Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou (10 page)

The game had changed. I couldn’t understand it. I decided that maybe my friends were right. Maybe baseball had died and nobody but football fans knew it.

Even though I hadn’t kept up, I had never completely lost interest in the game. I played a little softball in graduate school—casual competitions tied to Sunday afternoon barbeques and beer-drinking. But that wasn’t baseball. Then, when we moved near Houston I decided to renew my interest in the professional game by attending a few in the Astrodome. But, somehow, that wasn’t baseball, either. Baseball was never meant to be played indoors. I’m not terribly sure it was meant to be played at night. Wind, sun, humidity, soggy fields are as much a part of the game as bats and balls. In the Dome, everything was controlled; there were no natural variables. The lights were subdued and carefully aimed so they wouldn’t blind a fielder; and when the bat met the ball, it didn’t
Crack!
with that wonderful snapping surety that signals a hit. It only
mushed.
The noise from the huge scoreboard was distracting, and people were wandering around all over the place when they weren’t doing “the wave.” Almost no one was watching the game.

There were cheerleaders there, too. Cheerleaders for baseball?! Vendors in the stands; yes, some batboys; maybe a mascot; but
cheerleaders?
Cheerleaders belonged on a gridiron. You don’t
cheer
baseball. You root! You shout, curse, groan, whine, taunt, applaud and boo and yell for another beer or a hotdog. You just don’t cheer. (“Get a hit, Get a hit, Biiiig hit!”? C’mon.) The field had been used the previous evening by the Houston Oilers in a preseason contest, and the yard lines were still dimly in place, ruining the diamond’s purity. The groundsmen seemed to spread the dirt around the bags with a desultory attitude, as if fearful of getting it on the carpet. The stands were empty by the bottom of the sixth, even though it was a close game. Houston traffic can be murder; it and everything else was killing baseball!

My attempt to update myself in averages and statistics failed, also. There were more teams now, three full divisions. My few friends who remained avid fans were so full of data that my mind swam trying to keep up with it all. Players seemed to change teams more often than they changed sanitaries. They didn’t even try to stay in the same league. The money was huge, and there was more talk of owners and managers than of players. Corked bats and juiced balls were in the news; so were gambling and steroids.

I continued to try to watch games on television, but that was no less frustrating. The announcers were mostly former NFL stars who couldn’t tell a slider from a sinker. One kept talking about “ground-rule homers.” One color-commentator
had
been a player. He related four times all the details of his best season—1972—when he was a second-string catcher for the Phillies. He talked a good deal about the records the current game was in no danger of breaking and announced upcoming sitcom plots and television specials while he ignored what was happening down on the field. There were commercials following every at-bat, it seemed. Sometimes, during the count the screen filled with some logo for some sponsor, and the pitcher’s background had become a rotating billboard. Because of “network discretion,” the cameras refused to show a rhubarb kicked up between a manager and the first-base umpire that resulted in a fight that turned into a bench-clearing melee and caused the ejection of four players. That’s part of baseball, too, and television was spoiling it.

Radio broadcasts were about the same, although I’m convinced you can “see it better” on radio, since the announcers at least have to glance down at the field now and then to keep listeners reminded of why they tuned in. But in both media, the announcers kept forgetting about the contest in front of them and comparing obscure details of each player’s personal life, contract status, and latest movie appearance or arrest record. My interest faded again. I decided that my first suspicion was right: Baseball in America was dead.

Then my son was born.

###

Don’t misunderstand. I was never one of those new fathers who ran out and bought bat, ball, and glove for an infant who couldn’t yet focus. In fact, I wasn’t that sure I wanted him playing baseball, ever. Organized baseball, I knew from experience and observation, could be a cruel experience, one that could destroy a kid’s self-confidence and create an instinctive sense of self-loathing that would last a lifetime. Neighborhood ball may have been a summertime staple for me, but in latter days, there were no safe vacant lots, and backyards were tiny plots too small for a game of one-eyed cat or even to have a catch with a friend. Kids either played league ball or they didn’t play at all.

