watching the game

Mickey Mantle: The Last Boy

 

"Get the f___ outta here. It's like a cemetery to me."

                                                                        - Mickey Mantle

 

                                                        National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

   When I first saw Mickey Mantle he was standing next to a barbecue grill in the late afternoon light outside a motel room in St. Petersburg, Florida.   He struck a relaxed and happy pose, the sleeves of his golf shirt tightly wrapping his biceps, manly spatula in hand, smiling that perfect all-American boy smile as if life were perfect, could never get better, and would always be so.  As soon as I saw that photo, I wanted it.   Not the picture per se, not even the guy nor that specific way of life, but the glowing atmosphere of spring training, the expression on a young man's face, the sense of well being and confidence and promise.   The portrait spelled baseball to me.

The black and white photograph made me believe that baseball was something  true and good.  To this day, I have no idea whether that picture was real or not.   I haven't bothered to research its existence in any form.  It’s entirely possible I made it up.   

Real or illusory, the compelling photograph invited me in, but I never got anywhere with it.   Until now.   I never understood all that the picture represented.   Until now that I've finished reading Jane Leavy’s masterpiece, The Last Boy:  Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood.

 Three pages into the book’s preface, Leavy explains that photographer Ozzie Sweet always shot Mickey Mantle and other potential sports heroes  “from below … rendering his subjects larger than life.”  
This is precisely how I remembered the spring training shot lodged in my own imagination.  “His photos look as if they could have been taken anywhere, anytime.   The context is timelessness.”    Yes, that portrait of Mickey that I had long admired always appeared as if it had been taken just yesterday.  Mickey was youthful and happy; he was a good person.  

Others will bring to Leavy’s biography their own set of perceptions, expectations, memories, fantasies, biases, stereotypes, and regrets.   Whatever image of Mickey Mantle you carry in your own consciousness, I suspect that The Last Boy will go a long way in amplifying or deflating it, while also doing his memory justice.

 “I care too much whether people like what I write,” Leavy confessed to Mickey Mantle in person during a weekend spent in Atlantic City in April 1983.    I found it poignant that an author would confide in a famous person so candidly, especially given the unsettling circumstances under which she met with Mickey face to face.  

The depth of Leavy's caring – about what readers think, that is -  has paid off, in my estimation, and richly so.    In writing Mickey Mantle's story, Jane Leavy has offered to all of us  a comprehensive and honest account of one American life, a disturbing yet beautiful story,  a truly stunning work of art.

In a recent interview I asked the author  about her two distinguished biographies -  The Last Boy and Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy (2002), wondering which had been the more difficult work for her to craft, not so much emotionally but artistically.  She replied that The Last Boy was by far the “harder story to tell,”  because there simply wasn’t “enough new to justify it.”  Countless Mickey stories had already been written.  What more could be said?   

Leavy's project took on an added urgency and difficulty, due to the fact that some of her sources were nearing the end of their lives.   “The window of opportunity was closing,” she offered soberly.  Indeed, several of Mickey’s teammates and loved ones did in fact pass away as his story gradually took shape.   

Almost everyone who has reviewed The Last Boy has praised Jane Leavy for her prodigious  research, recognizing the over five hundred interviews that have resulted in a best-selling biography.  Her index alone is eighteen pages long (in microscopic font); the bibliography reads like that of a doctoral dissertation; and Appendix 1 -  Leavy’s interview list - spans ten pages.   (Her interview list for A Lefty's Legacy occupies a page and a half, though that measurement doesn’t necessarily imply that the pitcher's story was any less compelling or complete).  

There’s simply no substitute for scholarly rigor and personal access of this kind, and the result is incredible richness, authenticity, and depth of story.   The Last Boy is the work of a brilliant mind, though intellectual rigor is never at odds with the plain-spoken, oakie-dokie, crude and sometimes repugnant reality of the character that Leavy has sought to define.   Her ultimate goal is truth.

It’s really not enough to say “Leavy interviewed over 500 people” and leave it at that.   The mere number doesn’t really say anything about her achievement.   It’s what she does with all these perspectives that is ultimately so impressive and so deeply moving.  Leavy takes the voices of human beings from all walks of life:  teammates, trainers, neuroscientists, kinesiologists, family members, orthopedic surgeons, mechanical engineers, damaged women, sabermetricians, rednecks, Catholic priests, Jewish grandmothers,  young boys playing ball in upper Manhattan and out on Route 66, and of course Mickey himself - reprehensible and endearing, winsome, disgusting, lonely, and sincere.  We're enriched with a fascinating variety of perspectives and emotions, as Leavy packs a great deal of content into every paragraph, efficiently and unobtrusively so, synthesizing many disparate voices, intertwining them seamlessly in a narrative that never seems disjointed.  

Open the book to virtually any page and you will find a vivid quotation from a reliable and often intriguing source.  

The story of Mickey Mantle's experience attains a higher level of sophistication than that of previous studies, in part because of the sophisticated language that Leavy borrows from highly intelligent people who are experts in their fields.  At the same time, however, she takes on the vernacular of some very inarticulate people, dignifying their discourse and making seemingly stupid individuals sound eloquent through the elegance of her own prose.

Leavy is being modest when describing her beautifully crafted work as “boring Writer 101 stuff.”   The blending of all these voices - as many as six or eight  different personalities on a page -  is very hard to achieve if you’re aiming to create a fluid story.   The author adeptly combines her own intelligent narrative voice with those of others, all playing in counterpoint to create a compelling whole, the point of which is to get at some important truth.

