious.” It strikes me as one of the most curious sentences in the book.
After considering the relative greatness of two hitters, Vecsey jumps abruptly back in time to 1948 and Musial’s hometown of Donora, Pennsylvania, the same working-class community that produced high school football hero Buddy Griffey, father of Ken Sr. “Donora was known for its fogs, thick and brown and vile-smelling, but this was like nothing they had ever seen or inhaled. The air kept getting worse.” The reason for this disruptive flashback gradually becomes clear: “Zinc is one of those elements that the body needs in very small doses in certain forms, but zinc can be poisonous in larger amounts.” Stan Musial’s father died in December of 1948, a sad event that temporarily summoned the athlete back to a former existence well after he had been catapulted into fame.
Mickey Mantle had Oklahoma’s bleak chat piles to call home, while Musial could claim fluorospor and zinc as his native territory. Both young men would welcome the opportunity to gravitate elsewhere, leaving behind misfortune and entering the world of Toots Shor, Coupes de Ville, and steaks on the grill outside Al Lang Field, as baseball set them free.
Unlike the palpable raw material of Mickey Mantle’s life, the stuff of Musial’s background seems more resistant to close analysis. While the imagery of Donora becomes vivid, the character of Stan Musial’s father is less so. “Lukasz never took his son to a game at Forbes Field,” Vecsey writes, “and Musial often said it was his mother who had played catch with him.”
The relationship of father to son does not yield much in the way of specifics that tell a psychologically riveting story, and one can only speculate about the degree to which the elder Musial’s form of employment, probable alcoholism, emotional distance, and reluctant attitude toward the business of baseball affected the trajectory of his son’s career and the content of his character. Musial’s mother emerges as the stronger presence in the narrative, though she appears more as mythical figure than fully developed personality: “he would always tell how his mother had stitched rags into a makeshift baseball and played catch with him between chores. When he told that story, he would weep, and so would she.” Clearly it was Stanley’s mother who understood the legitimacy of a baseball vocation more vividly than Lukacz Musial.
When envisioning a future for himself, young Stan gravitated to his first and only sweetheart partly because her family enjoyed a life of relative security and stability: “The girl I was going to marry, Lillian, her father owned a grocery store. No matter what happened in baseball, I knew I could always get a job in the store.” One pauses to wonder about the serendipity of relationships and our reasons for choosing as we do, leaving much to loyalty and good luck.
George Vecsey's story of a ballplayer's life offers some delightful phrases that you can "lift your hat to," as Emily Dickinson might say (though probably not about baseball). Good writing doesn’t simply arise out of strong content; it isn’t a matter of vocabulary alone. There's the cadence at a chapter’s end: “Stanley the homebody sent everybody home.” Or the elegant and emphatic balance in an opening that urges one forward: “He had always been a hitter. In 1948, Musial became a slugger.”
Rhythm is just as important: “St. Louis was loyal and highly undemanding psychologically. He did not have to fulfill everybody’s psychic needs. All he had to do was just hit the ball. Run out of the batter’s box. Smile when he slid into second. Sign autographs. Just say whaddayasay-whaddayasay and the people were charmed.”
Vecsey checks these sentimental visions of ballpark life, however, when faulting the Cardinals organization for its “paralysis toward black players” in an era when other teams took steps to diversify their rosters. Bitter comments voiced by Lou Brock and Bob Gibson (who described 1961 as “the year I got out of prison”) challenge Musial’s outlook on America’s game and its “wunnerful” opportunities.
Spring training for the integrated Cardinals initially brought white players to the Vinoy Hotel by the glittering bay, while athletes of color were housed in black neighborhoods further inland. Management finally broke with this short-lived tradition in 1962 when it filled two hotels with a newly integrated team and brought all players together, including wives and children. Lil and Stan moved from their waterfront bungalow on Tampa Bay to the team motel where the family shared a single room. Bob Gibson's cheerful description of the outdoor scene captures a free and easy, oasis-like atmosphere that many still associate with spring training, his words suggesting a spirit of victory over cruelty and injustice: “People would drive by just to see all these black and white guys swimming and grilling steaks together.”
What may strike the reader as peculiar is Musial’s reserve in the midst of profound change, his remoteness at critical times when he might have been more outspoken on behalf of teammates. “Nice guy, I guess,” Bill White would recall in 2009. “He was a good player, but I don’t know him. I don’t think any white guys knew him either.”
