My mother, rest her soul, used to hear sports prognosticators on the TV or radio and click her teeth in disgust. “Everyone,” she would smirk, “thinks they can do two things better than anyone else. Run a restaurant and manage a baseball team.”
She loved only one sport, baseball. Football was just “a bunch of silly overgrown fat men falling all over each other.” Basketball was “freakishly tall men jumping up and down with their hands in the air.” Hockey? She would sigh, stare out the window for a moment, and then mutter something about Bobby Orr.
Like all true fans, she was passionate about the sport she loved. When I say love, I mean it in its truest, most irrational, devotional form. She believed her team would win the World Series every year, no matter what the stats, no matter what the record. And when they didn’t, she felt betrayed, heartbroken, and angry. “That’s it!” she would harrumph after the last game of every season her team didn’t win the pennant, “I’m never watching another baseball game! Ever!”
“Aw, c’mon, Mom,” I would laugh, “you know you’ll be back next year.”
“No, I won’t! You mark my words, Jimmy Patterson, never again!”
My mother was a good Christian woman from a small prairie town, and she had what some might think of as rather peculiar notions. “How can you call them the Washington Senators,” she would ask in perfect innocence, “when there’s not a single one of them from Washington?” She grew up watching hometown boys play ball, and didn’t understand why local origins weren’t a prerequisite for playing in the Big Leagues. “Wouldn’t that make more sense?” she’d say. “Then the town would really get behind them, and there wouldn’t be so many empty seats.” The second time the Senators left town, I began to think that she might be onto something. Of course, she blamed it all on the Yankees. If you were really good, you ended up in New York, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. That’s America.
Opening Day was her big thing. Starting fresh and all of that. She would write me a note to get me out of school saying I had a doctor’s appointment and take me to the game herself. Getting a chance to see the President throw out the first ball superseded any moral qualms she might have had about lying to the nuns over where I was going to be that afternoon. She wanted me to be able to say I saw Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. I saw them and I’m glad.
But her moral balance had an uneven keel. She didn’t understand how you could call it a strike if the batter didn’t swing. She could not abide base stealing, and would boo even if the home team stole a base. When diehard fans would turn and look questioningly at her, she would scold, “Stealing is wrong, young man. It doesn’t matter who does it, and it doesn’t matter why.” They loved her for her quirkiness. I know I sure did. Not being from D.C., she felt no overriding obligation to root for the home team throughout the season, though she thought it rude to go to a game and root for the opposition. So she picked teams with players she could admire to root for from home. The Pittsburgh Pirates with Roberto Clemente and Bob Gibson’s St. Louis Cardinals were her loves when I was growing up. When, in 1966, the World Series came to Baltimore, she had my father scalp tickets because, you never know, you might not get this close again. She took me then, too, and she was right. I have not been able to make it back yet to a World Series game.
Growing up in the Depression, she was unable to attend college, but she loved to read. Every now and again, she would drop a New Yorker magazine into my lap, or some reprint of the writings of Red Smith. “Ninety feet between the bases is the nearest thing to perfection that man has yet achieved,” he wrote, and, “Baseball is dull, only to dull minds.”
My mother loved crowds, she loved spectacle, and she loved the idea of seeing history made. She would scream and whoop and cry and get so excited she’d want to burst. I’ll never know what she would have thought of the Bud Selig era—the cancellation of the World Series in ‘94, the All-Star Game of 2002, the controversies over the juiced ball and the shrunken strike zone, the spiraling salaries, high ticket prices, and falling historical records, all of which, I have told myself, kept me sitting out the seasons since her passing.
My guess is that our conversation over these issues would have been a short one. Then she would have wrinkled her brows, her brown eyes would have grown darker still, and with a clenched fist and a stiff lower lip, she would have said loud and clear, as she did every Opening Day year after year, “Play ball!”