In which your narrator isn’t
here to talk about the past.
As I was pitching to my four-year-old son at a park, a ten-year-old boy and his father—who was still dressed in his business casual work clothes—started kicking a soccer ball to each other nearby. After five minutes of tripping over the ball and themselves, the father retreated to his chair by the soccer field and the boy wandered over to where we were playing baseball. His name was Kyle, and he asked if he could play with us. I told him he could. When it was Kyle’s turn to bat, it was pretty obvious that he didn’t have any experience playing baseball. After a few hopeless flails and some minor adjustments I made to his swing, he starting fouling pitches off. When he finally hit one in the right direction he looked over at his dad, beaming with pride, and said, “I wish my dad could have seen that.” I cringed and thought, “I’m glad your dad didn’t hear that.” Moments later as I walked by him to retrieve a few of the balls he had missed, he looked over at me and said, “You’re cool. I wish you were my dad.” I looked over at his dad, who was too far away to have heard the comment, and I felt awful. Before Kyle ran over to his dad to tell him how well he had been hitting, I tried to redeem the moment as best as I could. I had to say something. “I might be cool to have as a friend,” I told the kid, “but your dad is the best person in the world to be your dad.” I’m not sure if he bought it or not, but it was all I could think to say.
— BRYAN ALLAIN, Intercourse, Pennsylvania
2009. I ATTENDED THE 2009 ALL-STAR GAME, HELD ABOUT NINE months after the game at Wrigley, in St. Louis, with my parents and my father’s friend Jeff, a farmer who came across some late-in-life money and now pretty much spends every weekend hectoring my father into zipping down to Busch Stadium and drinking all day. Dad does not require much hectoring.
Those who think the United States federal subsidy system is too friendly to the American farmer will find considerable evidence to support their viewpoint in Jeff. He owns an unnaturally high amount of farmland on the outskirts of Mattoon, most of which is rented out to the government for “future projects.” He cashes an inordinate number of happy Obama checks, and as far as I can tell, about two months out of the year are his “busy season,” and the rest of the time he’s hanging around the Leitch house, drinking beer. Nice guy, sure, and a fun guy to have a six-pack with. After that, you start to wonder what’s going on, you know, at his house.
My dad is Jeff’s idol. Dad knows how to fix tractors, plant grass, build houses, install insulation, unclog pipes, and all kinds of manual activities you’d think a farmer would know how to do. Jeff comes by, and Dad puts a new engine in his Jeep and changes the oil in his tractor, and, as payment, Jeff trots along with Dad to Cardinals games because I’m out in New York and therefore unavailable. Like most parents, mine were too busy dealing with wild-eyed children to hang onto their twentysomething friendships, and now that the kids are out of the house, they need something, and someone, to fill their time. For them, that guy is Jeff.
Jeff is a baseball fan of a kind that most normal, non-obsessive people are: casual, generally uninformed, and loud. I don’t mean this as an insult, not necessarily. Jeff hates Tony La Russa, hates Albert Pujols, hates Busch Stadium, hates beer vendors, hates St. Louis, hates city drivers, hates the upper deck, hates the lower deck, hates the Cubs, hates the Cardinals. Jeff is one of those people who thinks everything in baseball is wrong.
At the 2009 All-Star Game, I sat in section 452, with my parents and Jeff. I had bought tickets for my dad for his sixtieth birthday, and Jeff came along with us. That was fine. Jeff is a nice guy. (I am emphasizing this fact, and not just because he’ll read this.) But this is an All-Star Game. This is the game that doesn’t count. This is a game to relax and have fun.
Jeff is like most normal people who watch a little bit of baseball, kind of. Jeff is not one to relax and have fun. Baseball is to be complained about.
