The Hardball Times -- Azure Texan http://www.hardballtimes.com/main Baseball. Insight. Daily. en studes@hardballtimes.com Copyright 2013 2013-05-22T08:05:15+00:00 Still life, after all http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/still-life-after-all/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/still-life-after-all/#When:05:59:15 denied 37 men a place in the pantheon of immortal major leaguers by refusing to elect them to the Hall of Fame, a pair of websites did something like the opposite, crediting two former players with their rightful positions in the larger house, the darker house, of good old-fashioned mortality.

On that day in January—a month named, incidentally, for two-faced Janus, the Roman god who gazed toward the future and the past at once—National Pastime reported that exactly 113 years earlier, in Brookfield, Mass., Boston Beaneaters catcher Marty Bergen murdered his family with an ax and then committed suicide. Meanwhile, over at FanGraphs, writer Carson Cistulli dusted off the sad tale of Al Thake, a 22-year-old Brooklyn Atlantics outfielder who in 1872 drowned while fishing in New York Harbor.

In postmortems of the postmortems, both sites made mention of the treatment accorded each decedent. National Pastime divulged that only one Beaneater teammate, future Hall of Famer Billy Hamilton, attended Bergen’s funeral, while FanGraphs offered proof that no fewer than four obituaries were published in the aftermath of Thake’s unlucky, untimely passing.

Tones and details differed across the obits, with one noting that Thake “stood high in professional fraternity for integrity of character and genial disposition,” and another stating that the body of Thake, “of 293 Smith Street, was found on the beach”—a passage about as flowery as a line from The Plumbers Handbook. A third noted that the “melancholy occurrence” took place when Thake “fell out of the boat and the tide carried him instantly beyond the reach of his comrades,” while a fourth claimed that he “was a good swimmer, but it is thought he got entangled in the fish lines.”

What the obits had in common, of course, was the one fact central to a death notice and thus to life itself: the man had up and died. Like Bergen, though under wholly different circumstances, Thake had succumbed to the equalizing law of nature, the universal rule that inspired 16th-century artists to render unto posterity a vast collection of vanitas still life paintings—the tableaux often included bubbles to symbolize the brevity of life, and human skulls to represent the certain and indiscriminate nature of death—and ancient Romans to conceive of a timeless caution to peasants and patricians alike: memento mori. Remember your mortality. Remember you must die.

Jamie Moyer notwithstanding, baseball is a game best endeavored by relatively young men, players whose ability to hit inner-half heat or throw outer-half cheese has conferred upon them an apparent resistance, if not a seeming immunity, to Father Time and his odious sidekick, the ageless Angel of Death. The age-20 season of Mike Trout, for example, would seem a sturdy wedge against the well-chronicled and otherwise inevitable age-33 decline, a downturn that as far as Trout is concerned has been dispatched to unthinkable distance by a catch that will never get old, that made time hold still, that will preserve the boyish upstart in a moment spent waaaaaaaay above the center field fence, where, as a different ageless Angel, he will always rebel against the graybeard while resisting the demands of gravity.

And what about those headlong baseline sprints of the young Bryce Harper? You can just picture them, can’t you?—the helmet flying off, the legs churning, the 19-year-old body trying to outrace, desperately, an opponent just dyyyying to kill the spirit he so immodestly embodies, a freshness envied by the elders and celebrated with every step its agent takes in defiance of their retaliatory pursuit.

You can say it’s just a bubble, a vapor, smoke that will drift and vanish like all the impermanencies of every still life on Earth, but the paintings are still here, aren’t they?—in permanent collections, before passing audiences, reminding every mortal of the fate that awaits him but also memorializing if not quite eulogizing the artisanal strokes that put a series of passing moments into the permanence of the framed vanitas. Cooperstown waits for this one, you imagine: Harper, heading there fast.

At the same time, those Brycian sprints look like deft warranties against the “anti-aging” strategies of an over-the-hill A-Rod, the secret nostrums and esoteric rituals designed to rescue a 37-year-old body from a hostage-taker—hello, human condition—that is consistently opposed to ransom offers.

It is strange to remember, then, that A-Rod, too, played in the majors at age 19, as did Tony Conigliaro, each so brilliant in the colors of springtime that he never could have foreseen the way his paint would dry, never could have predicted the way the world would eventually view him. And what of Ray Chapman and Cy Bentley? After debuting in the bigs at 21, each would see a final pitch in a way he might never have imagined, and each would add to an unfinished canvas—one that includes Thake’s sad bubbles and Conigliaro’s tragic skull—the specter of death and something like the opposite of aging.



Seasons are long but seem short in hindsight, collapsed into a handy series of summary capsules and clickable lists of synoptic numbers, but the players themselves move swiftly into our memories of them, our mental and sometimes material images of stunning displays of skill and power and mind-blowing speed, each delivered by arms and legs not yet ceded to the greedy clutches of old-age complaint, the gimpy knees and creaky elbows.

Stilled in the frames we hang in our halls, then, are the instant achievements of not-yet-retirement-age cells: Reggie thumping the third of three Game Six homers, his 31-year-old muscles forever poised in a quick uncoiling; Willie closing in on the World Series drive, his 23-year-old body always in a moment that prohibits eternal rest; Jackie Robinson sliding into a precious home plate, his 36-year-old toes always winning (or not!) what could have been lost, and always awarding to the host body an apparent amnesty from the brutal mandates of time; and finally, Robin flailing in an older man’s armpit, his 26-year-old face pummeled into hilarious perpetuity by a 46-year-old fist.

Okay, maybe that last one’s a bad example, but still, there it is, a permanent piece in baseball’s collection of lasting impressions, and an image that steals from time’s trajectory an instant when everyone is young enough to fight, when the pride of vitality is reason enough to bleed, and when, like Gilgamesh, grown men pull against the power of mortality to take the plunge toward the everlasting, because what else is there but to vanish, to be forever retired, to be cast toward the grave and away from the field of play?

Swept into permanence by the swiftest of passing actions, each masterwork—Jackson’s completion of the hat trick, Mays’ over-the-shoulder catch, Robinson’s theft of home—seems indeed to have been a kind of magnum opus, the term ancient alchemists used to describe the process for creating the famed Philosopher’s Stone. And what did people want with this Philosopher’s Stone? Why, when their chances of obtaining it seemed pretty unrealistic, did they work so diligently to produce the magical substance?

The answer still echoes in the silly infomercials of today, with their facile pledges of never-ending youth, and in every religion that still promises what Gilgamesh briefly embraced and then permanently lost: eternal life. Mindful of the bill that everyone must pay, the alchemists claimed that by ingesting just a bit of the stuff, a person could cheat the Reaper and live forever, youthfully, with the speed and vigor of Mercury, Adonis and Zeus, gods whose power derived at least in part from their refusal to surrender to age.

Here in the real world, of course, no such elixir exists. Knees stiffen and postures stoop, regardless of the alchemy that some mortals seek, and sooner or later—though too often sooner—life pulls the plug on the thumping heart, even if that heart belongs to a big-league ballplayer and even if that player yielded exploits so prone to preservation that they will outlast the body that gave them life. And here today is the late Roger Maris, slamming No. 61 into the adhesive permanence of a U.S. postage stamp. Maris, who died in 1983 at a relatively young 51, wouldn’t live long enough to see the stop-action snapshot of his record-setting swing take on the immortality that his body could never match, but he would live long enough to see it enshrined in the venerated canon of baseball imagery, alongside the deathless images of Mays, Robinson and Bobby Thomson, whose Shot Heard Round The World would eventually take shape as The Shot Seen Through Time.

