watching the game

Literature, the New York Mets, and the Tug of Baseball

 

 

A paper presented at The 50th Anniversary of the New York Mets

Hofstra University ~  April 28, 2012

________

 

 

 

Judy Johnson, Hall of Fame, 1975.  

“Sure-handed third baseman from the sandlots of Delaware.  A key player in the  Negro Leagues.   Good instinctive base-runner . . . line drive hitter with an excellent batting eye; a smart, soft-spoken and well-respected player, an athlete whose intelligence set him apart." 

 

 

If I were a professional ballplayer, these are attributes I'd hope to display. William Julius Johnson.   Judy.   What an honor to bear his name. 

But I’m not that Judy Johnson.  I’m an English teacher, ordinary fan, mother of three children who love baseball.  One of those kids slept peacefully in my arms on a long escalator ride to the top of Candlestick Park in August 1986.   My firstborn son was six weeks old, and I had to show him the game, and the visiting team.  I had to show him my Mets.

Three summers later we sat in  95-degree heat, 8 rows from the tippy top of Shea Stadium, all sticky with Dove Bar and beer.  My boy was with me on the night that Number 8 kept Game 6 alive.   When it was all over, I jumped up and down on the bed  -   “They won! The Mets won!”  -  and twirled my baby around the room, screaming,  “I can’t believe they won!”   

A few months later that tiny child spoke one of his first words:  Mookie.  

I cannot boast vast quantities of baseball knowledge or memorabilia, but a few Mets items have taken up residence in my home:  a plastic chip-and-dip plate in the shape of a baseball glove molded in orange and royal blue. A 3x3 black-and-white photo of Ron Hunt, snapped on April 12, 1965.  He’s walking back to the dugout on a dreary opening day.  Few fans are in the seats at Shea.  We’re two hours early, Dad and I, and my  sisters, ages 5 and 7.  

On my writing desk, a ball signed by Tom Seaver, another by Ed Kranepool, together with an 8x11 portrait of Cleon Jones, his arms outstretched, body leaning forward, knees slightly bent, eyes looking up, hands coming together – and his graceful signature in bright blue permanent ink.  

I own an exquisite library full of books - classical, English, American, postcolonial; Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare; the OED complete 13-volume set, precious editions of Austen and Woolf, a slim folio signed by T.S. Eliot. Prodigious intellects lend gravitas to my collection:  the Jameses, both Henry and Bill, plus those of a different order: Kiner’s Corner; Straw;  The Bad Guys Won; Wherever I Wind Up; The Complete Game, by Ron Darling; Great Moments in Baseball, by Tom Seaver,  Miracle Man, Nolan Ryan;  Ya Gotta Believe! and 100 Things Mets Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die. 

I like the fact that John Donne keeps Tug McGraw company on my shelf.    I need the words of baseball.  I feel this as an intellectual and spiritual need, romantic and physical. 

I’ve followed the New York Mets for 50 years.  How can this possibly be?  How can I be older than a ball club?  I’ve endured longer than Shea Stadium did (by a decade), a fact that saddens and amuses me . . . .  

Rooting for the Mets as a child in the 1960s was a perfect way of preparing for life’s and baseball’s disappointments, failures, losses, and dysfunctions. Long before I heard the cliché, I understood viscerally that baseball is a game of failure, because I lived that truth with the early Mets. They taught us not to set the bar too high, until along came an expertly coached team of men who showed us the difference between mediocrity and grandeur.  I rooted for the Mets because they were my dad’s team.  Their abysmal debut season 40-120 felt like a huge win to me, because I’d discovered an amazing game at the tender age of 7 and delighted in every part of it. 

Baseball didn’t begin with souvenirs, t-shirts, and a lot of food; it started with names, sounds, and rhythms in our home.  It began with words. 

My father was a Dutch Reformed minister who worked 7 days a week and many evenings too, but when he came home and spent time with me, baseball asserted itself as language, and this is how the game felt most real. My dad spoke two languages, scripture and baseball, his words rooted in love, with phrases that became deeply embedded in my young psyche:   “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.   