THE 2008 CHICAGO CUBS, the ones kicking the Cardinals’ asses that day at Wrigley, had eight different players named to the 2008 All-Star Game in Yankee Stadium in New York. Half of them played the game at Wrigley: left fielder Alfonso Soriano, catcher Geovony Soto, third baseman Aramis Ramirez, and center fielder Kosuke Fukudome. At the top of the fifth, four of them sat on the bench or in the bullpen, desperately waiting to run onto the field and spray champagne in disparate directions: pitchers Ryan Dempster, Kerry Wood, Carlos Zambrano, and Carlos Marmol. That was more all-stars than any other team in baseball, and the most all-stars the Cubs had had on the team in their history. This was the year of the Cub. You might have heard.
The Cardinals only had two, and neither of them batted in the fifth inning: Pujols, of course, and Ludwick, whose hot first half earned him a surprising trip to Yankee Stadium. During all-star week in Gotham, I headed out to Fifth Avenue for the annual all-star parade, mostly to see Ludwick, who must have been bewildered to be there. (Before 2008, he’d never hit more than fourteen homers in a season.) When Ludwick’s “float”—actually a 2009 Chevy Silverado—made it to my section, I was the only person paying any attention to him. Because I am a thirteen-year-old boy, I yelled, “Hey, Ryan! Go Cards! Congratulations! Welcome to New York!”
Ludwick turned and smiled widely. “Thanks! Gotta love New York. I wouldn’t want to live here, but for a couple days, it’s great!”
I hear this sentiment a lot from friends back home. “I don’t know how you live there, but I’d like to come visit sometime.” Allow this Midwesterner to translate that statement for those in the Northeast Corridor: This means, “you people are fucking morons for living in New York.”
Ludwick’s appearance on the all-star roster allowed me to continue a nearly decade-long tradition: buying an all-star jersey, each year, of whatever Cardinal happens to make the team. And no repeats:
You probably think all this all-star stuff is silly. You’re wrong.
A NATURAL PART of growing older is realizing how infantile some of your childhood passions turned out to be. As it turns out, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Vanilla Ice, and Saved By the Bell, alas, are pretty lame. My sister, living a perfectly happy hippie life at the age of thirty, wouldn’t admit that she once had a New Kids on the Block bedspread even if you plucked out her toenails, one by one. We enjoy simple pleasures when we are young, because when we are young, we are stupid and have no taste.
But we can take it too far the other way too. Sometimes we can segue so far into adulthood that we forget the purity of shiny colors, surreal landscapes, dogs and cats living together. We look too far behind the curtain rather than just absorbing the giddiness of what’s in front of us.
When I was a child, my favorite event of the year was the Major League Baseball All-Star Game. It was a kaleidoscope of crazy visions for a ten-year-old. Ozzie Smith batting against Roger Clemens? Tony Gwynn and Dale Murphy in the same outfield? Cal Ripken shaking hands with Dwight Gooden before the game? Yes please! The All-Star Game unites the gods in one location, at one time, in a way that’s breathtaking for a young baseball fan. It was like Who Framed Roger Rabbit when Daffy Duck and Donald Duck played a piano duet together, or a comic book in which Batman and Spider-Man joined forces. It blew my mind. It still kind of does.
Sure, in a theoretical sense, interleague play and extended player movement has diluted the All-Star Game, but that’s just a theoretical thing: Something you bring up as some sort of data point for whatever agenda you have rather than an actual reason not to watch the All-Star Game. Sure, it doesn’t really mean anything, it’s just an exhibition game, the home-field advantage for the World Series thing is pointless. So what? It’s a game where you just watch the greatest baseball players in the world play baseball for four hours.
Baseball’s All-Star Game is the only all-star game that matters precisely because baseball is a sport that cannot be altered dramatically if the players don’t care, like in the NBA and NFL. Baseball is just baseball, and it’s a sport that focuses on the individual in a way perfect for the All-Star Game. Tim Lincecum against Derek Jeter? Albert Pujols versus Roy Halladay? Yes please! It’s the All-Star Game! Look at all the different uniforms! Everybody’s all in the same place! What more do you people want? If you can’t appreciate that, you are old and cranky and I am not sure we can be friends.
