The World Series is over, so what is "order," anyway?
Hi Susan--
As you say,
regarding Game 3’s final play, motivation means
everything in Buddhism and nothing in Major League Baseball’s
rule book. No place
for karmic intent. Game
3 will always end with Middlebrooks as
the rule book’s archetypal infielder who “dives at a ground
ball and the ball
passes him and he continues to lie on the ground.” Game 4 will always end,
too, with Kolten
Wong—whom Sox fans in Hawaii definitely are noticing
now—continuing to lie on
the ground after Mike Napoli’s sweep tag on his arm. Saturday, we were treated
to the first World
Series game to end with a walk-off obstruction call; Sunday,
we saw the first
World Series game to end with a pick-off.
Tonight’s game should end with David Lynch on the
pitcher’s mound
describing his Quinoa recipe.
Everything’s
tied—the series, 2-2, and the number of strange walk-off
endings,
1-1. Fitting, I agree,
to talk about how
attachment leads to connection.
I’m
fascinated by the communal ties that are created by baseball
fandom. Your Cardinals
Hui sounds like a real joy—the
equivalent of finding a Cardinals’ fan bar where you live, but
without having
to deal with the clangy-loud “bar” aspect of it all. During the 2004 and 2007
World Series, I rent
my garments with other Sox fans on electronic bulletin boards,
and this helped
share the communal angst. But
very few
folks on these boards were actually writers by profession. I think it’d be
therapeutic, for instance, to
complain about AWP between innings. If I
see Saltalamacchia behind the plate tonight, I’ll get that
feeling of first
looking into the new AWP Conference Program every year and
recognizing endless
variations of the same panels I avoided the previous year.
The community is
now happening for me through text and email—of course, in our
exchanges on your blog, but also in the electronic messages
I’m getting from
friends around the country, not all Sox fans, sending notes of
encouragement
or, just as often, sending texts with the words “Salty” and
“third base” in the
same sentence just to see what kind of apoplectic reply
they’ll get from
me. Yesterday, I
texted the URL of our
dialogue to an old friend, a journalist who enjoys sports but
has no emotional
attachments to baseball teams.
He replied:
“Oh, the angst. Forget
about you and
your friend with all your tributes to the serenity of
baseball. It’s like
fandom everywhere—pure
unadulterated angst.” I
texted him back
in the middle of Sunday’s game.
First
reply: “I agree re: angst . . . then Gomes comes up w/runners
on 1st & 2nd,
and I start freaking out.” I
didn’t have
much time to reflect on the panic, though.
As I was writing the text, Gomes hit the three-run
homer that eventually
won the game. I know
that we can’t get
into much emotional and intellectual nuance in a text message,
but I was trying
to understand the boundary between serenity and angst—a
boundary so important
to everything you and I have been writing during the World
series—and before I
could form a sensible sentence in my head, Gomes walloped
Maness’s hanging
sinker.
The stress never
quite went away, though.
To stay within myself—this is my new koan, by the way,
to stay within myself—I
read student
work between innings last night.
This
brought back Fenway nostalgia for me, countless memories of
walking to the
ballpark after my late-afternoon class and buying a bleacher
ticket (such an
innocent time, when ordinary folk without corporate bar codes
tattooed on their
foreheads could just walk up to the ticket window and buy one
for less than
$10). I’d take my
backpack into the
game, find a good seat in the bleachers and, along with other
grievance-collecting Sox fans, bask in our communal anxieties. Between innings, I’d
relax by grading my
students’ composition and technical writing essays. I usually could finish
two or three long
essays during the course of a nine-inning game.
Strange to think that the mediocre Sox teams of the
mid-1990s could
produce anxiety, but you know how it is, once you’re at the
ballpark, you feed
off each other’s catastrophizing, even when we knew that
beyond Roger Clemens,
Mo Vaughn, and John Valentin, the team was mostly a bore.
These questions
of community—virtual and real—are a part of
how I became a Sox fan. I
didn’t spend
my childhood in Boston, and I agree with Leonard Schwartz that
our baseball
partisanship “is an identity issue” more than a question of
the cities we live
in. I actually spent
part of my
childhood as a Mets fan. You
can imagine
how this made the 1986 World Series utterly debilitating for
me, since, by
then, I followed the Sox fanatically.
One of my brothers (I’m the youngest) used to hit me
every time I rooted
against the Mets. I
had a great impetus
as a child, then, to wish the Mets all the success in the
world, and to do so
loudly in front of my brother.
After a
time, I developed a version of Stockholm Syndrome, adopting
the Mets full-bore
as my team. As I
started to play
baseball myself, and to gravitate toward pitching, Tom Seaver
became an
unequivocal hero. But
the whole time, I
was secretly interested in the Red Sox.
Everything they did was unorthodox.
Their asymmetrical stadium was reflected in quirky
personalities like
Bill Lee and Luis Tiant—much of this coming to my knowledge
during the riveting
1975 World Series, which made televised baseball feel as
important to me as
rock concerts. Once
the Mets traded
Seaver to the Reds (an organization that forbade its players
from wearing long
hair or facial hair—I think Bill Lee once called this rule
“fascist,” which
only endeared him more to me), I expressed my Sox fandom more
openly. By then, the
brother who used to hit me was
nearly 20 and didn’t care much for baseball anymore. He wasn’t going to punch
my shoulder if I
rooted for another team. My
oldest
brother was a Yankees’ fan. Rooting
for
the Sox, then, was a perfect metaphor for the unstable
communities of my
childhood: one brother used to hit me if I rooted against his
team, and my
other brother was stereotypically loud and brash in his
allegiance to my team’s
Satanic Majesty enemy, the nefarious Yanquis.
Thank goodness my mother hated Nixon and Reagan, or I
would’ve been even
lonelier growing up.
I loved how you
put it—that “we create sanghas of a sort
around this game.” Our
partisan ties to
ballclubs are only barely geographic, I think.
This seems a self-evident statement; yet most people I
talk with are
surprised that I spent my childhood in Pennsylvania but wasn’t
a Pirates or
Phillies fan. But
these teams did
nothing for me—and I found their artificial-turf ballparks
repugnant. The Sox of
the ‘70s possessed an aesthetic, I
guess, that appealed to me as much as their strange ballpark
did. I never could’ve
rooted for, say, Sparky
Anderson’s close-shaven Reds, who ran to first base on ball
four and who played
All-Star exhibition games like they were the seventh game of
the World
Series. (I detested
Pete Rose, who
always reminded me of the uncle who wanted me to take up
boxing as a way to get
tougher, when I just wanted to read books and play in bands. Ironically, this uncle
was a Sox fan.) My
affinities were with pitchers like El Tiante, turning his back
to the batter
during his windup, and Bill Lee, who once said, “Sparky
Anderson says Don
Gullett is going to the Hall of Fame after the World Series.
I'm going to the
Eliot Lounge.”
My initial fandom
began with connection—an effort to connect
with quirky players, once I didn’t have to worry about my
brother hitting me,
and once the Mets yanked Seaver from my life—but then it grew
into
attachment. I want to
find my way back
from attachment to connection.
I don’t
know if it’s possible. It
might be
easier if David Ross starts tonight instead of Saltalamacchia,
or if every time
Saltalamacchia looks like he’s about to throw to third,
Farrell would shout,
“Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little Solitaire,”
and, like a good
Manchurian Candidate, Salty would hold on to the ball, let the
runner slide
into third, and trust his pitching staff to get out of the
inning.
Best,
Tony
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