The downside of what had happened to organized baseball was vivid to me. Soon after we first married, Judy and I lived directly across the street from a schoolyard diamond. On summer nights, we could sit out in our backyard and hear the shouts and curses of a balding, paunchy coach wearing Spandex shorts and golf shoes screaming at his diminutive fielders to “Run, #%&$@#*%!”, “Get down in front of the #$%!(#@ ball!”, “If that’s the way you hustle, I’d hate to see you take a @%#&!” or “You gonna throw the @%$#*$@ ball or $%&# it?” This was just tee-ball, and some of the players were in diapers only three years before. Memories of my own bench-warming days—interrupted only by infrequent banishment to right field where I stood around kicking the tops off of weeds and waiting for my chance to blow it—combined with more contemporary observations to convince me to seek other avenues for my infant’s athletic endeavors.

Accordingly, a few years later I enrolled my son in soccer. I erected a basketball goal, interested him in fishing, swimming, and even started him with tennis lessons. I tried for nine years to keep baseball a secret, and I desperately hoped that he also would never discover football.

This, I know, to a Texan is heresy. In Texas,
football
is synonymous with
sport;
it’s also synonymous with religion for a great many people in the state. But football to a college-fund-conscious father means orthopedist and orthodontist bills. It also means sitting quietly in the stands while some bruiser bounces your baby boy all over the ground just for the hell of it. Plus, I knew well that whatever verbal abuse our neighboring baseball coach heaped out on his young charge was nowhere nearly so brutal as the articulated vituperation that routinely spewed forth from even a Peewee League football coach’s mouth.

When my son turned nine, though, things changed, and the shift took me completely by surprise. I think the sudden rush of baseball films,
The Natural, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams,
even the silly
Major League
laid the groundwork. Still, these films were more about how baseball was, rather than how it had become, but they stirred something in me. For some reason, I read David Halberstam’s
Summer of ’49,
Heywood Broun’s
The Sun Field
and Ring Lardner’s
Alibi Ike
and
You Knew Me Al.
I found Valentine Davis’s
It Happens Every Spring
and
Rhubarb.
One day, I was down at the video rental store asking if they had
Pride of the Yankees
or
Kill the Umpire.
In sum, I was reawakening to the ideal activity of heading out to the park to buy a hotdog, sip a beer, and engage in something that was and always will be peculiarly American.

But books and movies were too far removed to move me into serious reevaluation. Instead, the whole thing came home to me one spring night as I returned from an out-of-town meeting. It was a long roadtrip across the state, and just after sundown, I found myself on a lonely stretch of West Texas interstate, looking for a place to pull off and get a bite to eat. As I took the next exit ramp toward a crossroads and a less-than-promising truck stop, I spotted a familiar pool of light off in the distance, about a mile away: a baseball field. Impulsively, I steered off the blacktop and onto a chalice drive that wound around some abandoned and rusting farm equipment, past a small grove of mesquite, and into a makeshift parking lot paved with chugholes and boulders the size of compact cars. All the vehicles—pickups, mostly—were covered in red dust. Two sets of rickety bleachers were lined up behind a chickenwire and hurricane fence backstop, which was flanked on either end by ramshackle benches in open dugouts.

There was a portable concession stand that offered nearly icy hotdogs—mustard, but nothing else for condiments—stale buns and watery soft drinks. I waded through boot-scuffing gravel over to the counter and ordered two dogs and a package of well-crushed potato chips. No napkins. I carried my supper to a vacant spot on the bleachers and watched two teams of twelve-year-olds battling in the bottom of the last inning. The stands were full of people, but they were utterly silent. On both sides of the infield, parents and friends, siblings and cousins sat literally on the edges of the splintery seats, fists clenched, brows furrowed, eyes riveted on the youths poised for action on the dimly lit dirt field on the other side of the chain link. The red team was at bat; there were two on, two out, and the count was full, the score tied. Cries of “You can do it!” rivaled other calls: “One more, son—just one more!” “C’mon Brad, it only takes one.” “See the ball, hit the ball.” “Rock an’ fire, Mike, rock an’ fire. Just let him hit it!” “Take him downtown, Brad!” “Come get him, Mike! Nothin’ but BBs! Put him inna book!” “Park one, Brad!”