AT THE 2009 All-Star Game, hometown hero Yadier Molina came up with runners on first and third and two outs in the second inning. Molina might have to dodge flaming arrows every time he visits Flushing, but at Busch, he’s just a notch below Pujols on the adulation chart. I’ve found that Yady is particularly popular among the female contingent of Cardinals fans. This is not because he is strikingly attractive; he is not Grady Sizemore, and these are not Grady’s Ladies. I think it’s because he’s kind of pudgy, kind of awkward, kind of cuddly, and always smiling. I also suspect the “Yady” nickname helps; it’s difficult to come up with a cute moniker for the scowling, scary Pujols, and it’s impossible to morph either “Albert” or “Pujols” into something that ends in a y. Yady is warm and accessible, and you just want to buy him a pie and watch him eat it, then buy him another one, and watch him eat that too. You want to wrap him up in a blanket and tell him jokes. He would be an active giggler.
It’s a big moment for Yady, the local product shining on one of baseball’s grandest stages. National League manager Charlie Manuel, a baseball lifer who once managed the Cleveland Indians with a colostomy bag next to him after undergoing treatment for cancer, paced around the dugout. The NL was already down 1–0. This was as important an at bat as the game had seen so far, and St. Louis’s own was at the plate.
And Jeff was screaming.
“Get ’em out of there!” he yelled. “You gotta have a bigger bat up there! Molina ain’t gonna hit one out! Step on their throat.”
My parents, typically quiet and studious at the game, looked down at their feet, and I stared straight ahead hoping no one in our section connected me to that guy. Jeff did not allow this.
“Will, Will, you know this guy managing?”
“Yeah,” I mumbled. “Charlie Manuel. The Phillies manager. They won the World Series last year.”
“Well, he’s an IDIOT! Is he like La Russa? I bet he’s like La Russa! He has to be! Boooo!”
Never mind that Yadier Molina, in front of the Cardinals red fans, had yet to actually bat in an all-star game. Never mind that, had Manuel actually pinch hit for Molina in that situation, Tony LaRussa and Albert Pujols would have had a race to see who could insert a Louisville Slugger in Manuel’s anus faster. (I like Albert’s odds.) Never mind that Jeff had probably never heard the name Charlie Manuel in his life.
No, Charlie Manuel was the manager, like Tony La Russa was the manager, and the manager exists, to Jeff, and fans like Jeff (normal people), to be the evil minion standing in between them and everything they believe and know to be “true” in the world of baseball. Tony La Russa, and Charlie Manuel, and every other manager in baseball history, have devoted their lives to baseball, to dissecting every possible scenario, to planning for all situations. They have seen more baseball than any of us can imagine: They breathe and excrete baseball. It is a sport that keeps them on the road for six months out of the year, that ruins any semblance of a normal family life, that breaks their heart, that flashes over their eyelids when they attempt to sleep at night. They care more about baseball than any of us care about anything. They have traded everything. This is all they know. They are the pulse of the game. We are just visitors. This does not mean they are always right. That is their curse: Their decisions, wrung out of sweat and blood and bile and years of emptiness, are simply decisions. It can all go wrong, and when it does—and even when it doesn’t—they have farmers screaming at them for being a fucking moron, from the stands, from the radio, in the restaurant when they just want to have a few beers and be left alone for a while. They love it so Jeff can hate it. They are there so that we might destroy them. Neither can exist without the other.
Charlie Manuel got this grief from Jeff, and surely thousands others, for making an obvious decision. And so few decisions are obvious.
Managers understand, the good ones, anyway. They understand that part of baseball’s value lies in its capacity to inspire such rage. The game makes us all helpless. We refer to it as “second-guessing,” to be nice, but it’s really lashing out at what we cannot control. We expect baseball to be perfect, all the time. And it is perfect. But it is run by human beings, who are far from perfect, who are not even close. We hold it against the game. We hold baseball to a higher standard. It must be as idyllic in reality as it is in our dreams.
