Just in time for spring training, the tree is down
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- February 9, 2020
- 923
In “Ball Four,” the best book ever written about baseball, Jim Bouton refers to “the cool of the evening.”
It’s a lovely phrase, isn’t it?
In the context of his 1970 best-seller, the author is referring to the satisfying feeling a pitcher gets after he’s done his job to the best of his ability and can sit back and relax until it’s time to do it again.
But I’ve always expanded its meaning beyond the literal connotation to something more metaphoric, more human, more universal.
“The cool of the evening” can be experienced when it’s neither cool nor the evening. It can be blazing hot at noon on the beach; in fact it can happen on any day and at any time.
For example, on the day after the Super Bowl, I spent the better part of the morning with my wife taking down the Christmas tree, which had occupied a place of prominence in the sunroom since early December.
Could I have done it sooner?
Obviously.
I mean I know what it must have looked like to the neighbors — a thousand multi-colored lights, several hundred ornaments and a cascade of tinsel are hard to ignore in a space whose walls are all basically glass — but that didn’t matter.
I gave up trying to be accepted by people down here a few months after leaving home 20 years ago.
Life is too short to worry about what others think.
Besides, there’s a small part of me that hopes someone might actually have enjoyed the cheery, festive sight so many weeks after the holiday season had ended.
I know it was a comfort to me on some of those cold winter nights, the ones that make a person imagine a better world, one not quite so consumed by hatred and divisiveness, one in which honesty and integrity aren’t words as fossilized as brontosaurus bones.
But enough about politics.
It’s almost baseball season.
Which brings us back to “Ball Four.”
I was 15 years old when it was published. It was the summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school, and I used my lawn-mowing money to buy a first-edition hardcover copy.
It had been excerpted in a national magazine — Look or Life, one of those — that spring and everyone was all up in arms about how Bouton had broken baseball’s cardinal commandment.
No, not thou shalt not pump anabolic steroids into thy posterior, and no, not thou shalt not use advanced electronics to steal signs.
The inviolable clubhouse rule was written thusly: "What you see here, what you say here, what you hear here, let it stay here.”
Now 50 years down the baseball’s scandal-potholed highway, such a prohibition seems almost quaint, like a 16-year-old kid using a fake ID to get into an X-rated movie — not that I would know anything about that — but you get the idea.
What Bouton did in “Ball Four,” if you listen to the purists, was to pull back the curtain and expose secrets that had long been suspected but never proven, among them:
—Players took pep pills to offset the rigors of a 162-game schedule.
—Some of them were unfaithful to their wives.
—Most used profanity almost as often as they drank to excess.
—And that they were — gasp! — flawed human beings, not gods.
The outrage was immediate and long-term. In fact Bouton, who had been a standout pitcher for the New York Yankees before arm trouble made him expendable, was banned from the House that Ruth Built’s most desirable get-together: Old-Timers Day.
But that’s not what I took from “Ball Four,” not when I was 15.
What struck me from the first page to the last wasn’t how well-written it was — and remains — but how funny it was. Bouton’s day-by-day journal of his season with the expansion Seattle Pilots remains a must-read for any sports fan. It is, by turns, scatological and sarcastic, insightful and irreverent, moving and memorable.
Every year, just about this time, I pull it down from the shelf and set aside two days to read it once more. Some of its passages I’ve almost memorized, and the cast of characters becomes more ingrained each time I reimagine their arduous 1969 season.
Baseball has long since lost its grip on America’s psyche, and no one calls it the “national pastime” anymore unless it’s part of a punch line, but that doesn’t diminish the greatness of “Ball Four,” which brings us back to the cool of the evening.
Most of us spend a large portion of our lives working jobs that offer little in the way of public recognition, and that’s fine. Even someone as famous and well-regarded as Jackson Browne — my favorite singer-songwriter of the '70s — understood that.
“I’m going to be a happy idiot,” he wrote in “The Pretender,” the title track from his 1976 album, “and struggle for the legal tender.”
In those few words he captured the give and the take, the yin and the yang, the good and the bad of American life. After the rebellion of the '60s had burned out and cooled, young people were left with a simple choice: work or starve.
The career that I chose — or, more accurately, the one that chose me — has offered me far more than I ever anticipated, and for that I’m forever grateful. I’ve met some incredible people since I started writing for a living, and though I don’t often show it, I am humbled by the response my words have generated over the years.
And when I’ve finally finished a piece — its rewrites and endless edits — and my wife has given it her imprimatur, her seal of approval, I always look forward to experiencing Bouton’s bliss.
That golden feeling when the day’s work is done, when I can put a Jackson Browne album on the turntable and marvel in his memorable line: to wit, “Out into the cool of the evening strolls the pretender.” Coincidence? Jim Bouton … Jackson Browne. Same initials … same words. Who knows how the greats create?
After the last of the Christmas boxes had been stacked and stored in the garage and my Polar Express electric train set had taken its place along side them in that well-ordered space, I was quite tired, but that only made the feeling of a job well done all the more satisfying. I hope you get elated by that sensation, too, and soon.