And here for all time, just as he was there for a short time, is the young Flying Scot, his swing needing just 200 microseconds of a single minute—3:58 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, to be precise—of a single day—Oct. 3, actually—in the Year of Our Lord 1951 to send a Ralph Branca fastball into an image so timeless that it seems a keepsake in a precious public gallery, and yet into records so bloodless that they can’t possibly speak to the bliss and heartache that they actually represent—real emotions, permanently divided and distributed by the tiniest slivers of time and space, that in many cases have gone to the grave with the people who carried (or dragged) them around for the rest of their natural lives.

Also left unstated—box scores are good at objective summary but not so good with predictive wisdom—are the future prospects of the 20-year-old center fielder who waited on-deck while Thomson sent that ball into the life of the world to come. Though dispatched in the instant to a portrait at home plate, he would eventually go on to hit some homers, steal some bases and make an immortal catch, but at the time he was just the Say Hey Kid.



Time and gravity. Einstein made note of their teamwork, and he was right: Together they’ve snatched the once and future Willie Mays and brought him back down to Earth, in the form of a figure aged 81 years and change, and yet the man is still the breathing embodiment of what he once was and what he will always be: that almost godlike figure in a picture we don’t even need to see, a picture we can simply conjure from its place in the everlasting.

With it in perpetuity are other snapshots, both in color and black-and-white, of young men elevated into semidivine status not only by the outcomes of those moments but, just as often, of the body of work those moments represent. And here today is Gehrig, long before his everlasting speech, fixed in a follow-through so powerful that it hints at invincibility, an attribute that couldn’t possibly be real. And here tomorrow will be Clemente, in the time before his flight, lifting the left knee high and cocking those powerful hands, the whole of his body coiled for that one pitch, that one fastball or slider or otherwise trivial curve, whose outcome might add its testimony to an inerasable number: 3,000, as it turned out, forever 3,000.

Gehrig and Clemente, like Bergen and Thake, were among the dozens of major leaguers cut down during their careers, each man’s legacy arrested in mid-stride, it seems, and evermore illustrated by pictures that would never let the man go gray and by numbers that would never get past a premature finale.

Some were casualties of illness: Bill Blair died of influenza in 1890, Addie Joss of meningitis in 1911, King Cole of tuberculosis in 1916, Urban Shocker of pneumonia in 1928, Walt Bond of leukemia in 1967 and Danny Thompson of the same disease in 1976. (The list literally goes on.) Some players succumbed to other maladies – Austin McHenry to a brain tumor in 1922, Tiny Bonham to appendicitis in 1949, Harry Agganis to a pulmonary embolism in 1955, Darryl Kile to a heart defect in 2002. Still others, like Tony Boeckel, in 1924, and Nick Adenhart, in 2009, were victims of car accidents, and five players—Charlie Peete, Ken Hubbs, Thurman Munson, Cory Lidle and of course Clemente—sadly went down with the planes.

A boat accident claimed Tim Crews and Steven Olin. A dune buggy accident felled Danny Frisella. Homicide took Gus Polidor, Miguel Fuentes, Lyman Bostock and Greg Halman, and suicide claimed Dan McGann and Willard Hershberger, McGann following two of his siblings and Hershberger ending a slump in the most drastic of fashions. Killed in World Wars I and II, respectively, were Eddie Grant and Elmer Gedeon, and even if Grant’s extraordinary story had already registered his retirement from the game, Gedeon’s had not.

Other players suffered fates considerably less noble: In 1903, drunk and disorderly on a night near Buffalo, future Hall of Famer Ed Delahanty went to his mysterious death in a plunge over Niagara Falls, and in 1935, Len Koenecke, also drunk and disorderly on a night near Buffalo, had his time ended in an almost unfathomably bizarre skirmish.

Denied retirement, each player (except for the suiciders) left the game at a time not of his choosing, but it was Cleveland shortstop Ray Chapman who on Aug. 17, 1920, earned immortality the hard way by suffering a fatal injury on the field, succumbing some 12 hours after taking a Carl Mays fastball to the head. Chapman left behind a lifetime WAR of 27.0, proof that while all men are irreplaceable, some are more irreplaceable than others. Each creates a void that other physiques will never precisely fill, thus consigning to nothingness the customized shape of hustle doubles and off-balance throws, but some bequeath to poor replacements—hey, Babe Dahlgren was good, but he wasn’t Lou Gehrig good—truly unfillable shoes.

Replacement for Chapman arrived first in the form of Harry Lunte, who, after stepping in as a pinch runner, went on to amass a lifetime WAR of -0.7, and then in the person of Joe Sewell, who unlike Lunte and Chapman would earn a place in the Hall of Fame. Still, you could argue that Chapman left a mark more enduring than lifetime stats or even Hall enshrinement. His legacy, in defiance of mere mourning and in a departure from simple synopsis, would become more forward-looking than backward-looking when the ghosts of his fatal beaning inspired the chiefs of Major League Baseball to ban the dangerous spitball and to mandate the use of batting helmets.

You can be sure that Chapman would have preferred not to martyr himself to a future of life-saving practices, preferred not to have given his life, Christ-like, so that others might live. Messiahs are cut from different cloths, not from shirts that say “Cleveland,” and mortal life in its earliest phases is a space in which to ignore the prospect of death, to defer to some remind-me-later time the truth of memento mori and the fact of vanitas still life. But Chapman might rest in a sweeter peace were he to know of his posthumous contribution—that men like Ron Cey, Mike Piazza, David Wright and Ian Kinsler are still around to enjoy the game, reaping the spoils of retirement or striving to create lasting proofs of their time on the field of play. History suggests that if not for the helmet, their stories might have ended in the dirt.

But chaos still favors the margins of baseball, patrolling the narrow dividers between victory and ultimate defeat: One player whom Chapman’s ghost could not save, and whom youth could not resurrect, was Tony Conigliaro. On Aug. 18, 1967, at a time when the 22-year-old Red Sox outfielder had already amassed 104 big-league homers, Conigliaro suffered major damage to his left retina when hit by a fastball just below the helmet. Severely impaired, he missed the rest of that season and all of the next before returning in 1969 and posting career-best numbers in 1970, only to fall victim to compromised eyesight in 1971 and leave the sport. He would return, briefly, in 1975, but by then he was a sad ghost of his former self.

At 30—an age when Jamie Moyer had posted just 36 of his eventual 269 big-league wins—Conigliaro would retire, leaving unfinished what might have been a Hall of Fame career. (For his part, Hamilton would quickly develop a fear of pitching inside and, after posting an 0-5 record and 6.49 ERA in 1969, leave the game for good.) Seven years later, at 37, the onetime teenage rookie would suffer a heart attack and a stroke and then spend the rest of his life in a vegetative state before passing away, in 1990, at 45—an age when Moyer would post a 3.71 ERA and a 16-7 record.

Longevity is a contract that no one can claim; epitaphs and stat lines wait with equal urgency in the same class of margins that divide home runs from fly balls, safe calls from outs. In the end, what lasts is what you could never quite foresee. And so the viewer is left to ask himself: What is my lasting impression of Tony Conigliaro? Is it his Topps All-Star Rookie card, a portrait that shows a teenager’s eyes focused one some unformed future beyond the edges of the frame, or is it a later picture, of a 22-year-old man in a hospital bed, his black eye shut to what his right eye must see?



On Jan. 19, 1937, exactly 37 years after Marty Bergen committed a horrifying murder-suicide, Cy Young, Nap Lajoie and Tris Speaker each earned a place among the immortals by gaining election to the Hall of Fame.

On Jan. 19, 1961, exactly 29 years after Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis denied Shoeless Joe Jackson’s appeal for reinstatement, and exactly 11 years before former Dodger southpaw Sandy Koufax, at age 36, became the youngest player ever elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, former Rookie of the Year Don Newcombe announced his retirement, thus ending a once-flourishing career that had already stalled in a whiskey bottle.