It’s as if you’ve been invited to a special gathering of ballplayers, all your favorite baseball guys, some of whom you’ve long considered your imaginary friends.  They’re all standing in a room having fun together, and you’re among them. They’ve gathered to tell Mickey’s story, roast him and praise him, and you’ve been invited to the party. You hear their voices during the course of an evening, or maybe over a  relaxing weekend, and eventually you leave the venue feeling as if you’ve  experienced something truly rare.  You feel as if you know the man for who he actually was.

Familiar ballplayers and baseball people form a chorus of eyewitness accounts:  Casey Stengel, Bob Costas, Mickey Lolich,  Joe DiMaggio (stating that Mickey “is a rock head”), Whitey Herzog, Duke Snider, Clete Boyer, Yogi Berra and Carmen too – just to name a few; and there are hundreds more.   There is no shortage of expletives emanating from these sources, but there’s poetry too, some of it coming from unlikely places, like Boog Powell for example, who describes the sound of the ball coming off Mickey’s bat:    “It was a ring.  It was more like a musical note.”  (I doubt that Boog thought of himself as speaking poetry.)

Others tended toward lyricism when characterizing Mickey’s performance on the field:  “He bunted on me,” recalls Ed Roebuck. “I fielded the ball.  It sounded like a bunch of wild horses running by."  Mickey Lolich captures the "buzzing" sound of the sinking fastball after it made contact with Mickey’s bat:  “It's actually the seams grabbing at the air as it goes by."  (Only moments later did Lolich realize that the very same ball had just hit him forcibly in the thigh.)   A few of these poetic moments serve as lyrical cadences in Leavy's chapter endings:  "When asked how he had pitched to Mantle,  the late Frank Sullivan said,  'With tears in my eyes.'"  

Jane Leavy is the perfect biographer for Mantle.  Erudite and colloquial, satirical in delivering sharp one-liners,  tough yet compassionate, she talks the talk just as coarsely as The Mick once did.  She has an off-the-charts baseball IQ.  She is an elegant literary stylist.  And above all, she approaches her mission with the rigor and intensity of a first-rate investigative journalist.    Whether she’s chasing medical answers or a tape-measure home run,   she pursues information with urgency and passion, tirelessly so. 

Leavy’s analysis of Mickey’s hitting technique is nothing short of masterful.  Most simply stated, hitting is a combination of strength and technique.   Leavy takes this basic definition and amplifies it through excellent narrative supported by fascinating appendices that feature kinesthetic drawings of Mickey batting from the right and left sides. 

Formulaically stated, Mickey Mantle hitting a baseball = inference + stored experience + reflexes + visual motor system + DNA + Granpa Charlie out by the shed with tennis balls.  Or in the words of one specialist, hitting is “an intricate biomechanical task that requires the coordination and mobilization of virtually every muscle in the body in less than a second.”

The Last Boy is worth purchasing for just that sentence alone.

So this is what we’re watching.   No wonder we love baseball.     No wonder we say we “love” Mickey Mantle.   It’s because we’re witnessing the human form in the act of achieving something that’s profoundly difficult and rare, even as we’re cracking peanut shells and downing warm beer.   We’re in the presence of an action that is biologically and technically amazing, even if we don’t stop to analyze that person's complicated movement, even if we can't begin to comprehend what it is we’re feeling at any given moment of live action or historical footage.  Even if all we seem to hear is music.

Leavy’s artistic vision did not  play out as a straight chronology of Mickey Mantle's professional life.  We can access that information, including all the game summaries and stats, in countless other ways.   Statistics aren't necessarily the stuff of good literature.   Nevertheless, the author focuses effectively on pivotal turning points in Mickey’s career, beginning for example with the astonishing performance at USC that “catapulted him to fame”  (5 AB, 4 H, 2 HR, 1 3B, 1 1B, 7 RBI).

Her subsequent analysis of the knee injury that Mickey sustained upon losing his footing atop an uncovered drain in the outfield of Yankee Stadium is an amazing journey in itself, moving as it does from the re-creation of bizarre circumstances and team dynamics on the field and through the exhaustive medical research that followed.   Again, Leavy chases the truth in seeking to determine what exactly happened and why,  finally uncovering the precise nature of Mantle’s injury, and making the astonishing discovery that he played through unimaginable forms of pain, more agonizing than anyone ever realized.

Leavy acknowledges  that her hero's career might have been dramatically different had physicians possessed the tools and technology that would have enabled them to diagnose and solve the problem as medical experts now do almost effortlessly with the click of a button; with MRIs clearly showing tears in the ACL, MCL, and meniscus; and with routine arthroscopic procedures.  While clearly regretting the “cascading episodes of instability” that plagued Mickey's performance on the field, Leavy downplays the useless what-ifs and might-have-beens.  In doing so, she rescues her subject from sentimentality and from the easy label of  “tragic hero.”  

It’s tempting to see Mickey as a victim of early injury and a troubled past.  Some readers have formed precisely this interpretation.   The early episode of child abuse is regarded by some as the cause that explains or justifies Mickey's lifetime of bad behavior.   This is not the reality that Jane Leavy has  chosen to emphasize as the structural or thematic heart of her story, however.   She describes the matter quietly, almost privately, yet without minimizing its significance. 

