Take Me Out to the Ball Game

But you can forget the peanuts. And the Cracker Jack? I'll take a pass on that, too. Get me two hot dogs, plain, and a cold Red Dog and I'll be just skippy. Thanks.

I'm an atypical guy. I don't spend my Saturdays epoxied to my TV screen, watching whatever sporting events happen to be on until my eyes virtually bleed with glorious, glorified exhaustion.

Don't get me wrong. I like sports well enough. Football's okay, I guess, even if it's really simulated war that often leaves grown men on painkillers and crutches for much of their lives; it's nice to have on in the background when cleaning La Casa del Terror or taking a nap on a chilly winter afternoon. And basketball is fine as well, even though, like most Chicagoans, I lament the fact that our city has been without a professional franchise for years and...wait...what's that? Chicago still has a pro basketball team? Really? Which one? The Bulls? Really? Huh. I stand corrected (or I would if, I were, in fact, standing; but as I'm sitting at a rebellious keyboard, pecking out these words using only my two middle fingers, I'll sit corrected, thank you).

And hockey? Man, I used to love me some hockey back in the days when all the kids would watch the Blackhawks on TV, then go out to the cobblestone alley bisecting out block and play the game until the sun left us hungry for more and the aqua light from the wooden posts took over. (I played goalie and played it well.) This was, of course, before the Blackhawks' ownership decided that it was more important to protect their season ticket holders, who numbered somewhere under 20,000, than to show the game to the millions of potential fans in the metro area and allow the sport to stay in the hearts of those alleyway players and grow in the hearts of their children. Oh well.

But baseball? There you have the sport I have affection for. No. "Affection" isn't quite right. "Passion." Yeah. That's more on the ball. "Passion."

I can't pinpoint where that passion sprang from. I can Marlowe back as much as I want through afternoons spent on living room floors, elbows tripod-propped, eyes straining at the enormous (or so it seemed then, as all things did, I suppose) back-and-white Zenith, to watch the Cubs on WGN (tactfully turning from the screen whenever they ran a commercial for Creature Features so as to not meet the gaze of the line drawing of Lon Chaney, but feeling that gaze hot on my neck anyway) or the White Sox on WSNS (whose signal always came in like every game was being played in a blizzard and photographed by men with inner ear infections perpetually affecting their sense of balance) and wonder what specific moment lit the fuse.

Was it Burt Hooten's no-hitter, which seemed so much like a magician's slight of eye to the eight-year-old boy on that living room floor on Ohio Street? Was it the throw from deep in the shortstop hole that Don Kessinger, tall and lanky and graceful as a dancer, seemed able to make while in mid-air every single time? Was it the shower and the goofy softball uniforms and the patchwork lineup of the '77 White Sox, dubbed "The South Side Hit Men" in the daily papers, a nickname so politically incorrect that even the suggestion of such would likely get a columnist canned now?

Was it the doubleheader in Montreal where the first game went 18 innings with the Cubs winning on a shoestring catch (shown later on replay to be not a catch, but merely a trap, more slight of eye) by Rick Reuschel, stout of stomach but swift of leg, only to see the Cubs get hammer 15-0 in the second game, which ended somewhere just east of 3 a.m.?

No. The exact moment is unknowable. But there the passion lies, if such an emotion as passion can ever be said to "lie" rather than "gallop" or "frolic" or "bust a move." Other sports are background noise. Baseball is intimate, a whisper near enough to the ear for its breath to be felt. Baseball is pastoral, the poet's game. It is the grace of everyday working and living and dying. Even when its season passes, as all seasons must, the promise of another season is enough to warm the coldest January day, to melt the snowflakes before they can even hit the ground.

So. Baseball season kicks in again today. It's not near--it's here. And I'll watch the games, the fuse burning still, even though bleacher seats at Wrigley Field cost more than I can afford on my best days and Old Comiskey is little more than a parking lot with a brass plate marking where home used to be, surrounded by open space and uninspired architecture pretending to be the sport I adore. I'll watch the games. And a large part of me will clasp hands with those fragments of my childhood that were innocent and good. And that smile you may well see pasted to my 38-year-old face like so much Colorforms fun? That's the eight-year-old on the living room floor staring up at the Zenith all over again. That's innocence. That's peace.