“He must be like Tony La Russa,” Jeff repeated, through his beer. “Boooo!” Yadier Molina hit an RBI single, and everyone cheered, including Jeff, who smiled and said, “Still should’ve pinch-hit. This guy, what’s his name, Manny, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Jeff and I clinked cups. Yady hit that ball hard.
EVEN THOUGH it’s now the most profitable professional sport in the country and is being watched by more people on earth than at any other time in human history, baseball is rarely at its best when it’s trying to put on its fancy Sunday clothes. The MLB Network, pretty much the only channel playing at Will Leitch Brooklyn Headquarters, is renowned for this, dressing up baseball history in sepia-hazed Things Were So Much Better Then Bubble Wrap. Ken Burns laid down the foundation for this, and everyone at Major League Baseball Productions has followed his lead, romanticizing baseball’s past into some sort of pretend Elysian Fields, where the sports was uncorrupted by capitalism, nobody looked for unfair advantages, and all players floated a foot about the infield. Major League Baseball cashes in on this, but a little less each year: This sort of happy nothing-to-see-here revisionism inevitably produces diminishing returns.
The flip side to this, and the ultimate result, is the unstated notion behind every truthless whitewashing of the past: The good days are behind us. Baseball has lost its way. When people say the strength of baseball is in its history, or in its numbers, what they’re really saying is Back in my day . . . we understood what baseball really was. They’ve packaged the past and fed it to us wholesale, and it makes baseball look like a game primarily enjoyed by men in fedoras, responding to spunky, gritty utility infielders with shouts of “Zounds!” and “Egads!”
The NFL and the NBA mostly ignore their history, constantly selling you on the idea that what you are seeing right now is the pinnacle of their sport’s potential. It has never been better than this, and it never will be. Until the next time you want to buy a jersey. Baseball plays up the opposite too much. It turns the past into something that cannot be replicated. And it makes everybody pissed about everything that’s happening now.
Because this is a book about baseball, I feel obliged to leap to baseball’s defense. Everyone is wrong. Trashing baseball is indicative of intellectual laziness. Allow me a little debunking.
MYTH: Steroids have ruined baseball’s record book, which is the true source of baseball’s supposed mystic power.
Baseball is gorgeous whether it’s played by steroid monsters or Little Leaguers. But to hear it the last few years, baseball is nothing but big historic numbers to be discussed as relevant or not.
So: Who cares that Pete Rose is the all-time hits leader? Who cares if Barry Bonds has more homers than anyone else? Who cares if Roger Clemens won the most Cy Young Awards? When did baseball become about that? Baseball is three hours of Shakespeare sixteen times a day, and, somehow, we’ve turned it into a math problem about longevity.
If Alex Rodriguez had never been busted for steroids, and he had eradicated all of Bonds’s records, Barry Bonds would have still existed. A record broken doesn’t mean the achievements (or their dubious sources) went away. You can’t erase the past. You can’t relive it, either. You have to let it go.
More to the point: Saying that baseball is ruled by its record book is another, roundabout, faux-analytical way of saying it is ruled by its past. No other sport claims to be ruled by numbers, because no other sport would be so perverse as to imply that the action on the field is somehow secondary to some imaginary, elusive theoretical construct. The game is the source of the numbers, the players, the teams, the uniforms, the fans—everything. The bases are still ninety feet apart from one another, at least until China takes us over and turns the measurements into their metric system equivalents. It is always the same. We’re the ones who screw it up.
MYTH: Baseball is in constant need of saving, whether it’s by Babe Ruth, Cal Ripken, Mark McGwire, or whomever. Eventually you’ll run out of saviors.
Take your pick: cause and effect, before and after.
Time Baseball Died: the 1919 Black Sox scandal
What Brought Baseball Back to Life: Babe Ruth and the American erection caused by the booming home run
Time Baseball Died: the cocaine scandals of the late seventies and early eighties.