Biography is not psychiatry.

Mantle grew to be a man who could be deeply cruel to others, often deliberately so. One could argue that The Mick caused more harm to others than was ever done to him.  He knowingly uttered statements that were offensive, crude, and hurtful.  He sometimes wrote horrible things to children when signing memorabilia.  Although his own boys appeared to love him, often gravitated to him, and sought to emulate him for better or worse, he was on many counts a terrible father.   Although Mantle was a lot of fun to be around, he often treated women in ways that will make readers cringe.   Incredibly, Merlyn stuck by him for most of their married years  (he wrote like he loved me … I like being Mrs. Mickey Mantle….  he was married in a very small geographic area of his mind), but her reminiscences are often heartbreaking.

Mickey was raised in a family that “didn’t show up emotionally.”   They seldom expressed or spoke of love, seldom spoke at all in fact, showed very little affection, and failed to connect with each other in the most basic ways.  It was an American household that can only be described as bleak.   Once he left Commerce, Oklahoma, with its piles of chat and vast holes underground, Mantle had little incentive to return.  Its depressing landscape was emblematic of a  deeper human problem.   Mickey Mantle would never know a true home.  

Having married very young (at the insistence of his father), Mickey would eventually comment on his troubled relationship with Merlyn:    “I love her.   She’s like my sister, though.”   Combine this peculiar attitude with the fact that Mickey first became sexually aware in the hands of his own half-sister, and it’s no wonder most of his experiences  in intimacy took place outside the home.  Repeated encounters with countless willing and beautiful women left him hungry for affection and human connection.

It's no accident that he was a man easily prone to tears later in life.   The tears sprung from a variety of troubles,  untapped emotions, and melancholy what-ifs that resided deep within.

“The ballpark throbbed with love,” wrote George Vecsey on “Mickey Mantle Day” in June 1969.    It’s a peculiar form of affection, this so-called “love” we fans feel when applauding and contemplating our heroes; with all due respect to Vecsey, one wonders if love is the right term.   In responding to players like Mickey Mantle, we witness kinesis and anatomy, the graceful human form in motion.    Let’s not tip-toe around the idea:  we embrace the maleness of the thing, the very ideal of male beauty, even as we admire the intensity and violence of an athlete's hitting.   Somehow this experience gets translated into “I love the man.”   But fans don’t really love the man – at least not in the ways that this particular man truly needs and yearns to be loved.

We sport his number on “authentic” jerseys.   We covet his autograph, though that signature is likely counterfeit.   We build him up, deify and sanctify him, grab some metaphorical piece of him, measure him against the rest, perhaps settle on number two, then maybe let him go.

How is it possible that a man so beloved by so many – thousands in a screaming, joyful crowd – comes to feel that he has never known love?   He had an entire day named after him; yet Merlyn would remember Mickey Mantle Day at Yankee Stadium as the worst afternoon of her husband’s life.   "I don't get close to people," Mantle once confessed to Bob Costas, eyes filling with tears, "I'm weird or something, I guess."

The emotional rhythms of Leavy’s biography are among its greatest strengths.   She is a master of rescuing the moment from sentimentality, and she does so with exquisite timing.   Just when Mickey lets his guard down and finally says something generous and kind, the moment is swiftly deflated with a sophomoric wisecrack.   The story's hero may utter a deeply offensive statement, and just when you’re ready to close the book and drop it to the floor in disgust, the man redeems himself; or a friend like Jerry Coleman or Clete Boyer speaks up on Mickey's behalf, sounding an amusing, endearing or uplifting tribute.  We feel it all:  sorrow, repugnance, compassion, disgust, delight.  And maybe even love.

“Do you love him more or less after writing the book?” asked one reader last week at Politics & Prose.    “The same,” Leavy softly replied.   She went on to observe that Mickey Mantle was at once “very flawed” and “very decent,"  uncomfortable with attention yet wanting very much to succeed.    There were many times when he was “generous beyond measure.”  

What emerges in the end is Mickey Mantle’s utter likeability in the midst of all his reprehensible qualities.   Leavy’s book has a way of making you want to forgive him. He was fun to be around; men and women agree that this was most assuredly true. He could be shy and unassuming, quiet,  boyish in a good way, sweet and genuine in displaying his aw-shucks modesty.  He was a player who loved being among his teammates, and he treated them well.    “What the f__ did you do that for?”  he asked Tom Tresh, upon learning that Tresh had named his newborn son Mickey.   At the same time, writes his biographer, Mickey was “quietly honored”  by the gesture.  He was a man who could be deeply touched, though it seems he never knew quite what to do about such sensations.

Jane Leavy taps into Mantle's essential goodness even as she watches her childhood hero fail repeatedly.   It might surprise some readers that this tough investigative journalist becomes a quiet and important presence in her own story, lending it an occasional feminine touch – the clicking of a young girl's party shoes,  for example, or a woman's stunned refusal of an unwanted advance.   Leavy enhances the baseball chapters of her story with five very personal interludes (rendered in softer, quieter italics) during which she keeps company with a  ballplayer whose private behavior demonstrates the familiar contradictions.

In one of these poignant scenes, Leavy references I Love Mickey, a ditty made popular by Teresa Brewer in 1956.  In the original recording, Mantle can be heard calling "Mickey Who?" as a bouncy refrain.  Some thirty years later, while sitting quietly in the close quarters of a limousine, Mickey and his biographer consider the song.    We learn that the flip side of the 78 rpm includes an apt companion piece:  Keep Your Cotton Pickin' Paddies offa My Heart.

