Aloha Tony--the morning of game three
has arrived; it's sunny here, with big white clouds out past the dark
green trees, and the sheer Ko`olau mountains we live next too are
clear and corduroyed. I was thinking first of how the subject of our
first conversation continued into my Thursday afternoon experience of
Game Two and attending a rather gory department meeting. And then I
wanted to move into perhaps happier territory, namely what in
baseball seems to beautiful to behold.
So, Thursday I was able to adjourn to
my utility closet for the first hour of the game, just long enough to
see that Wacha was on and there would be no re-run of the disastrous
first game. That game earned me heckles and jeers from colleagues,
custodians, and students alike; I had to duck my head walking down
the halls of my bare-knuckled, industrial, needing-massive-renovation
building. At 3 p.m. The department meeting started, and I'd been
advised to go. On the plate are changes to the curriculum
(down-sizing, because we are a “dwindling” faculty), a proposal
to end the mandatory teaching of English 100 by all members of the
faculty, and (contrary to both, seems to me) a proposal to get
full-time tenure-line faculty a 2-2 load (we now teach 3-2, for the
most part).
I sat in the back row, my bright red
iPad cover noticed by the associate chair ("is THAT a Cardinals' iPad?
You mean you don't have a logo on there?"). I do have the logo on my small red Dell computer, but he need not know that. The iPad was open to two
tabs: one, the box score, and two, my facebook Cardinals hui, a group
of us writers who love the Cardinals, along with some of our friends.
The hui promised to be my eyes (or, as Ned Stuckey-French put it, my
tickertape) during the meeting. My nerves were singing, as the game
was close. For a while it was 1-0 on the strength of Matt Holliday's
triple. On one tab he was a red dot on third; from the hui, I got the
report of a “LOOOONG” hit. Another colleague was pretending to
root for the Red Sox, just to get my goat. The meeting began with a
long discussion of the future absence of Bible as literature and all
the 300-level lit courses, including poetry (about which I spoke, as
I always do, thinking that regular lit courses often leave poetry out
all together). Then we moved on to the 2-2 load and the 100-rotation
and, as the game continued to be very close, my nerves humming, I
spoke up wondering how, if we are dwindling, we can cut our own
teaching load. I started speaking (rather loudly as I remember) about
adjunct labor, or what we used to be good at avoiding. To make a long
story short, when one politically enlightened colleague spoke up to
say “we are not a charity” about the adjunct situation, I walked
out. The next day, I found my two pens in my mailbox; I gather I had
trailed them behind me as I left.
I walked to my office, angrier than
I've been in a long time, only to find that Ortiz had hit a home run
off Wacha, and my team was now down by a run. So I trudged to the
parking structure and began my long slow commute home with ESPN radio
on (Hershiser is brilliant, but pompous). Somewhere on H1, the Cards
start getting singles. And then: a surprise! Kozma, who had almost
got picked off second a couple minutes before, led a double-steal
with Jon Jay, and they ended up on second and third. Wow. A surprise
to this fan, the announcers, everyone! When Carpenter hit his sac fly
and all hell let loose on the base paths and in the skies over the
infield of Busch—the brilliant Yale pitcher depositing his throw to
third into the left field stands and the Cards taking the lead—I
pumped my fists and yelped in traffic.
Nothing of the spirit so far, I
presume, except acknowledgment of suffering and joy, but I do want to
pause to remember other moments of surprise: Ozzie's home run in
1985, Edmonds's amazing catch in 2005, the craziness of the 2011
Series, when being down two outs and two strikes seemed to mean
nothing to the Cards . . . these are moments that make a crease in
time. The random chance of baseball, combined with the skill it takes
to take advantage of it, appeals to my avant-garde leanings. To pluck
a certain hit out of thin air, to dive and stop a ball headed for the
outfield, to block a ball at the plate, to do something impossible
under incredible stress, oh my. When Lance Berkman was asked about
his two out two strike hit in 2011's 11th inning, he
responded that he had stood at the plate and had no thoughts at all.
He was there, the ball came toward him, he hit it, but without any
cognition. Is that not the moment we sit on our pillows for, Tony?
Anyway, I got home the other day in
time to see the end of the eighth inning and then the ninth with my
son, Sangha. First Carlos Martinez, who later showed up for the
presser in turquoise shirt, turquoise bow tie and nerd glasses, threw
98 mile an hour fastballs (with great movement, Hershiser had said on
the radio) and got his outs. Manager Mike Matheny did what Tony
LaRussa would never have done; he kept Martinez, a righty, in to
pitch to Ortiz, a lefty, and it paid off. Then Trevor Rosenthal
(Closenthal, we call him) finished the game.
My friend Kyle Semmel says he has a
strong and strange feeling about today's game, how crucial it is.
