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BOGGS.
I tried to explain, but things were never quite the same afterwards. A month later we parted ways.
It went beyond the simple boyhood dalliance, this love for baseball, to be sure. I read the box scores, traded bubblegum cards, and played my share of Little League – but there was something else besides. I wrote poems about Carl Yastrzemski. I was a Strat-O-Matic addict. I cherished the autograph of Lamarr Hoyt. (Lamarr who?) I listened to old radio broadcasts of the Sox 1967 Impossible Dream pennant drive, and winced in fresh pain every time the tragic tale of Rico Petrocelli unfolded – a brilliant career cut short by a fastball a little too high and inside. I named my Teddy bear Fred Lynn Hardwig, preferred Ball Four to the Bible, and laughed at jokes in which the entire punchline was “Kurt Bevacqua.” The most memorable neologism of my youth was my reference to the October dance as “The World Serious.” It seemed to me then, as it does now, a fitting description.
It has been almost six months since Edgar Renteria’s single to center ended the 1997 World Serious, and I am in keen need of some hardball. I am perched on a barstool at Ginny’s Little Longhorn, waiting for the Indians-Mariners Opening Day game to start. I order a Lone Star and wait for the first pitch – a curveball away – and find myself a satisfied man indeed.
We’re not out of the first inning before the old man to my left, smoking filterless and sipping his beers over ice, leans over to me and says, “This a replay?”
“This is the first day of the 1998 baseball season,” I tell him.
“No shit?”
We turn back to the screen to see Edgar Martinez launch a high hanger into the stands. M’s up, 2-0.
No shit.
Of course, I’ve launched a few high hangers into the stands myself. What self-respecting American child hasn’t? I can well remember the towering shot I hit over the Green Monster to win the World Series when I was only seven years old. The fans, naturally, went nuts, pouring onto the field and pinning me to the carpet in our front hallway before I’d even had a chance to round second base. And that was only one of a career 815 homers I hit from my spot beneath the chandelier. I was that good.
I’ve not finished beer one when I see my first play at the plate, as the Indians’ Manny Ramirez throws a one-hop strike to the catcher, hanging Glenallen Hill out to dry. By the top of the third, I’ve seen my first rundown, my first double-play, and my first steal of third. I’ve also had my second incomprehensible conversation with the gentleman to my right, a gravel-voiced vet with a taste for foul language and canned bean dip. His name is Ted. After three, the score stands 2-2. Tie ballgame.
Ted buys a pack of red hot pork skins. An inning later, he offers me one. I pass.
Somewhere between the proffered pork skin and the top of the fifth, Ginny herself enters the Little Longhorn. There is a round of applause, and flowers everywhere. People are jumping up to greet her, slap her on the back. She sports a new hairdo and a smart western shirt, and is all smiles tonight. I have come on her birthday. This has nothing to do with baseball. Nothing. But as I watch her entrance, I miss Sandy Alomar’s solo home run. 3-2 Indians.
When I’m not down at Ginny’s – and I’m not very often – I teach at the Texas School for the Blind & Visually Impaired, working with students who have multiple disabilities. This means that in addition to a visual impairment of some stripe, they have a condition that affects their ability to walk, talk, hear, or perform some of the higher metacognitives that the rest of us take for granted. They are terrific kids – each of them wonderfully unique – and it is impossible to say which one of them has made the most distinct and lasting impression in my mind. But it will be a long time before I forget a young man I worked with last summer, who, through dint of extreme shyness and modest cerebral palsy, found it extremely difficult to talk. And yet, there was one question that always drew an immediate and enthusiastic response. When I asked him what he was going to do after school, he’d get a wily grin on his mouth and come as close to a full holler as he ever got: “Watch baseball!” Which I’m told he did, whenever he got the chance, shoes off and on the couch, the television tuned to his beloved Cubs. When I would come in the next morning and ask for a report, he’d shake his head sadly. “Oh man,” he’d say, but it rarely got farther than that. With the ’97 Cubs, it was about all I needed to know.