The warring fans were unmindful of each other, although their rivals might be sitting next to them, might even be members of the same family from all I could tell. Every eye, every mind was focused on the dusty red field before them.

In each dugout, coaches wearing jeans, workboots, and gimmecaps with tractor logos crouched, surrounded by players, all faces turned toward the moment in front of them. As if willing the outcome, every heart and mind was intensely alert.

On the mound, the blue pitcher leaned in to take the sign. His face was smeared with dirt, as was his jersey. The knee of his pants was torn wide open, exposing a bloody knee. His mouth was set in a determined sneer, his hand kneaded the ball as he ground it into his thigh, his cap-shaded eyes slanted in furtive study of his catcher’s digital signs. Behind him, seven players were bent at the waist, up on their toes, gloves out in front of them, their eyes and minds focused on the moment about to unfold. The red batter was in his crouch, bat waving over his right shoulder, his fingers loose on the handle, his spikes planted, waiting.

The pitcher stretched and delivered, the runners started, the batter swung, the fielders moved, and the red-stained orb arched high over the outfield, seeming to gather speed as it roped away toward the barbed-wire fence and the mesquite thicket beyond, while a loan outfielder, glove outstretched, sprinted for all he was worth to the junction to try to intercept the ball before it crossed the line forever. In automatic unison, everyone stood up. I joined them, unaware I was doing it, blissfully ignorant of the dollop of mustard that fell from a half-eaten hotdog onto my shirt. For a moment, all was breathlessly quiet, only the galloping runners’ spikes broke the stillness while both sides of the bleachers silently beseeched the gods of baseball for contradictory miracles. But there could only be one. “That’s gone,” I heard a voice near me whisper in dismay. “See ya!” another voice answered in delight.

In seconds, there was pandemonium. Cars and trucks I hadn’t noticed before were flashing their lights and honking their horns. Half the fans were jumping up and down, hugging one another, slapping themselves on the back while the other half flung their mitts on the ground and groaned in anguished dismay. Half the players were mobbing the hero, tossing their caps in the air and flinging equipment around in a joy that was as pure as it was gracious, while half stood shocked with defeat, not mortified, but quietly proud of an effort that, while disappointing, was still noble.

As I went back to my car, I realized that I was stunned, humbled by what I’d witnessed. My brief, vicarious participation in the moment was nothing short of uplifting, nothing less than inspiring. Shirts can be laundered. Boots can be polished. Experiences like that couldn’t be replaced.

As I drove away, I spied the opposing fans gathering together around pickup beds, pulling out previously secreted caches of beer and passing them around, laughing and joking, boasting and bragging, reliving the whole game all over again. I realized that they’d replay that night for years.

The teams, likewise, red and blue, were co-mingling, talking amiably, sharing a bond that nothing else could have forged. I realized that what I had witnessed was far more than a game, far more than a contest between two kids’ teams. This wasn’t just a pastime; it was a metaphor for life. It was baseball.

###

Now, I felt compelled to give baseball another chance, to attend another major league game. And naturally, I had to take my son. To do otherwise might have been abusive. We went to see the Rangers, and I was able to experience the game from a different perspective. I laid out for the expensive seats, right behind the dugout. That night, my boy fell in love with the players. He called them “awesome.”

But more than that, there was the “awesome” feeling of being in the stands, surrounded by thousands of other people who had unashamedly plunked down a good deal of hard cash to sit on uncomfortable seats and sip extraordinarily expensive beer, munch a cold hotdog, and gaze up occasionally at a humid summer sky while they casually watched a boy’s game being played by grown men. Before I knew it, we were rooting, whining, crying, and yelling. And we were having the time of our lives. It didn’t matter that the Rangers lost miserably. Nothing mattered beyond the experience itself. It was just the moment, I told myself. Parental bonding. Or was it?

That season we started watching the majors on TV with some regularity. I gradually realized that I was doing more than explaining the fundamentals of the game to my nine-year-old. I was proselytizing him. If I couldn’t convince my friends that this was a great game, I decided, perhaps my son would join me in my faith that this was, truly, the only game worth the name.