Many biographers rely heavily on the testimonials of others. In writing about Mickey Mantle, for example, Jane Leavy consulted over 500 individuals in seeking to understand the complexity of her boyish hero. Similarly, Vecsey counts on hundreds of others to provide insight into Stan Musial’s life on and off the field, but one seldom hears the voice of the man himself.
It takes a fine reporter to elicit poignant tributes such as that voiced by Jim Frey: “There are a few people in the world who love being themselves. And I think Stan Musial is one of them.” A lengthy chapter is devoted to Musial's “very private family life” and the degree to which Stan and Lil adapted to relative affluence, while maintaining a relatively normal existence. “You go to his home and you step on kids everywhere," observed Ben Vanek, son of former player-manager Ollie Vanek. “That’s what my home is for,” Stan is reported to have said. “It’s for kids, yours and mine.”
Vanek laments the fact that “we have elevated professional athletes much higher than they used to be. I mean, if you saw Musial’s house, it was not a mansion. It was a house among other houses. Neighbors right next to him. No security fence out front. You probably could walk up, paperboy or something, walk right up to the door, get paid, give him change, stuff like that.”
A tenuous line separates the man who knows greatness and fame from those who resume a so-called ordinary existence. Stan himself once faced considerable odds: a father who didn’t particularly want him to sign; an unimpressive beginning as a pitcher; a few seasons of bouncing around in the minor leagues. He may very well have become that “player to be named later.” But somehow talent reveals and asserts itself. Boys turn into men as they make their choices for better or worse, take their licks, and enjoy their good luck and the blessings of good health together with a few magic ingredients and intangibles whereby an ordinary existence becomes extraordinary, and all the fans show up in red.
In his epilogue George Vecsey explains that he never formally interviewed Musial during the writing of his biography. This revelation doesn’t undercut the credibility of his narrative, because the author has already achieved a satisfying fullness in the telling.
It’s an odd feeling to hold a book in your hands and feel as if you know a man, to the extent that anyone can be known through words. You come to understand some particulars of his personal life, however tame those facts may be. You sense his few imperfections and simplicity of character against the backdrop of which athletic feats gleam brightly. You spend time in his company; share a steak medium rare; travel with James Michener and Angie Dickinson; meet Pope John Paul II and John F. Kennedy and Lech Walesa; enjoy a slice of life off the field in a Florida motel where black and white families vacation together in a scene that the man named King has not yet prophesied.
In the end you may not know much more about the mind of Stan Musial, if that’s what you look for in biography or baseball writing; but you may come to appreciate something of the world that shaped him. His stats are there for the taking; the matters of his personal life remain largely private.
Stan Musial: An American Life offers its readers the opportunity to spend time with a baseball man. This is, after all, what we want, isn’t it? It’s not unlike what we hope for during those few seconds it takes a ballplayer to sign his name. We enjoy a brief conversation and the impression that the man is our friend.
Perhaps there is an untold and more complicated story beyond the coiled stance, distinguished Hall of Fame numbers, and the smooth curve of an athlete's signature. But in the end the reader may be content, as was his biographer, to be in a gentleman’s presence and feel the warmth of his hand.
Click here to watch Stan Musial live on "What’s My Line."
To watch Stan Musial on and off the field, please click here.
June 4, 2011
Fenway Park
Red Sox 9 - Athletics 8
W: Aceves (3-1) L: Moscoso (2-1)
14 innings
Baseball is the ultimate story. One inexorable and seemingly timeless plot - full of many subplots over which we have no control - drives to an uncertain but ultimately sure conclusion. We don't know in advance who the main characters will be, and every cameo appearance holds a promising significance. Apparent losers suddenly become heroes and vice-versa. For all our knowledge of stats and scouting reports and pre-game hype, we have no way of predicting when the dramatic climax or game-winning moment will come, or what form it will take. This is a truth we know only in retrospect.
Unlike stories told in books, we cannot turn to a final page, read its closing paragraph, and understand on some level how the narrative will end.
Yet when all is said and done, once we know the outcome of a baseball story, the box score is there for the taking as a work of art (just as images linger in our memories), serving as an outline after the fact, retelling the drama that some of us may have witnessed live in all its curious and tantalizing ups and downs. The box score and play-by-play read to me like a poem, time once unhurried and unmeasured but now compressed; a sensation entirely different from the action itself; a satisfying pattern of words and numbers, bringing the game back to us for good.
June 4, 2011. Fenway Park. Boston vs. Oakland
Weather: 60 degrees, sunny.
Wind: 15 mph, In from RF.
T: 5:17.
Att: 37,485.