The Last Boy ends with a bitter indictment of the memorabilia industry, which often deals grotesquely in relics of the game.   How are the rest of us any different, I sometimes wonder, the biographers and writers, statisticians and artists among us, when mining our own treasures from the lives of those we tend to idolize?

Literature of this caliber is what separates memory from memorabilia and the men from the boys.  Jane Leavy’s biography is an exquisitely crafted narrative that educates its readers in all kinds of things statistical, historical, medical, moral, mechanical, and human.  It's a work of art that seeks truth and does justice to one ballplayer's complicated life.  Some might argue that Leavy treats Mantle with more intelligence and fairness than he even deserves. 

When Mantle returned to Cooperstown in 1988, he took his time inside the Gallery:   “Mickey read every plaque . . . . Then he put his hands up to his face and cried.”   Tears of awe, regret, what-might-have-been  . . . who can really say or know what those tears were all about?  

So, which Mickey is he?   The one who couldn't wait to get outta there?  Or the man who wept when contemplating greatness?  It’s a bit like having to choose between Mays and Mantle.  Who was the better player?   Can't we just have both?

I wonder how The Mick would respond if he knew about The Last Boy.  "It's like I'm reading about somebody else,"  he might say.  In all likelihood, he wouldn't read the book at all.  "Why can't they get over me?"   Maybe that's what he would say.   I wonder what he'd say next.

 

highly recommended

Jane Leavy, The Last Boy: 

Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood

HarperCollins, 2010

On the Road

 

"I don't know nothin' about hitting."

                                                                              -  Mickey Mantle

 

      Last night I had the great pleasure of meeting  Jane Leavy  after her wonderful reading at Politics & Prose  in  Washington,   D. C.    She announced that The Last Boy:  Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood will reach number 4 on The New York Times Best Seller List next week.  Leavy's outstanding biography of Mantle is fully deserving of this honor.    If you're interested in hearing more about the book, please tune in to the interview I co-hosted with Steve Lenox  this past Monday evening on the Seamheads.com Radio Hour.    Jane Leavy was an outstanding guest, and what a privilege it was to speak with her. 

I'm on the road, so more to follow soon . . . .

 

 

A Baseball Memoir

 

 

Stories are often most compelling when individuals face considerable odds while experiencing various forms of misery and sorrow.  We want characters to change and grow.   We sympathize with men and women who transcend the difficulties that life throws at them, and we care about what becomes of them.

Memoirs usually appeal to audiences because they dramatize turmoil, darkness, bad behavior, and gut-wrenching events.  The more dysfunction, the better.    It’s artistically very difficult to create an engaging narrative from the raw material of a fundamentally happy story.

The pretty cover of Kathleen Murphy Lockwood’s memoir appears to introduce a happily-ever-after drama of a conventional marriage.  Indeed, hers is on balance a wholesome story that revolves around a ball-playing husband whose very nickname suggests a carefree, untroubled life:  Skip.

Major League Bride: An Inside Look at Life Outside the Ballpark doesn’t offer much in the way of scandalous content, juicy gossip, or sordid imagery; not many starlets, bombshells or beauty queens; no explicit sexual content or entertaining skirt-chasing behavior or smokin' hot baseball wives who vividly come to life.   No bombs that drop, no performance-enhancing drugs, nothing much stronger than a celebratory half gallon of White Russians and plastic cups of Old Milwaukee drunk by exuberant fans in County Stadium.    Naughty and unseemly behavior is acknowledged, swiftly judged for what it is, then politely dismissed.  You won’t experience much rock and roll, unless you count “Rocky Mountain High,” “California Dreamin’” and Gloria Gaynor declaring that she will survive.

The spirit of this book is unfailingly cheerful.   Its author is upbeat, wholesome and well-adjusted.    It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood:  the optimistic Mr. Rogers theme is sounded several times, usually without irony, as a legitimate way of being, while Peter Pan, Wendy, and the Lost Boys serve as an ongoing metaphor for the uncertain, dreamy and sometimes unreal fairy tale of a baseball life.     It’s a way of being that Kathleen Lockwood knew more intimately than most of us ever will.

Before any baseball scenes take place, however, the reader experiences a few  chapters taken from the author’s surprisingly sheltered childhood and adolescence.    She was raised in a “Donna Reed” and “Father Knows Best” culture, a bygone era in which stay-at-home wives greeted their husbands cheerfully every evening with a happy kiss and some form of roast in the oven.   Hello Ward, how was your day?   Laundry clean and folded, orderly household, well-behaved children.   Very little conflict or turmoil.    “Stress” was a word used by builders and civil engineers; spoken usually as a verb, it simply meant to emphasize.

Many women took pride in their role as homemakers.   The concept wasn’t considered embarrassing or demeaning.    The act of making a home – creating and defining it, sustaining the happiness and well being within it – was viewed as a worthy vocation, wherever that home may have been, however transient or permanent, whatever form it took.   

Think about it:  there’s a reason why the five-sided plate in baseball is called “home.”   It’s a spot on the ball field that is loaded with significance.   Homes don’t just come out of nowhere, like subdivisions in Levittown, sprung up overnight.   As a destination signifying happiness and victory, the concept is not so very easy to attain, neither in games nor in real life.

