Baseball and Me

Hi -it's been a while - I've was asked by all folks the Mets a few questions in an e-mail survey and well one question was - what does baseball mean to me and because I can't help myself sometimes.
this came out:

Baseball and me

Baseball is for me both a link to the past and a way to mark the passing of the seasons – it emerges like spring from the depths of midwinter with promises here and there of better weather to come, a warm day in February or a spring training game on the TV and the promise hope sometimes fear of the coming season.

        And then the season begins with pageantry and hope and questions that will be answered as the days go by…the number of games 162 lulls one into thinking there is all the time in the world but a season’s youth is soon gone and then as the dog days of summer turn into fall one is either caught in the thrill/anxiety of a pennant race (I’m older so that’s what I call them) or watching for signs of better days to come in the trades and the call ups. And then when the cold weather comes, there is the postseason and the promise of joy but most of the time it will end in heartbreak.

      And for most of us fans there will be heartbreak at the end – games that could have been won or blow out losses at critical points or more cruelly a team that almost but not quite there – a 90 plus loss season as depressing as it can be, especially when it begins to look like this is all you are going to see for years on end, is nowhere nearly as painful in the fan’s heart as the almost winning season, not getting to the playoffs by a game, losing a series, losing the world series –And that suffering binds fans to a team in way that is hard to explain to non-fans. Too many wins in perverse fashion bring a sense of boredom and ennui –as witness by Atlanta or the Yankees not selling out postseason games recently.

For me the 90+ loss seasons merge into forgetfulness but the painful moments of the almost – 1973, 1987, 1988, 1991, 192 1999, 2000, 2006, 2007, 2008 are just seared into me – I can still see that homerun Roger McDowell gave up in 87 fly over center field and Gooden in the 88 playoffs giving up the tying homer in the 9^th against the Dodgers in 1988 – the 99 loss to the Braves in game 6.  

And then there was trading Tom Seaver – this maybe have been the one moment that came closest to ending my fandom. There are not words that fully describe the bitterness that my heart felt at the men who could do this.  After that I followed the team but only just – by then I was also following the Red Sox so my heart was not so purely one teams anymore – (and an entire other essay would be needed to describe my emotional relationship with the Red Sox.).  Suffice to say that aside from Tom’s first Start in Shea as a Red, I did not set foot in Shea until the owners who had traded Seaver had sold the team.  (Judging by the attendance spike that happened I was not alone with this.)

I suppose logically it is some version of the sunk cost fallacy were you’ve given so much that to stop now would mean that all that came before was meaningless – but if you’re going to apply logic and cost benefit analysis to something as ephemeral   as baseball you are not doing it right. This is a decision of the heart not the mind and the heart has its own rules.

And as much as I do love it, baseball is in the end meaningless except to itself and the meaning it gives to people’s lives - poetry if you take strictly utilitarian view is meaningless as well, but at the same time vital for the human soul – and it is within that contraction that things like baseball live – we give it the meaning that it was but at the same time it gives a fan meaning. Not logical or even emotionally coherent but there it is.

There are of course memories of joy – dancing on my lawn with my friend in 1969 in a soft rain right after the Mets won the World Series – I was 13 and to be honest nothing in my life has ever been like that feeling of sweet simple joy I felt then. Other good memories – the run to the division in 1973, the playoffs against the Reds, the home run Lemmy hit against the Astros, the 86 win (made bittersweet by it being against my second favorite team) and this years unexpected dash to the pennant (the series is another matter).

And lastly there is the past – the game is a link to the past and to my own past at this point in my life, my mother and father were both from Brooklyn and especially my mother  were diehard fans (but truly in the 1940-1950’s were there casual Dodger fans?) – I remember my father describing how devastated he was by the 1951 playoff loss to the Giants (as the time he was working as an operating room assistant in a military  hospital near Seattle during the Korean war) that he couldn’t think of anything else – or my mom, who never said a bad word about anybody responding ‘good I hope he rots in hell’ to my telling her that Walter O’Malley had die.

And lastly there are remember tales of my Grandfather, talking about playing baseball in the parade grounds of Brooklyn wearing a cast off Zack Wheat‘s road flannel that was so big on him that he might have been wearing long sleeves or riding a trolley (actually clinging to the outside) to the Dodger’s original Stadium (the one before Ebbet’s Field) where he would watch the game from a fire escape that over looked the field. To tell the truth I did not give this tale much credence , Grandfathers love to tell stories but some years back I saw a picture of the old stadium and sure enough there were the fire escapes crowded with spectators  - dang he was right was my thought. Alas he was long gone by then so I couldn’t share it with him.  (that's the picture I saw up top).

But I like to think they are there with me when I’m at a game, keeping score (another massive essay on why I do that could be written.) There with me is the chill of a spring game the laze of a summer night game or in the almost unspeakable tension of late season games and playoffs. 

And on occasion I do get to cheer like a lunatic as well – like when Cespedes hit that home run against the Dodgers – I was horse for two days after that.

It was worth it, at that moment it was all worth it. All of it, even the rotten parts.  It’s why I’m a fan.