The game’s magical vocabulary - metaphor and idiom, syntax and rhythm, diction both poetical and crude – was the highlight of our daily conversation, a joyful mode of thought, a language that I loved.  While learning to speak English in increasingly complex ways during my school years, the splendid lexicon of baseball was a key part of the curriculum, while the New York Mets felt like something basic and fundamental – as normal, natural, and necessary as speech itself.

Baseball is a physical thing, of course, and I loved the grit of it long before Title IX and Little League finally opened the gates to young women. I played ball with Tunis Van Peenen and Michael Minervini every day after school on the John F. Kennedy playground. Traveling across the monkey bars, I sang my song of the ’66 Mets, their names forming a happy litany:  McMillan, Hunt, Luplow, Jones, Bressoud, Kranepool, Grote, Swoboda.  

The Mets kept me company long after the real boys went home.

While my best friend Janet Vandergoot gloated about Mantle, Maris, Murcer and Ford,  I defended Danny Napoleon and Choo Choo Coleman.  Baseball began with the names of men chanted on the playground, sung in the kitchen, playing on the radio out on the screened porch on summer nights, and read in the quiet of my closet while I studied many slim pieces of cardboard.  

The beginning of baseball was the word:   Edward Emil Kranepool.   6’ 3.”   205 lbs.   Bats:  L.    Throws:  L.   Bronx, NY. 

My eyes traveled slowly from one horizontal line to the next until a few diminutive letters stopped my breathing, and changed my life . . . .

 

 

 

To read the complete paper, please download here: 

Literature, the NY Mets, and the Tug of Baseball

 

 

 

 

 

Farewell

 

“And listen to the sound of a new beginning

Oh, this is where the old is ending

Listen to the sound . . . .”

 

                                                                         Building 429

 

 

 

We arrived at the ballpark early, my sister and I.    Very early.   Two weeks ahead of pitchers and catchers.   Few people walked the neighborhood.   No one rehabbing or laying down bunts on the practice fields.  No vendors selling beer and popcorn in the stands.

It was early February and I couldn't wait to see a game.    Any game.   How blessed we were to see much more.

Roger Dean Stadium, Jupiter, Florida.  When spring training begins, the Miami Marlins and World Champion St. Louis Cardinals will share this facility and its strikingly ordinary ballpark built with such comfortable, inviting human proportions in mind.   Tonight belongs to a different team, however.   It's the season opener for the NCAA Divison II and  NCCAA  Palm Beach Atlantic University Sailfish.   Their coach:  Gary Carter, onetime Expo and New York Met, winner of five Silver Slugger awards, three Gold Gloves, 11-time All Star, HoF inductee 2003, proud family man, dying tonight of brain cancer.  A pitcher named Darling paid tribute to Carter on the MLB Network recently, holding a simple sign while remembering the strong, vibrant man who once squatted behind the plate.

We arrive to find a remarkably peaceful place.   No noisy throngs of snowbirds hungrily seeking autographs of big-leaguers and future stars. No well-groomed broadcasters on the sidelines.   Four young men in camouflage stand at the entrance to the field, ROTC students from PBA, serving as color guard for the evening, readying the flags.   Young men in orange jerseys stretch and sprint on the field, loosen their arms. A broad-shouldered catcher dons his mask, outfielders play catch, parents and girlfriends find their seats.

Country ballads blend with Christian music in ways that make this experience more powerful and real.   The game is free.  Hundreds of seats all for the taking, no questions asked.   I find mine and snap a picture of it, feeling both pleasure and sorrow.  I was born on November 8th.   Eight is my favorite number.   A big bright jersey hangs in the home dugout tonight, but no one will be wearing it.   Number 8.

All the young players sport blue wristbands inscribed with the words Team Carter and Isaiah 40:31, referencing their Coach's charitable foundation, together with his favorite passage of scripture:

"those who hope in the LORD
   will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
   they will run and not grow weary,
   they will walk and not be faint."