Promising starts and premature endings, like first pitches and final outs, are inseparable from the sport of baseball, each anointing this date or that date as a happy or sad anniversary. No doubt, the two-faced god of transitions—of debuts and finales, of springtime hope and lifelong despair—presides as much over baseball as over other earthly endeavors. The facts of life are one with the game and guarantee its persistence through time.

New players will always replace old players before turning old themselves, and old players will always try to prolong their youth, through whatever means possible, before yielding to age and mortality. Koufax, like his successors Conigliaro, A-Rod, Trout and Harper, made his big-league debut at 19, signaling to the realm of possibility that a 300-win career had just begun, but after an age-30 season in which he posted a 27-9 record and a 1.73 ERA while earning his third Cy Young Award, the lefty succumbed to that most old-mannish of maladies, arthritis, and announced his retirement.

But Koufax, like Gilgamesh, has graced the Earth as both a historical figure and an epic figure, a man of the people who nonetheless played a central role in a legendary, cautionary tale while leaving for future generations a legacy of masterpieces to which to aspire. Today he is aging gracefully, and when his time is up he’ll have his hereafter in Cooperstown. Ars longa, vita brevis.

Meantime, though preternaturally gifted and precociously introduced, the man we might call Ozymandiarod has tried to redefine biogenesis and stay “forever young,” prolonging his mojo with pharmaceutical alchemy while boosting his Hall of Fame bona fides, which in a remarkably ironic twist appear to have taken a hit.

A-Rod can knock, but he might not get in. Sic transit 600-plus home runs.

In any case, long after A-Rod is gone from the game, talk of “legacy” will remain a part of his legacy. Math will still merge with biography to weigh on the keepers of fame, and myth will have its junction with fact. And so the viewers will continue to ask: How will we remember these players? Will we remember Marty Bergen as a catcher-turned-killer, or as an example that gifted athletes are not immune to the problems of the world? Will we remember Billy Hamilton as a player who stole 100-plus bases in each of his first three full seasons en route to the Hall of Fame, or as a man so reverent of humanity that he attended the funeral of a fatally troubled teammate?

And what of Charlie Peete? Will we remember him as a player we never had a chance to remember, or as a man we shouldn’t forget? Is he a lost prospect in a grainy photo, or a testament to what might happen and to what will?

And how about Miguel Fuentes? Will we remember the right-hander as the answer to a trivia question? Who threw the final pitch for the Seattle Pilots? Or might we recall him with a question much less trivial? Why must promise sometimes be snuffed?

We know for the most part how we’ll remember, say, the Say Hey Kid and The Luckiest Man On The Face Of The Earth, but no one knows for certain how we’ll look back on the likes of Mike Trout and Bryce Harper. Their images have taken shape, no doubt, but have yet to finish forming.

Once the season begins, we can wonder if the moments they produce, rather than the proofs of that production, are enough to sustain their passion for the game, or if the prospects of immortal images and everlasting plaques are the engines that drive them upward and onward, the motors that make their young cells go. Meanwhile, the players might realize that the most rabid of fans are kind of right: Baseball is just a game, sure, but it’s still life and death. Every instant, after all, is the beginning of the end, and every end begins always.

Take Al Thake. On Aug. 9, 1872, at Hartford Trotting Park, the 22-year-old left fielder went 2 for 5 at the plate, with one RBI and one run scored, against eventual loser Cy Bentley. Twenty-six days later, Thake was dead.

As for the 21-year-old Bentley, he would end the season—and his career—with a record of 2-15 and an ERA of 6.06. Some seven months after delivering a final pitch to Thake, the pitcher would die of tuberculosis.

To his credit, he did complete 14 of the 17 games he started.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Azure Texan 2013-05-10T05:59:15+00:00 The book on sports http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-book-on-sports/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-book-on-sports/#When:07:11:15
“Prior to the era of collegiate doubleheaders, the most important shot in basketball was the two-handed set shot. But with the advent of basketball teams from the South and West, the one-handed jump shot (Fig. 140) began to challenge the set shot. Teams such as Notre Dame, Minnesota, Kentucky and West Virginia came to Madison Square Garden year after year and scored sensational victories over the best in the East by using the one-hand shot. Today it is generally accepted that both shots are equally as (sic) important.”
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“Today” in this instance refers to 1948, the year Garden City Publishing Co., Inc. issued a 188-page oversized hardcover titled, Giant Book of Sports, on whose page 84 the above passage appears.

Dedicated to the memory of Babe Ruth—“exemplar of fair play, clean sportsmanship, courage and skill in American sport”—and with a target audience of American boys who presumably sought to become the next “Bones” McKinney of the Washington Capitols or Snuffy Stirnweiss of the New York Yankees, the book offered rudimentary and intermediate instruction in baseball, football, basketball, tennis, bowling and boxing.

Its pages were peppered with the sort of pre-irony boosterism—“Study the basic rules and practice, practice, PRACTICE!”—so expressive of the postwar zeitgeist, and augmented with typeset tutorials featuring hand-drawn illustrations—Fig. 140, as you might imagine, shows a pencil-rendered white guy in very short shorts lofting a short-range one-handed “jump shot” toward the hoop—and tips from professional ballplayers such as Joe DiMaggio, Sid Tannenbaum and Ken Strong.

“A kicker should stand about ten yards behind the line of scrimmage with his feet slightly apart, knees bent, the weight over the center of the body,” advises Strong, a professional placekicker/punter/halfback from 1929 to 1947, in the section titled, How To Kick. “Lean forward at the waist. Extend the arms so that you are ready to receive the ball with the fingers spread.”

Having discovered the brittle old book in a box of antique things, I felt downright excited, perhaps a bit like Indiana Jones, when I first cracked open—literally, as it turned out—Chapter 1, Baseball, its intro adorned with a black-and-white drawing that seemed to show a company softball game attended by a mysterious Mennonite and pair of Abe Lincoln impersonators but that probably depicted a very early baseball game and now represented a period piece inside a subsequent period piece, a nesting of two nostalgias.

Indeed, my reading soon became a kind of historical archaeology, a layered exploration of earlier eras by way of one printed relic, and uncovered both the quaint—“Every hamlet has its teams. Every vacant lot is filled with youngsters matching their skill”—and the classic—“the big leagues want hitters.”

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Intrigued, I continued to turn the pages, leafing through tips on base stealing (“You can practice sliding on the grass in your stocking feet”), pitching (“The slow ball, or change-up, is held just like the fast ball except that the ball is held against the palm”), fielding (“On bunts, whip off the mask, pounce on the ball, and scrape it up like Yogi Berra in Figures 40 and 41”) and hitting, which revealed both the expected—DiMaggio, extolling the virtue of courage at the plate—and the unexpected, the example of Spider Jorgensen, “star infielder with the Dodgers,” as having one of the most unusual, and therefore inadvisable, stances in Major League Baseball.

Spider Jorgensen?

Though a lifelong fan of the national pastime, I had never heard of this Spider Jorgensen. And even if a number of modern hitters were now using his stance, a “stance so open that he is actually facing the pitcher,” the former “star infielder” still seemed remaindered to a fixed and inflexible past, stranded, like the makers of Esslinger’s Little Man Ale, in a history forever closed to the attentions and appropriations of future generations.

Stranded with him, it seemed, were many of the entries in the chapter-ending glossary of baseball terms. Sure, I knew that a banjo hitter is one who hits a lot of bloopers, and, more or less, that a bench jockey is a “substitute whose chief occupation is heckling opponents,” but who knew that a barber is a talkative player, that a Blind Tom is an umpire and that a lemon in the grapefruit belt is a high-priced rookie who flops in Spring Training?