Watch baseball. It’s what I’ve come here to do, but I’m having trouble concentrating. Runners are forever circling the bases, but I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s all the Lone Stars. I don’t miss Ken Griffey’s shot, but I do miss Jay Buhner’s. Lots of homers tonight. I remember some vague talk about expansion and diluted pitching and an anticipated jump in offense, but right now it just looks like some bad pitches to some good hitters. I file this away for future contemplation, too distracted for the moment to give it my full attention. After all, I’m knee-deep in a dissection of North Austin beer prices; at the same time, I’m listening in on a neighboring conversation that, impressively, covers both lingerie and carburetors in under five minutes. The Mariners score six runs in the fifth, but I find myself talking Cowboys football with the man to my left.
Football?
Is this, then, the ultimate betrayal?
Of course, there are some who would argue that baseball betrayed me first. Spiraling salaries. Surly players. Owner lockouts. Four-hour ballgames. Free agency so rampant and roster moves so regular that we’re no longer rooting for teams but for uniforms. Everywhere you look, loyalty only to the dollar. And then the worst: the players’ strike and stolen season of 1994. The fans feel used. And yet, and yet… .
By the top of the seventh, I’m comparing unexplained bruises with a woman two stools down. By the eighth, we’ve devolved: the talk is of broken promises from itinerant guitar pickers. Things are getting morbidly sentimental at the bar of the Little Longhorn, and the M’s are in some serious trouble besides: 9-7, and time for a pitching change. By the time I get back from the jukebox, it’s 9-9. It occurs to me that, on this night anyway, my mighty love of baseball has faded in the face of the more immediate, less televised diversions that are increasingly presenting themselves here at the Little Longhorn. I wonder: Is it baseball I love, or just the idea of baseball? I’m a noted romantic, a sucker for nostalgia: I can ride good associations for years without any independent confirmation of the same. I scarcely notice when Travis Fryman draws a bases-loaded walk to put the Indians up for good, 10-9. Out to the parking lot for a few breaths of that sweet Spring air, and then home.
The next morning I woke up with a bit of a hangover. Not from the longnecks so much as a disastrous Opening Day. It was a day I had looked forward to for months, only to leave in the ninth inning of a one-run ballgame. There were mitigating circumstances, I tell myself. Too many distractions, too much despair. A less-than-ideal platform for my annual Spring awakening. And so it is with a boyish hope that I cling to one simple fact: I’ve got tickets for the Longhorns game Friday.
My host is Mike Smith, school colleague and Longhorns season-ticket holder for better than 20 years – a blood-runs-burnt-orange fan whose passion for Horns baseball is exceeded only by that of his wife and mother. We gather under Disch-Falk’s oak trees for some pre-game talk and a surreptitious Schlitz or two. It is the perfect evening for baseball, and though I’ve publicly derided Disch-Falk field in the past, on this night I’m ready for a little box-seat ballwatching.
Hook ’em Horns!
The game goes according to plan. It is a close game, well-played and marked by good pitching and a stiff southerly breeze that kills would-be longballs on the warning track. There are line-hugging doubles, textbook rundowns, and more than a couple mid-inning trips to the oak grove. Catcalls come from the grandstands at all the appropriate moments. An impossibly charming two-year old fella named Dustin whose backwards-ballcap sucker-swappin’ shenanigans fill the time during pitching changes. The game goes into extra innings – free baseball, in Mike’s words – but well before that, my faith is restored. The night is right.
I have found what I am looking for. All the grace, grit, and poetry of the game has come unto me on gilded wings, and I can view it with a lover’s eye once again. And though the Horns lose it in a dismal 10th, I am scarcely out of the parking lot before I’m counting the days ’til I return.
Play ball.
This article appears in April 24 • 1998 and April 24 • 1998 (Cover).