 

Just before 7 p.m. the crowd grows quiet as a few family members enter the ballpark through a small gate out in left field.  They take a long, unhurried walk across the grass.  Moments later, a golf cart approaches through an opening in right field.  Everyone in the crowd  stands up.   About 500 of us.

Gary Carter greets his team of players one by one, while his daughter Kimmy (PBA's winning head softball coach), his wife Sandy, and tiny granddaughter watch from just a few steps away.   "Let's get a win tonight!" Coach says to all his boys. 

"He wanted to be here for his guys,"  his daughter Kimmy will say.  

Earlier today I read about Gary Carter in The Palm Beach Post.  I read about how he'd showed up at his team's first official practice back in January, walking with the aid of a cane yet celebrating the beginning of a new season:   "Guys, the day's finally here!  It's spring!  Let's get after it!"  That's how 6'2" Logan Thomas, tonight's starting pitcher (who will soon throw a first-pitch strike), remembers it.  

Carter's life has already become a story.

Fans honor Gary Carter lovingly with applause and silent prayers.   And then the formal part of the evening begins.   It starts in a way I've never seen before.  We don't hear anyone cry, "Play Ball!"   Instead, a campus pastor - standing just behind the neatly-painted lines of home plate, very near the catcher's spot - delivers a prayer for all to hear.  "Give him peace," he says, "and give him power."

Power.   While all the fans bow their heads in prayer, I think about power.

Bottom of the 10th.   Boston 5, New York 3.  The Mets are down to their last out on October 25, 1986.  Everyone remembers this as the Bill Buckner game.  I have always viewed it as the Gary Carter and Mookie Wilson game.  Everyone remembers '86.

The count stands at 2-1, Carter at the plate. In a show of relentless grit and determination (more than power, it seems to me), he singles to short left field, and I stare at the cube television in disbelief.  Then I behave idiotically.  I run around our California bedroom screaming, pumping my fists, jumping up and down on a full-sized bed where my baby sits gazing at the television from his bouncy seat.  He is but four months old, and he's watching the game.  I pull him out of his canvas lounge chair and twirl him all around the room.  I just want to share the game with him.   

On February 1, 2012, Gary Carter views the PBA home opener from the press box with family members and close friends Tom Hutton and Jeff Reardon.  "His whole life is baseball and the Lord, and of course his family,"  Reardon has said.  An ailing Carter watches three innings of Florida baseball, and then it's time to go home.

The PBA Sailfish trail Lynn University 3-2 as they head into the bottom of the ninth.   Let's get a win tonight.   It's spring!    Let's get after it!    With two outs, Travis Murray - who majors in biology and envisions a career in medicine - delivers the game-winning RBI single.  Travis is a catcher.

Despite a battle with aggressive brain cancer, Gary Carter remains a smiling inspiration to his players and fans.    This is what we will read in the morning paper tomorrow while we eat breakfast on the patio.

The team stands in a circle of prayer in deep right field.   Remaining in Seat Number 8, I replay a scene from three hours earlier.   Gary Carter moves toward the home dugout from that same corner of the field, riding in the rear of a golf cart, traveling slowly along the first base line, facing backwards as they appoach home plate from first, circling around the catcher's box and heading inevitably yet curiously toward the bag at third - not in the counter-clockwise way that baseball usually moves -  then down the left-field line, far away from us, and disappearing through a small opening in the wall.  As that cart makes its gentle turn around home plate, I press my right hand against my heart, and with the other I wave goodbye.

 

 

 

His Grace is reaching for us

His Grace is reaching out

Listen to the sound, listen to the sound

Wherever you are.

 

 

 

Please click here to view Gary Carter's final home opener.

Click here to watch Hall of Fame acceptance speech.

 

My Favorite Glove

 

"Remember this game is more than a score."

                                                              -  A Glove of Their Own

 

Spontaneous and simple ballgames are the ones that remain most vivid in my memory and closest to my heart.