Times had changed, and so had the terms of its literate occupants, those humans who had codified games and conceived of ways to explain them. And yet a “hanging curve” was still a hanging curve, fodder for any hitter, in any era that you might recall today, who could routinely “get a holt o’ one.”


Chapter 2, Football, began the way Chapter 1 had begun, with a drawing, a brief history of the sport and a roster of inductees in the sport’s Hall of Fame, their mugs more or less immortalized by the pencil of one Samuel Nisenson. Of particular note was that while the baseball hall consisted entirely of professionals such as Ty Cobb, Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Hans Wagner, Pie Traynor and Babe Ruth, the football hall consisted exclusively of college players and coaches.

As if to remind the future reader that things weren’t always the way they are now, the publication of Giant Book of Sports preceded the advent of the Pro Football Hall of Fame by 15 years and boasted names like Doc, Jock, Red, Ace, Bronko, Fritz and Dutch to support an implicit point: that until 1970, when the NFL and AFL merged and TV contracts were strengthened, college football was the prince to pro football’s pauper, the winner, not the runner-up, of the popularity game. By contrast, the 16 teams of Major League Baseball together drew 20 million fans in the year prior to the publication of the book I now was perusing.*

*And yes, I gleaned this fact from the book I was now perusing.

Leafing forward in my trip back through time, I soon arrived at a passé look—leather helmets without the benefit of facemasks. As if to affirm the vintage imagery enshrined in our collective consciousness, each illustration depicted a player who looked a lot like George Clooney, albeit a bit less handsome, in the movie, Leatherheads, and thus perfectly suited to an era that by contemporary standards seemed virtually prehistoric, so distant and disconnected that only 21st-century cinema could bring it back to life.

Conversely, I realized that if not for the uniform pants folded just below the knees, the illustrated baseball players could have passed for modern big leaguers, each so unfailingly suited to a traditional cap that no single era could have laid claim to his appearance or performance.

But the football players? Just a few years away from the widespread use of plastic helmets, the football players seemed more time-bound than timeless, wedged permanently with the bobby-soxers and Dorsey Brothers in a charming yet outmoded past.

They seemed stuck in a timeline made not of overlapped pieces and transitional links but of many discrete parts, laid one after the other in a staggered series that failed to replicate the comparatively seamless continuum of baseball, whose current players wear throwback uniforms that don’t look so very different from their customary uniforms—a lot less different than, say, Chicago quarterback Jay Cutler would look were he to wear a wool jersey, canvas pants, leather shoulder pads and a leather helmet.

Indeed, by appearances, Joe DiMaggio (Figs. 9 and 10) could have hit in any era while always looking the part, timelessly stylish and enduringly wedded to his place at home plate. His swing, so utterly DiMaggian that its fluidity is fixed in our minds but hardly anchored to an era, would have traveled incely in a Wellsian time machine and reemerged in just as menacing a proof in any batter’s box in any stadium in any of baseball’s seasons.

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By contrast, the nameless ball carrier in Fig. 85 might as well have worn a zoot suit while playing The Merry Game of Fibber McGee, so absurdly outdated was his appearance. His “cross-over step”—performed, per text, just as he receives the snap from the center—seemed the prototype of a 1940s cake topper. And the tips—“take full advantage of interference (and) develop various dodging tactics”—appeared to have come from an early ancestor of the contemporary Captain Obvious.

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Even so, the outworn pose wasn’t all that separated his likeness from that of, say, Adrian Peterson*. The man’s pants, jersey and helmet, which looked more like a swimmer’s cap than a defense against a viciously rung bell, and even his number 66—they all stood out as museum pieces, musty, outmoded, and consigned to a collection of obsolete objects, along with the RCA Victor Tube Phonograph and the Hudson Utility Coupe.

They were, or are, pieces of our history, valued with a historiographical awareness of what they meant to the tenants of a generation, but now their service seemed only to nostalgia.

*For another key difference, see Postscript.

Just as antiquated, as if in a warehouse of once vital but now ignored things, were other gridiron how-tos. By now the “spinner play” and—with apologies to Doug Flutie—the dropkick had gone to the musty archives, and apart from Tim Tebow’s collegiate deployments, so had the jump pass. And even if modern offenses had turned the single-wing and the T formation into the shotgun and the Wildcat, none had dusted off the formations in Figs. 137 and 139.

With regard to aerial strategy, at least one ‘40s maxim had flunked the test of time: “When one team has fumbled and the other recovers, it is a good idea to pass into the territory of the back who fumbled. He will probably be a little on edge and a pass into his region may result in a nice gain.”

Gamesmanship, more than sportsmanship, had remained a common theme, linking the lifeblood of one era to that of another and rendering each unapologetically cutthroat, but no, no longer were players going both ways.

The football chapter ended with a digest of outstanding achievements, all from the college ranks, and included this entry: Most field goals, season – 17, “Frosty” Peters, as a freshman, Montana, in 1924, all drop kicks.

Meanwhile, back in Chapter 1, the Digest of the Outstanding Achievements in Baseball included this item: Hitting safely in most consecutive games – 56, by Joe DiMaggio. N.Y. Yankees, May 15 to July 16, 1941.


Outstanding Achievements in Basketball
Madison Square Garden Scoring Records
Most Points 1 Game: Harry Boykoff, St. John’s vs. St. Francis, 1947 – 54.

So began the end of the basketball chapter—with a list of achievements secured only at one arena and only by college players. The Basketball Association of America, a forerunner to the NBA and featuring among its 11 teams none farther west than St. Louis, had been founded just two years prior to the publication of Giant Book of Sports, and thus did the records reflect not only the absence of a sustained pro basketball history but also the provincial nature of the sport and its staging and coverage.

Granted, college teams from the “South” and “West” had scored “sensational victories over the best in the East” by using the one-handed jump shot, but still, if the Outstanding Achievements were any indication, Northeastern teams like St. John’s, Fordham and NYU were pretty much the only squads to have scored by the bucketloads at Madison Square Garden, and Madison Square Garden was the only arena to have very much mattered.

At the same time, according the list on page 82, inductees in the Basketball Hall of Fame included 10 college coaches and 16 college players but no pro coaches and just 10 pro players, all of them from Northeastern teams that included the Boston Whirlwinds, Troy Trojans and Brooklyn Visitations.

Brooklyn Visitations?

Though a subscriber to Sports Illustrated since childhood, I had never heard of these Brooklyn Visitations. And even if they did win six Metropolitan Basketball League championships between 1922 and 1935, they still seemed remaindered, even more than Spider Jorgensen, to a fixed and inflexible past, stranded, like the makers of Dixie Peach Pomade, in a history forever closed to the attentions and appropriations of future generations.

In fact, Jorgensen’s Dodgers would leave Brooklyn for Los Angeles in 1958, essentially trading a series of black-and-white stills for a long-running color reel, and yet in doing so still would maintain the continuity of a then 74-year-old franchise and an eventual link between Fred Warner, the third baseman on the inaugural 1884 Brooklyn Atlantics, and Luis Cruz, the L.A. Dodgers third baseman who in 2012 hit .297 using a Spider-like open stance.

But the Visitations? Following the 1936 season, the Visitations became but recollections, lost heirlooms waiting for an online encyclopedia to find them.

Paging forward, I soon arrived at tips for the granny shot—yes, the granny shot—as well as the two-handed chest shot, a method, as previously mentioned, that had already ceded some short-shorts-era mojo to the one-handed jump shot but that now seemed so laughably antediluvian that it could have joined Paranthropus boisei as an evolutionary dead-ender, done in by better-adapted styles.

No doubt, if a player today were to follow NYU All-American Don Forman’s 1948 advice—“Be sure that the ball leaves your finger tips at eye level”—he’d find himself without a prayer and without a team but with two black eyes and a broken nose, courtesy of the behemoth who slammed it back in his face.