During the ten years they experienced together in the world of baseball, Kathy and Skip Lockwood lived in thirty-one different residences.

The stuff of Kathleen’s drama, initially, is domesticity.  Chores.  Car rides.   Baton twirling and tap dancing.  Getting dressed for the college mixer.  Choosing tablecloths for her wedding reception.  Transporting the hope chest.   Hanging wallpaper.   Hauling the diaper bag.   Checking into a hotel.  Checking out.   Digging crayons out of a purse.    Raw material such as this isn’t instantly engaging, nor may it be of great interest to baseball audiences, even though the sympathetic central character follows her heart and dares to accompany a gifted athlete on his questionable journey toward a very uncertain future.  

The first half of Lockwood’s memoir involves a fair amount of telling, explaining, and getting through the chronology and itinerary of a young couple’s life.   There are few dramatic scenes that propel the story forward.  While we’re given an accurate account of the trajectory of Skip’s career throughout the memoir, the player himself doesn’t immediately come to life; he’s a vague presence and a relatively flat character at the outset. 

The story gains momentum in its second half, however, with scenes grounded more vividly in a wonderful variety of baseball landscapes.  Physical action moves to the foreground, as stats, game descriptions, and a pitcher’s experience begin to stand out dramatically in relief against the backdrop of ordinary life.

When baseball moments come to the foreground (imagine a Ken Burns effect, slowly panning away from a quiet domestic scene, perhaps a midnight dinner in a makeshift kitchen), a pitcher is throwing in sunny Class AAA Tucson  … or making his exciting debut at Shea, replacing Tug McGraw as the Mets’ #1 closer … or jump-starting his career on a lonely field in Winter Haven.   Here are the special scenes and features we’ve all been wanting to experience, shining now with an unusual luster and authenticity.

As the most important components of her story come together, the on-/off-the-field lines blur, and life becomes one thing.    It’s all the same thing:  her life and his.    It’s here that the book gracefully achieves its climax and raison d’etre, the point at which professional achievement and personal satisfaction fortuitously coincide.  It’s that rare situation, not always so easy to achieve, called baseball happiness.

 “Baseball was fun again,” Lockwood writes, recalling the productive, happy seasons spent with the New York Mets, the liveliest and most engaging segment of her story.   While delighting in a wondrous new lifestyle, the author’s excitement isn’t really about living in Greenwich and shopping at Saks.  It’s not about affluence, fame and material things; it’s about the joy of sitting in a Broadway theatre with Tom and Nancy Seaver, of knowing good people; the gift of friendship on the night that she gives birth to her first child; the pure fun of being embraced by excited, loving Mets fans inside a crowded diner in Queens.

Lockwood’s baseball memories include the familiar faces of Joe Torre, Felipe Alou, Bobby Valentine (and both his wives); wonderful personalities like the irrepressible Bill Lee and MaryLou, characters who add vivid color to a winter season in Puerto Rico.  Turn left at the pig.  Rusty Staub welcomes the wide-eyed Lockwoods to a vibrant city; the Mets’ wives (Kranepool, Mays, Metzger, et al) travel to Bermuda for an amusing softball tournament; and a ten-year-old Terry Francona serves hot chocolate to all the young moms shivering in the stands.

The author downplays life’s difficulties, including hardships at home and legitimate dangers on the road:  home burglaries, traveling alone, the threat of sexual assault, and all the cruel whims of the baseball world, including  injury and rehab, trades and releases, politics, strikes, management’s needs and managers' moods.   She consistently faces conflict, fear, and sadness with good cheer or stoicism, then quickly adapts to the next challenge.  (Kathleen’s personal battle with breast cancer is mentioned only in passing, the first time as a parenthetical event.)

It’s no accident that the pace of her narrative accelerates, ironically, near the end of Skip’s career, when he is playing through pain.  She describes his motion, pitch by pitch, with the deep understanding of a woman who feels almost physically connected to him, even as he works.   A good baseball story, no matter what its focus or who its author, offers grit and dirt, spit and pain.

She knows the fundamentals of baseball but never flaunts her knowledge or status.   She talks the talk credibly, because she learned the game the way fans learn it best – sitting through many, many innings at home and on the road, and watching.  Lockwood needed no co-author to help her voice the baseball experiences she lived just a short distance from the pitcher’s mound and within of sight of the bullpen.

Kathleen is at her best artistically when taking the time to let a memory unfold in all its fullness, including scenes of tension and conflict.  In a particularly effective scene near the book’s climax, as work and life become increasingly frustrating and the future seems somewhat bleak, a strong and steady woman closes her eyes to defuse pain and worry.  She simply closes her eyes.  It’s a powerful moment.

Kathleen Lockwood attended almost every home game during her husband’s ten-year career.   She happily hit the road, eventually with a toddler and infant in tow, becoming more and more adept at making temporary homes in unlikely places, from a shabby efficiency in Mayaguez to a sub-par Holiday Inn in anywhere U.S.A.   At times she struggled to find her place, yet for most of Skip’s career, she was determined to be herself, even at the most awkward and unfriendly times.  Near the end of the memoir, she exhibits a quiet strength while sitting in the stands, even though her husband is no longer playing, her own deep fears unacknowledged by wives surrounding her in silence.

When your husband is a ballplayer, you show up.