 Mom, can you pitch to me?   

He was only two years old and I was four months pregnant, and when I opened my eyes to see a small boy wide awake not long after sunrise, yellow plastic bat in hand, I knew I had to rise up, even though my body felt queasy and uncertain.  

Please can you pitch to me?  

I threw my best pitches with his Wiffle balls and he smacked line drives all over the room.    “Atta boy!” I cried in my nightie, then fell back into bed.

When that same boy was ten years old, he needed bases for a family game that was just about to begin in my sister’s broad front yard.   While the kids chose teams – cousins, parents, aunts, uncles, neighborhood kids, and grandparents too – I searched the basement.   We didn’t yet have all the fancy equipment and random Nike and Rawlings stuff that now fills a big corner of my garage, but I was happy to come upon some pretty good pieces of three-quarter-inch plywood that weren’t exactly square, but they’d be okay for first, second, and third.   They marked the spot and served their purpose well – that is, until my son slid hard into second, feet first, and a very sharp corner of raw wood tore a deep gash in his bare knee.  A half hour later, the boy lay on our dining room table while his dad prepared to suture up the bloody wound.   I played nurse in the background, thinking about how my choice of plywood bases had been so dumb.

There were always games in the yard, and the kids didn’t need much to make them happy.   My youngest child brought friends home from Cape League baseball camp almost every weekday in summer, their structured morning drills and scrimmages spilling over into lazy afternoons near the beach.  For hours they played pickle and web gems, chased balls across our clover and crabgrass and into the neighbors’ well manicured hedge of shrub roses, then dove or fell backwards into hydrangeas in full bloom.  They played pickup games on Lighthouse Beach until the offshore winds became fierce, or out in the front yard of our suburban home until the sky grew too dark for seeing.  They must have been playing by feel and sound alone, because I couldn’t see a thing except maybe a crescent moonrise out my bedroom window. 

The game got bigger and more serious when we visited real ballparks, and that’s where we once spent Easter weekend.   Vero Beach Dodgers @ Dodgertown.   Florida State League.  Class A Advanced.   Once upon a time.  Where the dugouts weren’t even dugouts, just aluminum benches open to the blazing sun or a night sky loaded with stars.   Our kids ate hot dogs on Good Friday when they probably should have been in church, and somehow that just didn’t seem right.  When a ball angled sharply off a lefty’s bat in the bottom of the third, the foul headed straight at my nephew Tommy and practically knocked the frankfurter out of his hand.  Actually, what really happened was this:  Tommy read what was happening right off the bat, dropped his hot dog to the ground, and snagged that ball with his six-year-old hands.

One Easter Sunday, our large extended family played a lively game with plastic bats and tennis balls.   The Cape Cod weather was unseasonably warm, so we all wore shorts, ran the bases in flip flops, and felt as though we’d been born again.  We shot those bright yellow balls all over the neighbor’s yard, and the day rang with sacrifice flies and laughter.

The best ball fields are often the simplest ones:   a Cape Cod lawn, a front yard loud with children, a bedroom full of sunlight.     Just as the best churches aren’t always the grand cathedrals.   Chartres, Reims, St. Peter’s, Yankee Stadium:  those structures inspire awe and maybe even godliness in many.     But the sanctuary that always felt most real to me was a woodland chapel (adjacent to a baseball field), built long ago by my mom and dad and a few church folk and a large group of teenagers.   They split wood, hauled logs, talked about the Yanks, carved joints, wondered about the Mets, crafted pews, imagined God, and built a durable altar of river rock and birch.  When finished, they sang hymns outdoors, offered prayers, and dreamed their summer dreams, blessed by a plank that hung from the trees and offered three words carved in rustic wood: 

Done in Love.

