Hi
Susan--
As giddy
as I am after Sox’s World Series victory, I’m sorry the Cardinals were the team
they beat. I would’ve much rather seen them win against at a group of
ballplayers I disdain. I could’ve seen
ex-Sox villains like Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, and Josh Beckett moping in
the Dodgers’ dugout, and the schadenfreude would’ve been more satisfying
than seeing Yadier Molina consoling Michael Wacha after he was leaving the
mound after the Sox had blown open the game. How can a fan not like
Wacha, or Molina, a backstop maestro? Even as I write this opening
paragraph, it’s clear to me that baseball is still a space where I allow myself
to revel in attachment. My remarks on
Gonzalez, Crawford, and Beckett were literal, not metaphoric, and I’m
embarrassed to admit that I really would’ve taken pleasure in their misery, as
I did watching A-Rod’s face after Pokey Reese scooped up the final out of the
2004 ALCS and A-Rod realized the Sox had just come back from a 3-0 series
deficit and the Yankees had completed the most profound choke in the history of
baseball’s postseason. But, of course, ballplayers are millionaires in
Ayn Rand’s America, and they don’t really feel something as strong as “misery,”
I think, when they lose.
This
baseball
fandom—at its worst, it’s like jingoism, and I understand that, at a
spiritual level, it can be as obscene as fetishizing a national flag.
Writing about it, though, helps me understand the need to channel our
desires
rather than try to avoid them. What happens if I take this desire and,
like you did with the giving and receiving of Tonglen practice, turn it
into
something that is communal rather than divisive. Putting myself in
front
of my laptop after every game and writing about my spiritual and
psychological
reactions—rather than just clicking my heels at a Sox win, or cursing
the Sox when they lost (OK, but I’m still holding a grudge against
Saltalamacchia)—helped me see, however temporarily, how the energy of my
sports
fanaticism can be redirected.
I’m
sad to see our Spirit & Series exchange ending. The back-and-forth of our emails helped me
avoid a total, unmitigated attachment/addiction to the Sox during their high
moments, and prevented the displaced, out-of-body aversion that comes when they
look more like WoeSox than Bosox. But I have a long way to go. Our cats,
Simon and Schuster, kept a wary distance from me during games (all those
unpredictable, jerky movements I make during a game—all my shouting when someone
hits a homer or obstructs another player from running to home plate—and all they
ever want is a little pinch of catnip to smooth the rough edges of the
day). Shimmy was a paranoiac—who could blame her, when G.W. Bush used
to break into her litterbox and bury her copy of the Constitution in the sand
and clumps of waste—and she had no patience for my postseason clapping and
hollering. She hid under the bed after each game's first clap and shout. Thank you, by the way, for
mentioning her in your recent posting. Shimmy’s ashes looked down on me
with disappointment, I’m sure, that I couldn’t stop cussing when the Sox swung
and missed.
I’m
grateful that our exchange spurred me to root around in my imagination—the creative
imagination and the spiritual imagination—to try to make peace with baseball attachments
while in the act of experiencing them. After
Game 6 ended, Fox showed an image from behind home plate of the final
out. I thought about how often I would sneak into the behind-home-plate
seats at Fenway during blowouts or at the end of rain-delayed games—in short,
anytime the more well-heeled paying customers had already left. I
remember one time in particular, early 1989, with my dear friend Mitch (who,
bless his heart, texted me Saturday from the Sox’s victory parade), when we
slid into seats two rows from the backstop in the ninth inning of a Sox/A’s
game. The
start of the game had been
delayed by rain. The Sox were up 2-1 in the top of the ninth, and
closer
Lee Smith was trying to end it. Dave Parker, instead, bashed a
gigantic,
game-tying home run over the Wall—one of the most impressive homers I’ve
ever
seen, and it landed somewhere in western Massachusetts later that
morning. Fox's camera Wednesday showed the same view, behind the plate
at Fenway, in their replay of Koji’s final strikeout. Seeing the Sox
jump like giddy children after the final out, feeling the camera
shake slightly from the crowd reaction, I realized that I never once
envisioned
the Sox winning a World Series at Fenway. No matter how rich my
imagination might be, I never thought to imagine what a Series-clinching
game
would look like at Fenway. I never
visualized what it would be like to see the Sox’s shortstop leap into the air
after the final out, with the Wall behind him in left, staid and stoic yet
drunkenly eccentric, towering now 37 feet above a World Series win. All
the games I’ve seen at Fenway—and, as I mentioned earlier, all the papers I’ve
graded at Fenway—and I never pretended to envision what a World Series
clinching win would look like there. Blake once wrote that “what is now
proved was once only imagined.” But this
final shot of Koji reminded me, humbly, that sometimes what is true (in this
case, a Sox championship clinched at Fenway) was once absolutely unimaginable.
Best,
Tony
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