For comparison, I turned to the baseball page most associated with ball release, and there saw Bob Feller providing advice whose essential truth and relevance had not changed in the six decades since he issued it: “The ball is released off the first two fingers with a downward snap of the wrist.” Likewise, Fig. 20 showed Dizzy Dean getting “that extra hop on his fast ball” by turning his hips away from the batter and kicking his left foot high.

And even now, in the present tense, it is still the preferred technique.

image


Modern critics can argue about the biomechanics of pitching—humeral torque, shoulder kinematics and scapular loading—but in the time since 1884, when the sport legalized overhand pitching, pitchers haven’t radically altered the way they deliver the ball to the plate. No hurler is using a granny shot, of course, or a delivery similar to the jump pass of Harry Gilmer, All-American, on page 56, his face forever unmasked in a look from the past.

It’s true that pitchers have added pitches to their repertoires (see: the split-finger), and that bullpens are more important than ever before (see: the Giants), but even now, as the 2013 season has come upon us, the lessons of Feller still apply: “I use the entire arm, including shoulder, elbow and wrist, and twist the curve off vigorously (Fig. 27).”

Postscript


Change is registered in the layers of history, in the chapters of shared and storied experience, but isn’t always spelled out at the moment it is made. The publication of Giant Book of Sports arrived at a pivotal time—just one year after Jackie Robinson’s MLB debut, one year before Wally Triplett’s NFL debut and two years before Earl Lloyd’s NBA debut. Tellingly, except for those of boxers Joe Louis and Henry Armstrong, the black-and-white drawings remain, in essence, far less black than white.

The rest is a story—a brighter story—for another day. Here and now I look to the book and see that baseball, more than the other team sports featured, remains a beautiful display of continuity, its evolution directed by tiny tweaks to established practices: the addition of the split-finger fastball, the subtraction of smokeless chew; the emergence of the designated hitter, the death of the dead ball and its 3.4 runs a game. The line from now to then is a straight one, and its characters—its letters, numbers, men—are easy to trace.

DiMaggio’s hit streak is still a record, and his numbers—unlike Gilmer’s 3,786 lifetime passing yards—still look right in modern grids. Dizzy Dean, at 6-foot-2, would look nearly as imposing on a modern mound, but Don Forman, at a mere 5-10, might never make it to a contemporary court.

And in a Chapter 1 as foundational as Genesis, the Georgia Peach is still telling the hitter that “you must step properly if you’re going to hit the ball,” while Joltin’ Joe is still telling the fielder that he’s “off to (a) spot at the crack of the bat.” Meantime, with relevance to readers both now and then, “Snuffy” Stirnweiss is perfectly demonstrating the double-play pivot.

Names and terms have changed—does “crooked arm” still mean a left-handed pitcher?—but the narrative itself is consistent, familiar, pertinent. You can still practice sliding in your stocking feet, even if you say you’re wearing socks. The slow ball is still held like a “fast ball,” even if you call the first a changeup and spell the second “fastball.” On bunts, you still should whip off the mask, pounce on the ball and scrape it up, if not like Yogi Berra in Figures 40 and 41, then like Yadier Molina on ESPN. And you know that the big leagues still want hitters. The pages continue to turn.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Azure Texan 2013-04-22T07:11:15+00:00 Anatomy of the moment http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/anatomy-of-the-moment/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/anatomy-of-the-moment/#When:09:17:15
It is the bottom of the eighth, Game Five of the 2011 World Series, and along with 50,000 other partisan loyalists who’ve coughed up a mortgage payment to score a seat, I am screaming with some great conviction the surname of the burly Texas catcher, who with the bases loaded, one out, and the score tied 2-2, is digging in at the plate.

“Na-Po-Li!”

Of late, more than any other Ranger, Mike Napoli has embodied the Platonic form of possibility, the hylomorphic potential for an exceedingly positive outcome—in this case, a run-scoring single, an equally productive sac fly, or even a childhood-dream grand slam—and thus has the right-handed hitter with the linebacker chest become the home crowd’s greatest hope for happiness, the sort that turns a moment into something archival, something that remains a part of your treasury until death comes to snatch it away.

“Na-Po-Li!”

As for me, I am sitting seven rows behind home plate, in a seat so expensive it should have come with power steering and alloy wheels, and while Napoli stands waiting for the first pitch to arrive, waggling his bat in an airy coil of potential energy, I am cupping my hands in a makeshift megaphone and giving a hardy shout-out to a family ancestry that stretches all the way back to Italy. Granted, to a rational man of American make, the Neapolitan province would seem an unlikely contributor to the local sporting landscape, but in a universe where, in the words of Nietzsche, “all things are chained and entwined together, all things are in love,” it is not beyond imagining that while a man named Rzepczynski prepares to deliver the pitch, I should chant the Italian pronunciation of the parliamentary republic’s third-largest city.

“Na-Po-Li!”

Echoing through the park like a buoyant battle cry, all joy and unleashed conviction, the chant carries with it a collective expression of faith and expectation, of trust in the impending outcome and, equally, in the man who might deliver it, as though in this ad hoc chorale a shared confidence has found its common voice. No, this isn’t a moment of grim tension, the kind you see year after year on those baseball broadcasts when middle-aged women in sectarian jackets nervously steeple their fingers in the form of prayerful hands, or when factional men with clenched jaws and anxious eyes perch their home-team caps in rally fashion atop their autumnal heads, hoping against probability for an emancipation from pending doom.

No, this is the voice of optimism, of faith that the immediate future will unfold in such a way that the long-term future will never leave it behind.

This is the trust that the next moment, or one soon after, will last a lifetime.



Now let’s back up a bit, let’s rewind. Let’s discuss for a moment the man who is sitting in—well more like standing in front of—Seat 18 of the seventh row behind home plate of Rangers Ballpark in Arlington. Let’s acknowledge that this is not normally the seat he occupies. Normally, the seat he . . . the seat I occupy is a leather living-room swivel chair with a sloping back and wraparound arms ($550, Overstock.com) positioned 10 feet in front of a 46-inch flat-screen inside a comfy room in west Austin.



“Na-Po-Li!”

The roar is utterly seismic, and the stadium, in response to the roar, has begun to sway and shake. Meanwhile, the dude to my right is screaming so fiercely that his neck is a weird filigree of distended veins, but I still can’t hear him above the noise. His voice has been soaked up, assimilated, by something bigger than what his ticket represents. To my left, my wife, too, is shouting, but her exclamations are likewise absorbed by the vox populi.

“Na-Po-Li!”

On the other side of the black mesh barrier, in a locus of manmade light, stands the man on whose bat, and, to a greater extent, on whose genetic endowment of kinesthetic sense, the future is delicately balanced. Meanwhile, exactly 60 feet six inches before him, on a mound about 10 inches high, looms the man on whose left hand the future is likewise contingent, in the form of a ball whose cooperation he plans and maybe prays for. At five ounces in weight and nine inches in circumference, the ball is one of millions that Rawlings puts out, each identical in build but unique in the potential it embodies, like a bullet in a drawn-out war. Cranked out by the indifferent gears of assembly, the bullet could land harmlessly in a field or lethally in a heart, and in similar if not quite equivalent fashion, the ball could find its duty in a double play to end the inning or in a dinger that clinches the game.

The hitter stands ready, at the cusp of a moment that consequence will not ignore, while at the same time, with my happiness almost absurdly attached to his left arm, a man named Rzepczynski peers in to his catcher, settling on the pitch on which history will hinge. For their parts, the fielders and the fans have found a visual convergence between the mound and home plate, in the 60-plus feet in which the future, yielding to pious supplications or to the physics of a cylinder in search of a sphere, will inevitably take its form.