Kathleen Lockwood provides an important and seldom-voiced perspective on baseball.  She gets it.   She embraces the game and the man who plays it, wise in knowing that one of the truest forms of happiness comes when the people you love are doing what matters most to them, fulfilling the promise of talent and dream.    Everyone is the richer for it.

Just as sickness often makes a more interesting medical study than does health, so a dysfunctional story usually makes a more engaging drama than one in which people function capably and responsibly.   (King Lear, for example.)

Major League Bride is a much richer reminiscence than it might at first appear.  It’s a story about a marriage that works, a husband who remains loyal, a wife who makes personal sacrifices for the sake of a game, determined to connect with her husband in ways that matter, even if it means being on his turf instead of her own.   It’s a memoir of commitment, patience, and understanding.

How significant that Kathleen Lockwood recognizes the Red Sox ownership in her conclusion, acknowledging their graciousness in welcoming her husband back to Boston.   She, after all, is the gracious one.   She might have told a very different story of leaving and returning home, with very different emphases, but she went the route of grace, humility, and plain old-fashioned good manners.

From what I’ve seen, a successful relief pitcher has to have ice water in his veins.   And I’m thinking that anyone who loves a relief pitcher and sticks by him must have nerves of steel and a good heart.   In the often troubled and dysfunctional world of baseball, Kathleen Lockwood and her husband Skip succeeded in making a productive and happy life for themselves and for others.  What more need be said?

Major League Bride ends with two intriguing phrases -  “unconditional love” and “childlike wonder” – a pair of apt expressions that capture the spirit of baseball as many dream it should be.

Love isn’t only what you feel.   It’s what you do.

 

________________


warmly recommended:  

Kathleen Lockwood.   Major League Bride:

An Inside Look at Life Outside the Ballpark 

McFarland & Co., Inc.,  2010.

 

next up:   

Jane Leavy.  The Last Boy: 

Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood. 

 

 

 

Viewed from Above

 

  A day or so after receiving his private pilot's license, my 21-year-old son announced that he was taking his younger brother flying.

"We're going at three o'clock."    

I stood dumbfounded in the middle of the kitchen, marveling at the fact that this outing had been presented as a fait accompli, with no one asking for permission, not even an hour in advance.   We were entering a whole new chapter of life, and I found my situation almost amusing.    

"What you actually mean to say is:   Mom ... is it okay if I take him up?    Isn't that what you meant?"   He just smiled.  

I knew about single-engine planes.   They often took family members down together.   Fathers and sons, husbands and wives.  I dared not imagine the possibility of losing both my boys at the same time, but foolishly allowed myself to picture a fiery crash.

And then he spoke again:  "Do you want to come?"

People I really cared about had gone down in planes, and the very thought of such a thing was terrifying to me.  At the same time, I considered my son's passion for flying; his courageous vision of a future; the jets he'd so enthusiastically drawn with chubby markers on countless sheets of paper when he was a small boy; the lessons he'd recently taken from fall to spring,  instruction that I'd helped fund.   All of this had enjoyed my full support and enthusiasm.   I recalled how confident and comfortable I'd always felt whenever he navigated our fishing boat through uncertain riptides and fierce currents, over shallow bars and rocks, or many miles offshore.   How I'd always trusted him to keep us safe.   I trusted him.

Through our kitchen windows I eyed the heights outside:  everything looked clear and peaceful on a windless, deep-blue-sky day, just like today.  

"Okay.   Sure.  I'll go!"   I tried to sound nonchalant and laid-back about the whole thing.   "But just promise me one thing:  please get us back.   Promise me you'll get us all back.  Because if by some chance the three of us were to go down together, your sister would be really bummed."   She had just left home for her freshman year of college.

Our local airport, which is adjacent to the town dump and a skateboard park, looks more like a hut than a terminal.  The air strip resembles an abandoned parking lot, with cracks intersecting the runway and dry weeds sprouting everywhere you look.

Ollie pumped fuel into the wing of a beige Cessna that was so small it could have been a toy, and while doing so he turned to me and said, "You must be his mom."  The gruff, weathered Cape Codder mentioned that it's traditional for the mother to accompany a pilot on his first official flight.  I had never known about this ritual.  Phew, I thought, good thing I'd said yes to this opportunity.  What a loser I'd be if I had chosen not to come.  What a crummy mother.   

For what seemed to be the first time in my life, I took a back seat to both my sons, figuratively and literally.   It actually felt good not to be the one in charge, especially in those surroundings.  As I fastened and tightened my seat belt, I noted that the hired plane smelled dusty and very old, a bit metallic.

"This thing reminds me of  the cars I used to ride in when I was a little girl." 

"Yeah, Ma, that's probably because this plane was built in 1969."

I felt my first wave of nausea, and the possibility of airsickness midflight suddenly worried me.  How embarrassing would that be.  Or maybe I'd pass out, and if that were to happen, my boys in their matching headsets would likely not even notice.   There they sat, side by side and pretty much all grown up, the guy on the left carefully reviewing his final checklist.   I felt surges of pride and fear.

Take-off was remarkably smooth and steady, notwithstanding all the ruts and bumps on the runway.  He banked a smooth turn to our left, and within seconds we were out over the Atlantic Ocean, above the pencil tip of a lighthouse, the graceful curve of Monomoy, viewing everything from a mystical perspective.   I looked down upon the stunning layout of our town, the landscape of my children's happiest summer memories.