We'll see in a few hours. Hope you're relaxing before the excitement
begins, Tony. I'm just pleased now that Willie McGee will be
throwing out the first pitch. Oh how I loved him in center field and
on the basepaths.
More later--Susan
Hi Susan—
I’m writing in the wake of another Sox loss—probably
something I shouldn’t do. I should allow
the game to dissipate like a dream you can’t remember five minutes after you’ve
awakened. Saltalamacchia threw to third
base again? Or did he—I had a wild dream
that he botched another throw, then I got up in the middle of the night to go
to the bathroom, and by the time I went back to bed, I’d forgotten
everything. This is where I should begin
writing: start by forgetting what I was dreaming.
Earlier tonight, Liz and I watched the 1950 noir film Highway 301 with David Trinidad—lots of hoodlums talking trash in
their postwar gangster-ese, complaining about “nosy dames” and telling
getaway-car drivers to “shove off” at the first sound of police sirens. Afterward, walking through the alley, the
pavement damp with splotchy puddles glaring under receding rows of streetlights
on either side, we felt like we had walked into a generic Warner Brothers noir
set. All we needed was a cop swinging
his flashlight and a thug in double-breasted suit and fedora hiding behind a
trashcan.
Then we went home and watched the Sox lose.
Like you, I want to write about the beauty of the game—those
moments that are like Emerson stepping in a puddle, all mean egotism vanishing. Actually, I don’t know if I feel right
invoking Emerson. If Emerson were alive
today, he’d spend 20 pages arguing sabremetrics. Wins-above-replacement are signs of natural
facts; natural facts are signs of higher, spiritual Pythagorean Expectations. I’m not saying that beauty in baseball only
comes from the brush-cut grass and portly managers spitting chaw on the dugout
steps. I’m obsessive about numbers, and
sometimes the combination of batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging
percentage just gives me a sublime chill.
But I can’t find beauty in the deliberate evasiveness of sabremetrics.
Sabremetric categories seem like ungainly closed systems—for instance, I just
want someone to explain to me how “replacement” is defined in “wins-above-replacement.” I love numbers, yet I’ve never been able to
find a lucid explanation of how the phantasmic “replacement player” in the “wins-above-replacement”
formula is defined. While Emerson makes
the game into mathesis universalis,
Thoreau grows his beard and forbids anyone from washing his uniform. Hawthorne makes an errant throw to third
(probably the fault of his ancestor judge who served at the Salem witch
trials). Dickinson rewinds over and over
the Fox super-slow-motion shots of the bat hitting the ball. She pauses at the fiery red moment when you
can see the vibration on contact traveling up the batter’s forearms. She could stare at this for hours.
It doesn’t matter, though, because they’re all buried in New
England and they would’ve been Sox fans and they’d be really disappointed
tonight.
But what if I really could watch the Red Sox with a
realization of no attainment and no non-attainment? I loved what you wrote about Lance Berkman’s
remarks on his clutch 11th-inning hit in 2011.
Berkman stayed inside himself,
as baseball players always explain to reporters—a persistently inscrutable
phrase, but maybe something clearer now, if, as you say, I think of it as a
description of why we sit on our meditation cushions. Tomorrow, I’ll go to the Zen temple, where
the sangha will stay inside itself. I
don’t mean this phrase in a privatizing way that walls off the rest of the
world—not Paul Ryan forcing everyone in his office to read Ayn Rand, not Rand
Paul braying about the Voting Rights Act—but instead, “staying inside oneself”
as a gesture of mindfulness, coming back to the breath 101 times after being
distracted 100 times. This is a thing of
beauty—and maybe the pause between each pitch, like the pause between
inhalation and exhalation, creates the conditions for this kind of beauty. Each windup is the breath touching the
nostrils as it enters the body; each thud of the ball in the catcher’s mitt is
the tickle of the breath against the upper lip as the body exhales. But maybe the breeze I felt coming from a few
hundred miles south of me, in St. Louis (Saltalamacchia’s wild, flailing bat,
swinging at a neck-level pitch)—maybe this
is really the breath tickling my upper lip.
If so, I need to remember there’s beauty there, too, a beautiful
mindfulness like in Williams’s poem, “Thursday,” which ends with the poet “feeling
my clothes about me / the weight of my body in my shoes / the rim of my hat,
air passing in and out / at my nose—and [I] decide to dream no more.”
I’d planned to write about why we have so much passion for
our teams—why our friends and colleagues notice red iPads (odd coincidence, I
sat through a meeting on curriculum changes this week, too), or why they text
congratulations to us when our teams win, as if we played in the actual game
ourselves. I hope to get to this in my
next email. This one, now that I look
back, really was an effort to continue the thread you started, about what makes
the game beautiful. It’s when Lance
Berkman and William Carlos Williams stay inside themselves—equally aware of the
materiality of the mind and body and the illusory self-presence of both—and
decide to dream no more.
Best,
Tony
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