The air we share, all 52,000 of us, is a faithful medium, honest with the facts of its content. Owing to the null trajectory that photons have found convenient, light speed guarantees the gospel truth of perception, that what I see is what is happening and that what is happening is what I see. The push of a button will not suspend the action, placing in abeyance the outcome you are too afraid to watch. And no push of another button will speed this whole thing up, fast-forwarding the outcome you are too excited to wait for.

The air is staunchly of the instant, keeper of everything current, everything that so fluidly divides the precursory act from its pending line of successors, those events that slip through the sliding doors of contingency to become what the broadcasters talk about and what the sports writers publish, dispatching to perpetuity the keystrokes a moment inspired. Still unresolved, like a cosmos in wait of its bang, is the story those keystrokes will shape.

There is no doubt, however, as to the story I wish to unfold.

“Na-Po-Li!”

And I am chanting with the legion, chanting just prior to the pitch, when in an instant that seems to decelerate time, forestalling the future by bringing the past into sharper view, I come to a realization so vivid that it seems captured by a magnifying lens: that this moment—bases loaded, one out, tie score in Game Five of the World Series—is one I never bothered to dream.

Indeed, as a kid growing up in Dallas, I never once envisioned, even in a sugar-induced haze, a World Series appearance for the hometown team. The Rangers, like an underachieving schoolboy at last shipped off to an out-of-state aunt, had come to Texas in 1972 and set up in a rinky-dink ballpark adjacent to a theme park alongside a turnpike in a run-down in-between suburb, and from the start, everything about them seemed second-rate. The uniforms, the logos, the ballpark and even the brand of baseball—all were substandard, not uniformly terrible but invariably cheap, as if made in a secret sweatshop. Conditioned by the mediocrity to which the Rangers had been heir, the fans expected little and had their expectations confirmed.

As a kid, you didn’t go to a Rangers game to watch them vie for first place; no, you went to see your favorite player—on the other god-dang team. You went to see Reggie Jackson or Wade Boggs, not Toby Harrah or Pete O’Brien. You went to see Juniors Griffey and Ripken, not seniors Paciorek and Hough. Sure, even in the early years, there were some pretty talented Rangers: Fergie Jenkins, Jeff Burroughs, Gaylord Perry, Jim Sundberg, Al Oliver, Larry Parrish, Buddy Bell and of course Nolan Ryan, who by notching a pair of no-hitters and beating the bejeezus out of a man half his age would become the embodiment of Texas baseball. But nobody except the clinically optimistic, and perhaps the chemically deluded, ever really thought the Rangers of Texas would hoist the Commissioner’s Trophy.

In later years came better Rangers: Sierra, Palmeiro, Gonzalez, Ivan Rodriguez and A-Rod, whose extortionate presence in a Texas uniform only made a pretense of the Rangers having arrived.

Even after the new stadium opened in 1994, the Rangers still had the look of a second-tier franchise, spitting out teams that with few exceptions might finish at .500 but never play for the shiny prize. As if produced by the Convention and Visitors Bureau and labeled For Entertainment Purposes Only, the Rangers always made for a fun Saturday night—a chance to drink overpriced beer and to eat preposterously orange nachos with very good friends, rendering the game incidental and the outcome of no account. Granted, there were times when the fifth win of a five-game winning streak, coupled with the sixth beer of a seven-beer night, conjured up bizarre images, complete with the separate realities of a low team ERA and a diligent DH who for the sake of the squad would continue his Dianabol cycles, of the Rangers making a run for the pennant. But alas, morning would come, along with the dawning dyad of a wicked hangover and a middling Texas roster.

For every team . . . turn, turn, turn . . . there was a season . . . turn, turn, turn . . . except for the freakin’ Rangers. Middle-of-the-pack seemed their birthright, with exceptions made for dead-ass last and the occasional first-round exit from postseason play, which, truth be told, seemed a lot like losing your virginity without being allowed the benefit of the big release.

Still, if you were really honest with yourself, you’d have admitted to the mortifying truth: that you still felt privileged and even honored whenever the Yankees came to town. It was like, “Really? The Yankees? From New York? In this ballpark? Adjacent to a theme park? Alongside a turnpike? In a run-down in-between suburb?” Frankly, it was like having The Rolling Stones not only agree to play at your prom but actually show the hell up.



Rewind now, go back: It is the bottom of the ninth of Game Four of the 2011 World Series, and with the remote in one hand and a beer in the other I am sitting uneasily in my otherwise comfortable chair, watching, waiting and actually sort of praying, to the nearest god available, for something good to happen, even if what’s to happen onscreen has already happened in space.

The Rangers are up, 4-0, a score that could hearten even the most devoted disciple of the it-ain’t-over-till-it’s-over doctrine, and yet with one out and runners on first and second, Albert Pujols is stepping to the plate, wielding the power to change a future that by now is history, dispatched to the books as a series-tying win for the Rangers or a comeback win for the Cardinals.

Yeah, it’s over, but as far as I’m concerned, the fat lady ain’t even hummed.

Pause: Like many a sports fan with a newfangled television and a rational conception of time, I often record games on my DVR and watch them later, usually at a two-hour offset and mostly in an effort to condense the viewing experience into what matters most—namely, the game, thereby turning Jimmy Fallon and other occupants of repetitive ad space into easy fodder for three-times-the-norm fast-forward. After all, I ask, why spend five hours watching the ballgame when I can spend three?

Sure, by employing the Merlinesque power of the DVR and rendering Mr. Fallon a pawn of sped-up chronology, I trade the thrill of live action for the less-dramatic satisfaction of time management, enrolling myself in the brotherhood of Type A types who hit the snooze button just once and later tell their coworkers that a morning workout is key to a profitable day. I sacrifice up-to-the-moment suspense in favor of the task-list productivity that two-day seminars encourage and that weeklong seminars really support.

Still, for my money, DVR’ed action has always remained “plausibly live,” pulling me into its drama with the same intensity of a Miramax Films production that, in actual fact, was filmed a full 18 months prior to release, long before Kirsten Knightely or Keira Dunst or whatever her name is appeared on Letterman or Leno and said, “Oh, do we have a clip?”

Honestly, as long as you don’t know the outcome—that is to say, as long as you bury your iPhone six inches deep and live reasonably far from Buffalo Wild Wings—what’s the difference between watching the game live and watching it plausibly live? Sure, a cynic might claim that modern TV, with its time-warping devices, alters the reality of he who watches at home by turning a reasonable facsimile of time-sensitive truth—that is, sports on live TV—into a pliable version of what aims to be real, thereby severing the televised action from the moment it truly occupies and removing the witness from the legitimate tension of the unaltered instant, the unfolding now.

And yes, it’s true that by DVRing the game and consigning its action to the whims of fast-forward, rewind and pause, you remove the perception that this thing is happening right now, in a separate dimension of space but in the same dimension of time, but you also get to skip Cialis commercials that show self-assured middle-aged dudes, remarkably manly vis-à-vis the low achievements of their dysfunctional dongs, rescuing horses from the mud.

Play: Albert Pujols is digging into the box, positioning his hips and tucking his shoulders to assume the form of the thing you fear most, the monster in your closet, the devil in your head, the killer whose calls are coming from inside the house, the hitter, in truth, who with one swing of the bat can turn this imminent Ranger victory into a one-run game. Toeing the rubber, at least on TV, is Rangers closer Neftali Feliz, a man whose 1988 date of birth suggests that he should not have such a dramatic impact on my life, but there he is, a man of 23 on whose 100 mph heater my joy is teeteringly poised.

Still, even as the big right-hander peers in for the sign, I come back to the truth of this timeline, the one I occupy in relation to the one on TV. History, in the form of the events that create it and not just the accounts that comprise its record, has already registered the outs and the runs of this inning. Out here in the real world, in the inertial frame of reference that informs and encloses every perception, the Rangers have won or the Rangers have lost.

