Game Three Thread:
Dear Tony--
I understand what you mean by
wanting “the game to dissipate like a dream you can’t remember
five minutes after you’ve awakened,” but one of the lessons
I've taken from my blogging practice (funny phrase, that) is
that writing in that moment before memory takes hold, before
memory-as-interpretation alters the event, at the moment
before dissipation, is as necessary as allowing
things to sift out. I remember a Ph.D. poetry student saying
at her defense that she wanted to wait for events in her life
to sit for a while before she wrote about them, and realizing
how much a part of our regime as poets that has been. Of
course I understand that this particular moment was one you
didn't want to write from! What fascinated me about The Play
is that it hinged on action and not intention. That the third
baseman Middlebrooks stuck his legs in the air, ever so
briefly, as Allen Craig tried to navigate his way past third,
running as if he needed a GPS, or at least a walker because of
his bad foot, didn't matter in the least. My family and I were
yelling “interference!” at the tops of our lungs in the living
room, and then I remember saying, “the ump saw it! He saw it!”
For a Buddhist, intention matters. If Middlebrooks's intention
was pure—if he had not intended to trip Craig, as perhaps he
did not—then that matters a great deal. But in baseball, it
does not. (I love this comment in the FOX stream, from the
twitter feed of one Old Hoss Radbourn:
“If you can't trip a guy at third base then I weep for
America.” Here's the rule:
The act of a fielder who, while not in possession of the ball and not in the act of fielding the ball, impedes the progress of any runner.
Comment: If a fielder is about to receive a thrown ball and if the ball is in flight directly toward and near enough to the fielder so he must occupy his position to receive the ball he may be considered "in the act of fielding a ball." It is entirely up to the judgment of the umpire as to whether a fielder is in the act of fielding a ball. After a fielder has made an attempt to field a ball and missed, he can no longer be in the "act of fielding" the ball. For example: an infielder dives at a ground ball and the ball passes him and he continues to lie on the ground and delays the progress of the runner, he very likely has obstructed the runner.
While the play still re-runs (or
re-hobbles) in my mind—Allen Craig at third, Jose Oquendo,
red hoodie down his back, windmilling for him to run home as the
ball goes into the left field foul area (again!), Allen Craig
trying to start running, but tripping over the third baseman,
Allen Craig hobbling home, lying on the ground, his face
blank, not knowing what had happened, the Cardinals running
out to pick him up, gently—the rule has its own majesty. It's
about action and judgment, like so much in baseball, about
accident and result, about the moment and then the memory of
that moment. (I mean to devote the better part of one of these
epistles to the role of memory in our baseball lives.) My
husband, Bryant, loves the random chance of baseball,
especially when the teams are both so good. One foot, or inch,
one way or the other and the play would have been made. But
the rules do not mention accident; they only allude to what
happened. In this case (“an infielder dives at a ground ball
and the ball passes him and he continues to lie on the
ground”) the rule book called the play, even if the third
baseman didn't have time to move away. McCarver and Buck could
have called it no better than that!
You wanted to talk about our
attachments to our teams; I want to tell you about mine, then
open that conversation up to how our attachments to our teams
lead to our connections to other people. To move from
attachment to connection seems a step in the right direction.
I became a Cards fan in 1967 (another Series between the Cards
and the Red Sox) when I was on the cusp of turning nine years
old. I don't know that I yet knew much about baseball, but I
heard about the Series; because I'd been born in southern
Illinois, I decided to cheer for the Cardinals. The first
“word” I read was the TWA sign at St. Louis's airport, where
we'd drive my dad, who traveled a lot since he was in the Air
Force. So there's also a linguistic tie. When a friend said
she'd made a bet on game seven that the score would we 7-3 and
wouldn't I hope the Red Sox scored that third run so she'd win
her bet, I said no, I wanted the score to remain lower. Oh my,
the arrogance of youth!
That was the team of Bob Gibson,
Lou Brock, Curt Flood, Orlando Cepeda and—I nearly always
forget—of Roger Maris. A later iteration of the team included
Willie McGee, who threw the ball out last night, a symbolic
act that Fox chose not to carry. Sangha showed me this
morning: the highlights from McGee's 1982 Series, when McGee and
I were rookies (I in grad school), and then the rather older,
but still very thin man walking to the mound and quietly
lobbing the ball to Ozzie Smith, sporting a bright red jacket.
Somehow my loyalty to this team has stayed with me, has
strengthened. “Oh, it's an identity issue, is it?” Leonard
Schwartz once put it to me. Yes, the nostalgia of origins—the
nostalgia I generally am extremely skeptical of—has its place
in me, too. When I'm asked what my home town is now, I
sometimes say “Busch Stadium.” Whichever stadium happens to be
there . . . I wrote more about my fandom http://www.hawaii.edu/vice-versa/archive/issue_3/issue_3/schultz/schultz.html,
edited for that issue by Tim Denevi, a great baseball guy.
From attachment to connection: my
(pre-)husband became a baseball fan the first time I took him
to a UH game and he realized he could drink beer and talk to
people. He's evolved into a maniacal Cardinals fan, though he
won't admit it publically. Our son, Sangha (named for the
spiritual community and—as it turns out—for being “handsome,”
which is what the word means in Khmer), rivals me in his
intensity about the Cardinals. At 14, he is not always patient
with his parents; yesterday, when Bryant and I commented that
Holliday had made a very dumb base-running play, he got angry
with us, accused us of “hating on Holliday.” Another moment of
judgment, another moment of being reminded that Holliday is one
of our best players in this Series. When the Cardinals were
playing game five against the Pirates the other week, I
couldn't find the game anywhere (I do not have a smart phone).
It was not on the radio (which was carrying a talk show about
our hapless football team), nor could I use the orthodontist's
wifi, as I waited for my daughter to get her bands tightened.
So I called home on my rather prehistoric cell phone, and
Sangha called the game for me. When Radhika and I got into the
car to drive home I put the speaker on and Sangha kept calling
the game for me. The 45 minute ride home brought home to me
the ways in which we create sanghas of a sort around this
game.
My other baseball community is
on-line. Several years ago, after starting to collect writers
who are also Cards fans at AWPs here and there (Aaron Belz and
I found Kyle Semmel in Austin first by wearing our caps at the Tinfish table), I launched a Cardinals
Hui (or group, in Hawaiian) on facebook. This time of year the
Hui is very busy, sharing articles, photos, laments (the media
hates our team!), predictions (one among us, Harold Anderson,
called a walk two pitches before it happened during one game,
and now gets frequent questions about “the future”), and play
by play commentary. Community also rules in Hawai`i's baseball
world; for the first time ever, there are two Hawaiian players
in the Series, Shane Victorino, who got the Sox in with a
grand slam, and Kolten Wong, who has been terrible since
coming up in August for the Cardinals. But last night—oh
my!--he had a great play in the field and he got a strong
single to left. I'm hoping all those Sox fans here noticed.
On 10/27/13 4:05 AM, Tony Trigilio wrote:
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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