We could see the dramatic changes that nature had wrought from year to year, the land reconfiguring itself with every perfect and imperfect storm, the cut where the sea had broken through and opened up a new inlet, the big swirls of bars, the aqua shallows and bluer depths, so many liquid images...

whitewashed sand and specks of lobster boats, the fish pier, and a lone vessel cutting across the sapphire background of a deeper sea; ascending further then banking again to the left over broad sweeps of town and darker inland areas, wispy curves of road, miniature patches of rooftop, including that of our own home, the delicate line of a tidal creek, my dad's house and my sister's too, the grand hotel along the shore, and three golf courses that looked like playgrounds, which is exactly what they are.  I imagined living like this, right here - no longer on earth, nor in a beachfront cottage, but suspended in midair and sky, hovering over all this beauty.  How cool would that be?

Finally it appeared.  The pilot had guided our aircraft straight over the spot, knowingly I suspect.  A landmark and a beloved place.  Never had I viewed the ball field - our very own hometown field - from directly above.  A couple hundred feet above, and in the company of my two boys.    The sudden sight of it  from this heavenly perspective and in these circumstances took my breath away.

   

Not just the large diamond, where the big boy games are played almost every night in summer, with its true greens and that perfect, natural color of real sand so easy on the eye, but the small field too, the one full of sharp gravel that was never a very friendly material for all the camp kids and Little League teams.  There they were, side by side, the two fields where my three children had learned to play baseball - to love baseball - just below us now in a perfect layout and complementary fit, as if drawn by an artist's pen.

But as you've probably already noticed, there's something wrong with this picture.  The lines of late summer, drawn for another game, are altogether wrong.    They cut across the diamond and the outfield, obtruding on the geometry, compromising the purity of the thing.

Children need fields to play on - all kinds of fields for many different games.   I've sliced many an orange for many a team in October and November; spent long hours shivering on the sidelines while shouting, Take it to the goal!    Games that require no hands and contests that end in a tie don't completely do it for me, but I understand why they're worthy endeavors for many. A rectangle with a circle in the middle makes sense as a playing field, I suppose.  Baseball is not the only thing.

The ball field disappeared behind us, and I strained to make it linger as my eye erased all the superfluous white lines. Back toward earth we descended,  cruising slowly over the dump and finally touching the short runway with hardly a bump.

Down here on solid ground I can see a glow of lights and sometimes a sliver of moon from our back door after the sun goes down.    In summertime we see that warm glow of the ball field almost every evening.  When the breeze is right in June and July, we can hear the announcer's friendly voice, the anthem from afar, the cheering of a crowd - all beckoning, as if to say come on over and see.  

Tonight as I look over toward the ballpark, the lights are glowing once again, shining to light another kind of game.

I watch that vague glow from an upstairs window and from my pillow too.  Sometimes it's the last thing I see before closing my eyes at night, as my thoughts take me higher up, and I view a baseball field  from a mystical height, just before dreaming.

No-Hitter

 

It is so refreshing when on rare occasions

the game speaks for itself

and transcends words.

 

 

"I think words would ruin the performance."    

Scott Rolen on Roy Halladay

October 6, 2010

 

 

Game Over

The 2010 season ended for the Red Sox this past Sunday with an 8-4 win over the New York Yankees.

"For the first time since 2006, Game No. 162 of the regular season meant closure for the Red Sox. Before the game, players were signing bats for each other and packing up other keepsakes.  It was a day to say goodbye for a while, and the Red Sox did so by pulling out an 8-4 victory over the Yankees that prevented their rivals from winning the American League East title."

   Boston took the series, having lost the home opener in extra innings after four hours and eighteen minutes of play.   The Sox won game two of the day/night doubleheader, another four-hour contest that also went into extra innings.   In spite of two very satisfying October wins, Sox fans have known for a pretty long time that the Yankees would enjoy a post-season berth, while the banged-up Red Sox players would be heading home.    I often wonder why ballplayers don't sound especially happy when it's time to go home. 

They're all packed up in Chicago and Cleveland, Detroit and  Kansas City, St. Louis, San Diego, Denver, Queens, Anaheim, Seattle, Washington, Milwaukee, Miami, and so on.  Most players are already gone.  The seats at Fenway are empty.    And Mikey Lowell's playing career is done.  

The oft-occurring, much-hyped Yankee-Red Sox match-ups are behind us now, for 2010 at least.  It's time to enjoy the respite from those prolonged contests, which many commentators and fans have begun to measure in terms of hours and minutes, even though baseball supposedly has no clock.  

The game continues to play itself out in replays and ongoing speculation; in winter meetings, winter workouts, winter ball, and nonstop television coverage.  The activity continues not just among players for whom the game has become a year-round commitment, but in our minds too - in all those endeavors that keep it going in the imagination, which is where so much of baseball happens anyway.  

The problem isn't really with the regular season ending; the problem is with us.  We're looking out the kitchen window again with a blank expression, facing a gray landscape and tremulous leaves, and time is passing after all, though baseball often had a way of making us forget about that part.  You can sit around feeling depressed about it, or you can be creative and productive long after the seats empty out.   In  conversations, hobbies, essays, daydreams, and works of art we sustain the joy and find the meaning.  

