Home Base

Every year around this time I get excited about the start of baseball season, and every year I do not watch a single baseball game. I love baseball, although I have always loved the idea of baseball more than the game itself. I like the way baseball is elastic; a game might last two and a half hours, or it might last five. I like the game’s simple metronomic rhythms: pitcher throws ball, batter swings, catcher throws pitcher to batter, pitcher throws to batter, and so on. The action is both compact and sprawling. At any moment, a baseball may get launched four hundred feet or a shortstop might make an incredible diving catch or a streaker might run onto the field. I like baseball’s constancy. During the season, it’s every single night, the soundtrack to warm weather and watered-down beer.

I grew up about 50 miles outside of New York city, so my sporting allegiances have always been with the New York teams: the Giants, the Knicks, none of the hockey teams because hockey sucks, and, yes, I have enjoyed following both the Yankees and the Mets at different times over the years, even though it’s considered verboten to like both baseball teams from a single metropolitan area. My favor falls on whichever team happens to be performing better that season. If neither is performing well, I’m happy to ignore them both.

Does that make me a fair-weather fan? You bet it does. Life is heartbreaking enough without purposely compounding the pain by cheering on a shitty sports team. No thank you. No, I will follow the breeze of whichever NY baseball team blows fairest.

1986 was the last year I went all-in on a baseball team. I was fifteen that year, and miserable. Home life sucked. School life sucked. The Amazin’s were a welcome distraction from all of that. The Mets were a drugged-out, steroid-addled, libidinous group of freaks and I loved them with the full-hearted love of a kid. It’s the kind of love adults have a hard time giving, unconditional and trusting to the point of naivety. The Mets were young and brash and they had one guy who’s last name was Strawberry and another whose first name was Mookie. They got into fistfights. They did a ton of blow. What’s not to love?

Portrait of Jackie Robinson hanging in my dining room by Dave Daignault.

Before the Mets, I have vague memories of rooting for the Yankees during their 1977 championship season. I remember sitting alone in a bedroom somewhere, my eyes glued to a small black-and-white television, Reggie Jackson at the plate. It might’ve been Game Seven of the World Series or it might’ve been a meaningless August game against the White Sox; it didn’t matter to me. Reggie was my Babe Ruth, a towering Colossus. Both men led their Yankees team to championships. Both men loved their celebrity, and played it to the hilt. They were both icons who stood in a city filled with icons. Most importantly to me, however, was the fact that both men had candy bars named in their honor. (Never mind that the Baby Ruth is actually named for the eldest daughter of President Grover Cleveland, Ruth Cleveland – in my mind, it was named for Babe Ruth)

A couple years after that championship season and a couple years before he died, my dad took me and my brother to Yankee Stadium with his friend, Doug, who resembled Paulie from the Rocky movies. It was one of my first trips to a major league baseball stadium, and I still remember the shock of th shock of the impossibly green field slowly coming into view as we emerged from one of the dank stadium tunnels. At one point during the game, the announcer asked everybody to stand and remove their caps. We did. Then they honored their captain, Thurmond Munson, who had died in a plane crash earlier in the season. I remember seeing Doug wipe tears from his eyes and feeling as though I was witnessing something inexplicable but extraordinary.

One of the teams I loved growing up wasn’t even a team when I was growing up. My mother’s partner, a woman I refer to Elaine, grew up in Queens. As a kid, she was a rabid Brooklyn Dodgers fan whose hero was their mighty center fielder, Duke Snyder. She even got to meet the great man once, as part of a radio promotion. Decades later, I would find her baseball cards from the era in the bottom of a trunk she kept in the basement: she had Duke’s, of course, PeeWee Reese, the catcher Roy Campanella who became paralyzed after his car slipped on ice, Carl Erskine and, of course, Jackie Robinson, who is not only one of my favorite baseball players of all time but one of my favorite Americans.

Baseball season is coming. They’ve already started showing spring training highlights on the local news, but I haven’t been paying attention. No, I probably won’t watch a game this year but I might reread Roger Kahn’s amazing book about those champion Brooklyn Dodgers, The Boys of Summer, or George Will’s nerdy paean to the game, Men at Work. Maybe I’ll take my kid (who just turned 23) to go see a Savannah Bananas game. They’re a popular independent minor league team around here, sort of like the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball. I might tune into a game on the AM radio if I’ve got a long drive somewhere. Might even pull over to watch a Little League game somewhere if there’s a soft serve ice cream stand nearby. Or if not this season then the next. Baseball’s not going anywhere.