Sometimes I cherish material things, thinking they are what make me happy.  Our home is full of baseball gear and fine baseball books and sports memorabilia lovingly collected over the years.  Maybe I place too much value on these possessions:  balls autographed by Seaver, Rice, Varitek, Bay, Pujols, and Lowe; books signed by Feller, Kiner, and Aaron; a Ted Williams photograph, a Pedro Martinez bobblehead, and Johnny Damon’s bat.     

One of my favorite spots in the house is over there in the corner of my study – that basket full of random baseball treasures.   Better than all the Hall of Fame collectibles are one bat boy’s helmet, a few Cape League caps, a Dodger bear, a pillow that says “Play Ball,” the Easton glove my kids gave me on Mother’s Day several years ago, and a collection of dappled composition books containing the minutes of the “Back Yard Bush Club,” established c. 1994 for kids only.  

Atop this basket there’s a book that keeps calling for my attention.  Its cover invites me in; its landscape beckons, reminding me of a place I once knew.

 A Glove of Their Own  is a brief story written in rhymed couplets by a trio of women who celebrate the yearnings of kids who have very little, yet still desire to play the game.   The story is in fact a poem that takes place on a field that bears no name and boasts no painted logo.   The players have no uniforms, no scoreboard or flashing signs, no fans in the crowd, no rock star taking peculiar liberties with the national anthem.

In our town there’s a park, / with an oak tree so tall.

The story’s measured tetrameter phrases and its sing-song rhymes run a bit contrary to the unpredictable rhythms and sounds of baseball -  We meet there each day, so we can play ball - and the book’s tone borders on the sentimental, but its message is sincere, its imagery real:  Sticks are the bases; they work just the same.

This book’s simple purpose and the worthy causes it supports have been embraced by those who know what it is to live the dream – Yogi Berra, Tommy John, Sean Casey, among others.  Soft colors, earth tones, and children’s faces summon up a world that feels authentic; the images are dirt and sticks, a soiled ball, and ragged shoes.  The boy in the batter’s box has both eyes on the pitcher.   The girl in the ponytail takes a lead off first base.

I once lived this story – not because I grew up poor (modest, yes), but because we knew how to have fun without having much in a material way.    I know that field.   I know those kids.   I’ve played with some of them.   I feel fortunate to have lived this story.

 Our ballgames weren’t organized in advance.  They happened spontaneously almost every afternoon in spring, because the field was the one place where we all wanted to be.   We didn’t have a formal league or a website designed to look like ESPN.    No schedules or rosters posted on the fridge, nor parents whose personal and professional lives revolved around a ton of events crowding our eight-year-old calendars.  Few if any spectators watched us play, but that didn’t matter; we expected no audience, because we enjoyed our freedom and the game was enough. We shared bats of various weights and sizes, and they were made of wood.  The lively activity of hormones and innocent romances supplied a subtext, while the open, unnamed space where we gathered offered a sanctuary in the midst of changing lives.  For better or worse, I cannot remember ever wearing a helmet on my head.    

 You don’t really need a lot of stuff in order to learn baseball.  You don’t need a ton of money in order to love the game.   You don’t need anything like a million dollars, and millions of dollars certainly don’t guarantee a winning season.  The basics are what kids need, and it doesn’t take much for anyone to give back, once they've known the love of it.   In the grand scheme of things, it seems to me that the soul of baseball is more about sacrifice and passion than it is about dollars.

You might want to read A Glove of Their Own to a child, give a copy to a friend, or add the volume to your own collection.  On Monday when schools re-open, I’ll be over at the elementary school library; I’ll spend a short while there, and leave a baseball book with the librarian before I go.

Once upon a time, we played baseball nearly every day.  We swapped gear between innings.  I have no idea where that gear came from.    I didn’t have my own glove then.  I often shared with the boy who played third base – he’d toss his glove to me between innings on his way back to the bench as I ran swiftly toward the infield.  I can still feel the sweaty interior of that boy’s glove. 

The glove wasn’t even mine.   But it’s one I’ll long remember.

 

 

 

 

Please visit:

www.goodsports.org

www.pitchinforbaseball.org

www.sportsgift.org