Two years ago, toward the end of baseball's quiet off season, my daughter spontaneously up and left her comfortable off-campus apartment and headed to Home Depot on a mission.  The men in orange aprons guided her toward the lumber section where basic materials are stacked well out of  reach by forklifts, and there she purchased an eight-foot section of three-quarter-inch plywood.  She then located a few jars of sample paint, a small can of polyurethane, and with her older brother's help, she twined the floppy piece of board to the roof rack of her small car.  Over the course of the next two weeks, my daughter created a field of her own: drawing mostly free hand with only masking tape and a couple large cups as guides, she penciled and then painted the diamonds, base paths, bags, team logos, pitching mound and rubber, two infields, and a big sweep of color in the middle favoring Boston.  

Her goal was to finish the project in time for her birthday party on the first day of spring.  The game table has since seen heavy use, usually by young men and women holding blue and red plastic cups full of beer.   

My daughter has followed baseball for a long time.   She was three years old when I first took her to  Dodgertown.   We sat among all the happy retirees just a few rows behind those unmercifully hot, unshaded aluminum benches that served as "dugouts" for many seasons of spring training.  In a charming setting that is no longer home to the team from California, we spent a couple hours within hearing distance of a gregarious Tommy Lasorda and a rookie named Piazza who was taking his practice springs and earning a spot on the big league roster.   My daughter paid close attention to baseball at a very young age, though she finally fell asleep in the bottom of the seventh under the blazing Florida sun, cradled in my lap, with a Dodger bear in her arms and ketchup on her fingers.

A few years later at baseball camp up north, she would have her own spot in a Cape Cod dugout and on the infield too.  Her coaches were Chatham A's players who playfully dubbed her "Mrs. Nomar."   Some days she was the only girl who showed up among forty or fifty boys.    

I took her back to Dodgertown one winter when the Vero Beach temperatures didn't climb much higher than forty degrees.   We were the lone fans - one boy, one girl, one mom.   Not a single soul  walked the quiet grounds except us - not any souls that I could see anyway, unless you count the happy eyes and smiles painted on big round light bulbs shaped like baseballs that line the park's entrance.   Everything was locked and zipped up tight, but my son spied a small opening in the chain link along the third base line, so in we went.   My children were happy to walk the empty field with me, even with no promise of baseball.  It was Super Bowl Sunday.

A few years later my daughter and I sat together in Loge Box 125 at Fenway Park.   As the late April afternoon grew cool and shadows lengthened over the infield, we were subtly touched by that strange sensation that comes over you when you begin to realize that it's the top of the sixth and the pitcher hasn't yet given up a hit.   From that moment on, we were locked in, pitch after pitch, until the joyful outburst that came with the final out - a quick grounder to Rey Sanchez at second.  How fitting that it should be a ground ball out.  

When we went back to Fenway later that spring for another game, Caitlin stood quietly at the railing watching batting practice, hoping for a signed ball from anyone.   When Derek Lowe emerged  nonchalantly from the dugout, my daughter exchanged smiles with the tall player while sharing her pen, ever so happy to announce that she'd been at the ballpark for his no-hitter a few weeks before.  "You were awesome!" she had a chance to say, beaming for many minutes thereafter with ball in hand.

Derek Lowe 32.  No-Hitter. 4-27-02.

On October 16, 2003, we sat very close together on the sofa in the darkness of our family room, the only glow of light coming from Yankee Stadium in the bottom of the twelfth as Aaron Boone made contact and sent Tim Wakefield's first pitch high over the left field wall, three hours and fifty-six minutes after the game had begun.  We watched the knuckleballer's somber yet dignified exit from the mound, and went to bed feeling stunned and incredibly sad. 

She knows that baseball offers second chances, because a year later we gathered for World Series, Game 4.  We were a larger group this time around, since I'd coincidentally offered to host a field hockey team dinner that same evening.  The whole j.v. squad, plus the coach (a Classics teacher), the school chaplain (a longtime Tigers fan), and the assistant Head of School (who had vowed to drive round and round the campus later that night honking the horn of his old Subaru wagon  - no matter how late the hour - if the Red Sox were to win the Championship).  A bottle of Moet was already in his refrigerator at home, chilled and ready to go.   Eighteen of us gathered by the fire for a festive pre-game dinner on that historic October night.   I roasted a huge turkey for the team, complete with all the harvest trimmings, a lavish spread on our dining room table.  We called it Thanksgiving.

When my daughter went away to college, one of the first pictures she sent home featured three  happy young women standing against the backdrop of a ball field.   (The University's baseball team  would advance to the College World Series the following June.)

She lives so far away from home - more than twelve hours door to door - and sometimes I ache when thinking of that distance and all the happy years that have passed too quickly.  But I always feel better upon remembering that baseball has a hold on her.   Long after the final out of the regular season, the game is still being played for both of us - poetically in the mind as Giamatti used to say, and much less poetically in the form of a game board out on a screened porch, next to a big empty keg of beer.  

The game gets in the blood, as many players and coaches will tell you.   It gets in your head, and if the circumstances are just right when it takes hold, it remains there and never completely leaves, then finds curious ways of asserting and manifesting itself.  

When my daughter caught her first glimpse of Dodgertown one warm afternoon in spring, foot-long hot dog in her tiny hand, something was happening:   an image took shape even as her young mind was developing at a very rapid clip, absorbing all kinds of patterns and ideas.  The baseball field, its colors and dimensions, the essential shape and beauty of the thing, the everlasting fun of it took hold, and there it stayed, mysteriously embedded in her psyche.  It would find expression in a variety of ways over time, even as she ventured far from home. 

Baseball isn't just fathers playing catch with sons.   It's so much more.