You may not like baseball, but you should
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- October 30, 2021
- 743
As I write, the World Series has not yet begun, so I’m in an optimistic place, hoping this isn’t the last baseball we see for a long, long time.
With the likelihood of a strike/lockout dead ahead, there is every reason to savor what, on the surface at least, is a compelling match-up between Houston and Atlanta.
But I’m not going to look ahead, not when living in the past is much more fun and way less complicated.
People who know me — and by that I mean anyone who’s taken the time to read my work over the last 30 years or so — understand I grew up a Yankee fan. They take this as a sign of arrogance, of superiority, of believing I’m somehow better than the rest.
Au contraire, mes amis.
I will make this point early and leave it for you to consider as you weigh my worthiness to be a fan of the game. From 1963-76 — third grade through 16th grade, my Wonder Years — the Yankees won exactly zero World Series championships.
From the time I was 8 until I turned 21, my team didn’t do squat.
That’s a lot of losing during a particularly impressionable period of time, not that I had a lot of choice in the matter. I call that Death March of Mediocrity the Horace Clarke Years.
Who’s he? you might ask, thus answering your own question.
A funny thing happened along that dismal path, however.
As the Yankees fell farther and farther into a distant orbit of irrelevance, I fell deeper and deeper in love with game itself.
Then, as now, it rewarded patience, which was not exactly a popular thing as the '60s exploded and those seismic changes seeded the '70s with angst and anger.
As the poet/drunkard Jim Morrison preachified, “We want the world, and we want it … Now!”
Television was the conduit that gave my generation unprecedented access to a world spinning out of control, from to the grisly death count in Vietnam to the majesty of the moon landing, from Dealey Plaza to Chappaquiddick, from Mexico City to Munich as the Olympic movement sparkled briefly, then died violently.
All along the way, I played baseball. The family photo albums faithfully trace my trajectory from shy, skinny spare part to shy, skinny starter on city championship teams, from a kid who sported a summer butch haircut to one whose hair began to lengthen, first over the eyebrows, then lower than the ears and down the neck.
And those uniforms! They were heavy, woolen hand-me-downs from the pre-Sputnik days, baggy and gray and yet somehow symbolic of youth on the run, guys legging out infield singles and then scoring from second on liners to right.
It was a privilege to wear them in holiday parades and on Youth Baseball Day, an annual tradition at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, the inner sanctum of the big leagues, a sacred place where we were actually allowed to walk along the warning track.
What dreams may come, wrote Shakespeare, unintentionally casting Hamlet in the role of a young man with stars in his eyes.
Along the way, trophies and signed baseballs adorned my bedroom shelf, and every spring I began collecting cards, a nickel a pack.
By the time I got to college, campuses were hotbeds of protest and passionate debate, even at staid Notre Dame, where anti-CIA graffiti appeared on South Quad sidewalks overnight following disclosure they were recruiting our best for their own ends.
I got to know ROTC zealots and dazed rock’n’rollers, wrote about lost love in my short fiction classes, traveled to Miami to watch the Irish end Bear Bryant’s career in an Orange Bowl for the ages.
And all along the way, I found time for baseball. The Oakland A’s, of all teams, came to embody the freedom of the early '70s, with their long hair, their moustaches, their white spikes and their immense, towering talent. Three straight Octobers, they won it all.
Then came a counterbalance, the clean-shaven, efficient, boring-but-brutal Cincinnati club known as the Big Red Machine: Bench and Rose, Morgan and Perez, run by a wily genius named Sparky.
One October night in 1975, they were taken to the limit by a Boston team, which, in any other season, would have been rewarded after Carlton Fisk’s body-English homer in the 12th.
But that’s baseball. What’s meant to be often isn’t. Consider Bogart in “Casablanca:” “Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”
Spoken like a true baseball fan.
And yet … and yet … there’s something in the air this October — call it evolution, if not revolution — and I see great things just around the corner over the course of seven little baseball games.
Tune in if only to remember what could be it for a long, long time.