“Right now, in real life,” I say to myself in the swivel chair, “I am either extremely happy or extremely depressed. I just don’t know which yet.”



The temperature was preposterously ideal, and as I stepped from the driver’s seat in Lot F at Rangers Ballpark I said to my wife, “Is this Heaven?”

“No,” she replied. “It’s Arlington.”

Times had changed. We had just parked on the site of the old Arlington Stadium, stopping atop the ghosts of Mikes Hargrove and Cubbage, of Steves Buechele and Howe, and now, as we stepped toward the trunk to retrieve our camera, we moved with equal insouciance across the phantoms of Brian Bohanon and Benji Gil, of Bump Wills and Billy Sample, of the hundreds of other Rangers who’d played for pennantless teams in a rinky-dink park that had long since surrendered to implosion and paving over.

It was only 5:15, about two hours before opening pitch of Game Five of the 2011 World Series, but already the tailgaters were tailgating, raising beers and spirits in advance of the pivotal game. Above them, as if Heaven had colonized this North Texas tract, the sky stretched clear and blue to each horizon, and the breeze ferried the warmth of the late-day sun.

The stadium, with its roofed home-run porch and upper-deck frieze, stood waiting on the south, hearkening back to an era well before that of the old stadium and therefore boasting an architectural aesthetic that called to mind the Shot Heard Round The World rather than the failed hit-and-run you really didn’t see from the blistering-hot bleacher seats in August of ’93.

We began walking toward it, weaving through parties that in previous years might have lasted deep into the fourth inning and recommenced in the eighth, often with Jell-O shots but never with conversation regarding the Rangers’ shot at the Series. Those days had been put asunder, buried beneath the lot, and their legacy of low expectations had at last met with dismissal in the joy outside the park. The air sounded of hope and high expectations, and as we approached the gate I realized once and for all that the Yankees weren’t coming to town. The Stones weren’t playing the prom. This was about the Rangers, a team whose 40 years of futility had generated the moments to come.



Onscreen, Feliz has begun his windup. Pujols, being Pujols, is locked and loaded and looking exactly like a nightmare in double-knit garb, with the worst of the terrors lurking in his hips and arms. Destiny, for its part, has submitted to the mechanisms of his pending swing, and has aimed its hinges at his hands and eyes; the ancestors, though long dead and buried, still live inside his cells, and there they’ll convene to govern his timing. There, too, they might stand aside, powerless to the progeny of Fortuna or Feliz.

Meanwhile—well, no, it’s more than an hour after the fact—I am sitting in a chair that suddenly feels less like furniture and more like a cell, a tiny lockup that despite its comforts is a space I can’t escape. The sloping back and wraparound arms now define my incarceration, a strange custody that allows for only degrees of swiveled freedom. Frightened by a showdown beyond my control, I am indeed a prisoner of the moment, an inmate of the time it takes a five-oz. ball to travel a 60-foot six-inch space, and, more, a captive of the time that precedes it. I am a man whose liberties of mind and emotion are surrendered to keepers outside my reach, the keys handed over to a pair of men who on the strength of various seedings are sharing a time and place.

And no, I am not of the same time and place. I am twice offset, by spans of 200 miles and 60-some-odd minutes, but still here I am, unable to escape this detention and helpless against the anxiety it fathers.

On TV, the pitcher’s face is covered in sweat, a sheen of past effort and maybe of immediate fear. As for Pujols, his is a mask of conviction and poise, as if predestination has tapped his partnership and he is soon to do his duty to a future that is already known. Here under this roof, however, joy and despair wait together, adjacent but wholly apart. At the cusp of delivery they wait for their summons, each prepared in full measure for the sound—the striking of wood or of leather—that sets it off, apart from its reverse.

My heart keeps pounding, pounding, pounding as I wait for the effect to divulge its reliance on the nuance of the cause. My mind, and whatever seat it has given to the soul, yearns to know the end without needing to confront the means. The middle distance is too long, too painful, too much a test of the toughness that only victory can reward, and I wish only to know at this very moment whether to groan or to cheer without having to endure the trip.

Before me the two men stand, very much poles apart.

When victorious, one will point to his Heaven.

When defeated, the other will take a walk.

At last, initiating what cannot be returned, the pitcher lifts his leg.

This is the televised moment, lagging well behind its real-time source, which divides the known past from the irreversible future, and suddenly I can’t bear my place inside its grip. I can’t bear the playing-out of history, the drawn-out tension that accompanies the unfurling now, the sense of not knowing what is already known, the feeling of impotence against a mediated chain of events. Seeking escape, I at last reach for the lone means of control, the sole instrument of free will in the face of a so-called determinate system.

I grab the remote and aim it at the action.

I press a button, and the world is changed.



“Whaaaaaat!?”

Turning toward me, my wife shakes her head and points to her deafened ear. Cupping my hand to the side of her head, I shout once more, louder this time, with a volume that just might overcome the sound of this crowd.

The exhortation—“Na-Po-Li!”—has been seven-plus innings in development and longer in the making, the culmination of all that came before. What the crowd is saying is that the time is now; earlier, when my wife and I first arrived at our seats, the time was 5:40, and we gazed with satisfaction at a stadium fit for the world: TV lights made halos where once there were none. Luminaries—“Hey, that’s . . . !”—gathered on the landscaped grass. Sunlight came at a painterly angle, as if from a heaven made for framing.

Registered in the faces all around us was the rightness of another stale cliché: Electricity really was in the air. It was a thing and not a feeling.

In time the Jumbotron read: World Series. 2011. 5:53. Baseballs rang out from batting practice and rattled around in the seats, and you knew that possibility was in the air—with each groan or cheer it might later take the form of. Handed rally towels at the gate, fans burned nervous energy by waving them long before any rally could license their use. Out on the field, the players in their colors continued to hit and stretch, all in preparation for a time that hadn’t yet happened but that would certainly arrive. Meanwhile, back in the stands, more and more fans were showing up and joining the fabled “buzz,” a sound, charged with expectancy, that a solitary figure could never reproduce. The sound seemed to start nowhere but to be everywhere.

Pictures seemed patient for cameras to find them, abiding in the faces at the batting cage, in the last of the sunlight against tri-colored flags, even in the fans themselves. As if equipped with an innate understanding of time, as well as a desire to preserve it, fans snapped photos of whatever the viewfinder could fix on, and when finished they’d hand their cameras to strangers and ask, “Mind taking a picture of me and my (spouse)?”

Assuming a pose that seemed at once artificial, manufactured for an experience that did not separately exist, and profoundly suited to the occasion, they’d stand with their backs to the playing field and smile, perhaps happy in the knowledge that the moment had demanded the pose.

“Let me take another one,” the stranger would say, “just in case.”

World Series. 2011. 6:45. Out in the batter’s eye, workers unfurled a great Texas flag, its left side an astral swagger but its right side a nod to something larger, something that might bind her people to episodes they wouldn’t have seen. At 6:58 the fireworks went off, streaking gold and pink against the evening sky, and then the anthem arrived and for the first time ever I sang. Patriotism didn’t call me so much as the moment implored my voice. I sang it loud, top-of-the-lungs loud, with everybody else. We had paid big money to occupy these seats, and no amount of embarrassment would sabotage our lease. My wife and I had even packed an ice chest with food and drinks so that our night would settle into fullness. We’d waste no time with concessions. This was our ticket. These were our seats.

image
The View
The innings came and went, one half at a time. Each seemed a thing to hold onto, a souvenir so compelling that it removed the need for another. And yet the prospect of another, and then one more, was enough to convince the conservative mind: Let go of what you’ve gathered and make room for what’s to come. The moments were true to their content, the spaces loyal to the time they framed. Action unfolded at the pace of its making, independent of audience needs, and yet to watch it wasn’t just to witness it but to partake, to be a member and not just a voyeur. Each pitch was a suspension of consequence, the middle distance a field of opposites just .4 second in length; bliss and misery attended every release point, deferring consummation to a time at the plate, but the pitch never called for hostages.

