Baseball marries precision and guesswork, statistics and sentiment, arduous training and dumb luck, long lazy hours and split seconds of magnificent anxiety, a sense of history and a devotion to short-term opportunism.
An old Brooklyn Dodgers fan might tell you: If you don’t like baseball, whaddaya got against life, buddy?
It was a perfect day here, the exhibition crowd a mix of senior citizens, kids and true baseball fanatics, the origin of the word fan. The day was not even spoiled by an unfortunate performance by the Baltimore Orioles against the New York Mets.
The Orioles lost 5-1. More surprising: Both Cal Ripken and Brady Anderson, heroes in our household, made errors that wouldn’t be tolerated in an instructional league.
But it was only spring training, the equivalent to declaring “It’s a rental” when your vacation car crashes through a cavernous pothole. On Tuesday, the rationalization changed to: “It’s a long season.” Yes, even Cal and Brady will make mistakes, but apart from injuries, real catastrophes only occur in September and October.
On Opening Day, fans of failed teams who have been waiting forever for next year should remember the New York Daily News headline when the Brooklyn Dodgers finally won the World Series in 1955 : “This IS Next Year.”
Baseball fans are said to be sentimentalists, a half-truth. They are also pragmatists. In “Memories of Summer,” Roger Kahn paraphrases Casey Stengel: “Go with what works. All we want to do is win. This ain’t ballet and it ain’t a beauty contest, neither, which is a good thing for you writers, if you catch my drift.” Casey would have made a fine political consultant, if you catch my drift.
The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin makes her passion for winning clear in her moving baseball memoir, “Wait Till Next Year,” when she describes her first confession. Kneeling before a Catholic priest, this passionate little Brooklyn Dodgers fan acknowledged this sin: “I wished harm to Allie Reynolds.”
“The Yankee pitcher?” the priest asked. “And how did you wish him harm?”
She wanted him to break his arm, and then other sins flooded forth: She wished similar mishaps to Robin Roberts of the Phillies, Enos Slaughter of the Cardinals, Phil Rizzuto of the Yankees and Alvin Dark of the Giants, among others. But she wanted them to suffer no longer than necessary: “I wished that all these injuries would go away once the baseball season ended.”
Her priest was a baseball fan. “For your penance, say two Hail Marys, three Our Fathers and say a special prayer for the Dodgers.”
Baseball choices stay with you for life. I have become an Orioles fan, but my heart remains with the Boston Red Sox, as benighted a calling as being devoted to the Brooklyn Dodgers, as Goodwin shows.
When the Dodgers abandoned Brooklyn, she left her heart in Ebbets Field, only to find it at Fenway Park. “Perpetual bridesmaids, exciters of hope and destroyers of dreams, the Red Sox often made Boston seem like Flatbush North.”
My 5-year-old son has a saner view. He cheers the Orioles and speaks well of the Red Sox as a sop to his father. But he shops around.
He’s expressed interest in the expansion teams, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and the Arizona Diamondbacks. They’re new, they wisely snatched a couple of good young players from the Orioles, and expansion teams are underdogs. He knows you root for underdogs. That, perhaps, his Red Sox father has taught him.
This plays into a baseball cliche: the game as a father-child bonding experience. That’s dreadful 1990s-speak, and my baseball-loving colleague, columnist Charles Krauthammer, once heaped brilliant scorn on the idea by noting that his father, an immigrant, knew absolutely nothing about the game.
A fair point. But my testimony is to the contrary (and so, more eloquently, is Roger Kahn’s and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s). My late father and I spent practically every day of every summer trying to figure out why the Red Sox were losing.
We had a tradition of sneaking in for final innings of the first game of the split admission doubleheader on Patriots Day, April 19. Then watching the Boston Marathon, and paying our way for the afternoon game.
My son’s first Little League game this season is on April 19. That is no accident. But I do hope–and I’m sure my dad will be rooting the same way–that my son’s team does better than the Red Sox. That’s not disloyalty. It’s realism.