What Brought Baseball Back to Life: the speed (velocity, not amphetamines)-dominated game of the mid-eighties, led by Whitey Herzog and his Cardinals, along with the spinning pile of special lunacy that was Rickey Henderson
Time Baseball Died: Pete Rose gambling on baseball
What Brought Baseball Back to Life: The world deciding that it didn’t like Jim Gray
Time Baseball Died: the 1994 players’ strike
What Brought Baseball Back to Life: Cal Ripken deciding to never skip a game, ever, no matter how much his skills might be declining
Time Baseball Died: the 1994 players’ strike
What Brought Baseball Back to Life: The Great 1998 Home Run Chase between St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Mark McGwire and Chicago Cubs outfielder Sammy Sosa, two people who were not actually friends at the time, no matter how much they pretended to be
Time Baseball Died: Steroids!
What Brought Baseball Back to Life: Sorry! Still dead!
All of these “scandals” have one thing in common: They all took place during periods of baseball growth. Because baseball inspires such starry-eyed demands for perfection, there is a tendency to frame it in some sort of narrative. There is no overarching baseball narrative, as much as Ken Burns might like there to be. Baseball scandals are the same as political scandals: helpful in selling newspapers (or Google ads on blogs, whatever), effective in inspiring drive-by media traffic, and far more noteworthy in the short term than the long term. Scandals allow people who aren’t paying attention and are therefore easily disenchanted with Just How Different Baseball Is From When We Were Young to come gawk for a while and label it The Reason I Don’t Watch Baseball As Much Anymore. Baseball has “survived” everything thrown its way, because it is baseball, not a novel. Had Cal Ripken not broken Lou Gehrig’s record, had Babe Ruth not hit five hundred-foot moon shots in between drunken threesomes, had the Yankees and Diamondbacks not played a brilliant World Series right after September 11, baseball would still be chugging along just fine.
MYTH: Baseball is for nerds. Football is the new great American pastime. More people care about football than baseball. Baseball is boring and lasts too long.
Well, baseball is for nerds. I can’t combat that, I suppose, particularly because you’re about to pull my underwear over my head and tie it in a nice bow around my neck. It looks pretty, now that I’m in front of a mirror.
Football is an easy sport to watch casually on television. The quarterback goes back, throws the ball, the camera pans over, the wide receiver catches it, touchdown. What went into that play? Did someone miss his coverage? Did the offensive coordinator notice a flaw in the defense’s game planning? Did the quarterback just make a perfect throw? Does the wide receiver possess the ability to levitate at great speeds? The television tells us none of this: We just saw a guy throw the ball and another guy catch it. It’s a misleading juxtaposition that confuses us into thinking we saw an explicit cause and effect. We didn’t. We just saw what we wanted to see and nothing more.
Football is once a week. You can pay little to no attention to football, and it’s still always there for you on Sundays and Monday nights. It requires no effort, no investment, no obsession. Anyone can sound like they know football, and anyone can appreciate its violence. But it asks little of you. You can like football, a lot, and no one will really notice. It does not require you to love it. It does not require much at all. There are people who love football, who obsess over it, who follow it the way millions of others follow baseball. They are the minority. Football does not breed diehards.
People who think football is a better sport than baseball do so because they watch sports the way people watch reality television: They want it quick, they want it simple, and they want it obvious. There’s nothing wrong with that: We’re talking about sports here, not literature. But baseball offers more. It always has. And it always will.
What’s great about all this? I still have no doubt that Jeff enjoyed the All-Star Game just as much as I did. Baseball is an addiction for me and millions of other fans . . . but that doesn’t make it any more fun for me than it does for non-addicts, normal people. It takes all kinds.
How great is baseball? I’ve just spent this endless chapter singing its praises, defending it to its detractors, and interviewing myself about its glories . . . even when my team is down 5–0 to their hated rivals as 100,000 Wrigleyville denizens prepare to swoop into a drunken orgy everywhere around me. No use waiting for rain anymore either, not that there’s a cloud in the sky: With the easy 1-2-3 in the top of the fifth, this game is now official. Even when you’re watching a dispiriting, wrenching baseball game, it’s better than doing anything else. Fedora or no.
KNOWLEDGE YOU NOW HAVE