It never demanded obedience to the outcome alone. Liberty had left detention to the 2D screen, consigning to Panasonics and Samsungs the custody of the at-home audience, and our freedom was to know the completeness of every fastball to paint the corner. It was to know the height, width, depth and duration of every curveball to catch too much of the plate.

Contact separated suspense from knowledge, using wood and cowhide to solve one uncertainty while initiating the next: the irresolution of the baseball’s arc, the tension between leather and grass. The mystery was made of breeze and not pixels, and we could breathe it in. In space all around us, TV cameras were beaming into living rooms the image of the air we lived in, the air we felt. Climate-control had nothing to do with it, yet it was at 72 degrees and smelled of peanuts. It sounded of disappointment exchanged for confidence, and confidence yielding to the groan of a called strike three.

The groan would give way, at first grudgingly but then with an upsurge that necessity seduced, to the rising sound of hope. A song in search of its choir would quickly find the voices, 50,000 in strength, and the solidarity of devotion would take hold of the bodies in the seats. They were sealed with the air between them rather than partitioned by far-apart walls. Strangers would high-five in temporary friendships, and hug their way toward the bottom of the frame. The space between innings was both an aftermath and a prelude, its capacity doubled by overlapped importance. Like the space between pitches, it was not to be ignored. It was to be embraced.

In swivel chairs and on sofas, meanwhile, people stared at their TVs. They cursed and shouted at them; they pleaded and bargained. They begged the batter to get the job done; they besought the pitcher to throw a damn strike. They watched it live or plausibly live, but the fact remained that they didn’t watch it in person and so the lone enjoyment came in the payoff they had hoped for and not in the moments that might create it. They watched in order that the action, and in particular the result, validate and reward their investment of time. They watched so that the product might square with their loyalty, even if their loyalty was only to the happiness they craved. In truth, it was a purely selfish act, stripped of involvement with the state of affairs but suffuse with entitlement, the sense that fandom required compensation.

I knew this because I had been there. I had been in that chair.

I knew now that whenever I had sat in that seat, my cheers weren’t cheers for my team so much as they were cheers for myself. I knew now that whenever I had applauded, I had applauded my own satisfaction, the fact that the team had paid back my capital of hours spent in the swivel position. After all, I could have watched The Office. I’d seen that episode already and knew how it turned out: funny, gratifying, and free of anxious moments but for the regional manager’s social faux pas. As a model of risk/reward, with the dividend a known quantity, it would not have impressed social science, but in an era when 24 hours is deemed insufficient space for the duties we’re expected to juggle, it would have been an efficient use of my time. Instead I had watched the game, ceding to mediated images the pivot of my personal happiness and manipulating time in order that it serve my private interests.

But now I was here, in a moment the past had supplied.

For seven-plus innings I had embraced what the game had given. I had stood from my seat and let the instant take me in. I had sung and hollered and jumped around, perfectly willing to embarrass the man I thought I had been. In previous seasons, whenever people had performed the wave or some other demonstration of conformist thought, I had always sat contrarily in my seat, using stubbornness as civil disobedience against the status quo. But tonight I had done everything the moment asked, and more. I had danced the Cabbage Patch at random times. I had done the Cotton-Eye Joe. I had sung Minnie The Moocher at considerable volume, during the seventh-inning stretch. I had cheered at the Jumbotron’s every solicitation, and during a particularly tense Cardinals at-bat I had thought, “Well, let’s just see what happens. If we get ‘em out, great. If they get a hit, they’ve earned it. So let’s just see.”

Now here I stand at the axis of history, cupping a hand to my wife’s right ear. “Dudette!” I shout through the chanting. “This is so much fun!”



Sitting in my chair and unable to abide the tension, I point the remote at the action and press fast-forward, and in the silence of acceleration Pujols has flied to center and Holliday has struck out. Relieved, and removed from the fears of plausibly live baseball, I rewind and watch it again, at normal speed.

I celebrate with a nod.



“This is amazing,” my wife replies, just as the crowd cries “Na-Po-Li!”

Together we turn to the field of play and wait to watch the pitch.

Epilogue I:
On the evening of Oct. 26, 2011, with the waning colors of daylight straining through the living-room window, I sat in my chair and turned on the TV. Owing to some kind of butterfly effect in the meteorological operations of Earth, or to the divine intercession for which the Cardinals and their fans had surely prayed, Game Six had been postponed by rain, and in efforts to erase the vacancy, I pressed play on the game I’d recorded.

It was also the game I’d attended. Well-versed in modern methods of capturing the moment, I had DVR’ed Game Five in order to turn our experience into a private memento, a souvenir more durable than memory and something of a second nativity, allowing us to relive what we had hoped would be a Texas victory and what had been, in fact, a 4-2 Rangers win.

And there I sat, in my chair, watching myself on TV. And there I was, in front of my seat, pumping my fist and jumping around. I remembered the moment: the snapping-off of the slider, the call of a key strike three. I could still feel the thrill of the pivotal out, could still feel the emotion that attends the chemistry of now, the conversion of uncertainty into what is suddenly known and later recalled. And I wondered now if some future state of affairs—some tragic moment that had not yet taken shape—could retroactively negate the joy I had once and twice experienced. I wondered if bliss, registered first to the space of its making, is then preserved in retrievable form, or if it is conditional on developments that other forces control.

I kept watching. I could see it now, as I had seen it then: Rzepzcysnki’s pitch, as if fated to a spot reserved for a bat, breaks slowly into the zone. And in that instant where possibility morphs into probability and where probability becomes the surest thing, I know that Napoli is soon to pound the ball. Later he will tell the TV audience that he heard the chant—heard the “Na-Po-Li!”—and had no choice but to honor its intentions with a game-changing hit, but at the crack of the bat and for the briefest of instants, his future disclosure waits in the void that only the intervening moments can fill.

Almost immediately, as the ball traces a trajectory toward the right-center field wall, I let out a shout the likes of which I might never know again. I shout toward the heavens that agreed to this sound, and though the larger volume soaks up my voice and adds it to that of the masses, I continue to vent the euphoria in the way my body demands. From the depths of my gut, driven up by a history of spoiled raptures and dormant exaltation, comes the sound of a feeling so great that no amnesia will ever steal it away.

Now, at home in my chair, I press rewind and watch it again. I relive a moment so great and a feeling so deep that memory will not forsake them.

A night later, having pressed play, I sit in my chair and watch. I watch as Feliz comes slowly to the set position and then delivers the pitch to Freese.

Epilogue II:
It is late afternoon of Saturday, Sept. 29, 2012, and for the past few hours my wife and I have been sitting in our car in Parking Lot N of Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, waiting out the Noachian rain that has pounded North Texas all day. We’ve looked forward to this game for weeks—our first in-person game of the year and a game when the Rangers, we’ve hoped, would at last clinch the American League West—but as time ticks by and the rain keeps falling we at last concede defeat to the ruthless bully of very bad luck.

The following night, determined to attend the makeup game even if it means a wee-hour return to Austin, we groan through a 4-0 deficit and go absolutely nuts the rest of the game, fidgeting and screaming and finally flipping the bird at the Angels when the home team clinches the 8-7 win.

Just one more victory, we tell ourselves, and the division is ours.

Epilogue III:
Yes, I do record the Wild Card game, but no, I don’t bother to watch it.

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