Storytellersunplugged

Thomas Boswell famously titled one book of essays on baseball Why Time Begins On Opening Day. There are plenty of reasons for the baseball fan, casual or fanatic, to agree with him. After all, baseball is the writers’ game. Look at the bookshelves. From Moneyball to Feeding the Monster to The Echoing Green, the books give witness in ever-increasing numbers that writers love baseball. From bookish Bill James to elegant Bernard Malamud, from the precise George Will to the masterful, late David Halberstam, all were called to write about the game, and so many others with them.

Of course, the game offers much to those who’d take up the pen in its honor. Maybe that’s the reason writers are drawn to it. The season is 162 games, long enough for plots to unwind themselves at their own pace without hurry, with enough time for reverse and counter and a last, mad, desperate dash to the climax. Say “1978” in Boston and you’ll hear all about it.

Or maybe it’s because there are always stories in there, as many stories as you’d want to dig for. The aging veteran seeking one last shot at glory, the out-of-nowhere rookie who shines against all expectation, the part-time player who seizes the spotlight, the wily pitcher whose stuff has deserted him but whose guile enables him to befuddle those younger and stronger than himself – are these not the characters of epic? Of tragedy? Ask Roy Hobbs or Donnie Moore; they certainly thought so.

But I think Boswell’s wrong.

Writing is like baseball because for every superstar there are a hundred guys in the minors, doing whatever it takes to hang on because no matter what, they’re still playing baseball. They’re still doing what they love. They’re still chasing the dream, and they will keep chasing it as long as they can. Sound like any writers you know?

There are reasons writers love baseball, above and beyond that elegiac pace that suddenly goes accelerando when you least expect it. Basketball fails to surprise, the gap between the best and the worst too large. Too many of its heroics are wasted in hopeless situations and pre-ordained playoff series. It’s a game of superstars, and everyone else is forgotten.

Football’s season is too short, as are the careers of too many of its heroes. Their faces hidden, their bodies armored, on the field they become military units, manifestations of the coach’s plan. Individual achievements emerge only in the context of Super Bowls won, otherwise they fade into insignificance.

Doubt me? Then tell me off the top of your head what the career record for touchdowns scored is, or receiving yards in a season, or career sacks.

But everyone knows what 755 means, and we could see Hank Aaron’s face as he jogged around the bases after going deep into the left-field bullpen for homer #715.

Writing is like baseball because it’s a case of individual prowess projected on a team stage. It’s batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball, writer versus manuscript, a series of single moments that play out into a coherent, compelling narrative.

Find the themes. They’re there, waiting. Consider the Yankees, arrogant and rich and powerful, locked in eternal fratricidal combat with Boston. The Red Sox, forever beset by tragedy and lost opportunity, until delivered by miracles and a bloody sock. The Cubs, lovable losers basking in the sun at Wrigley while the beer vendors shout “Old Style!” and the fans watch from rooftops across the street. The Dodgers, gone from beloved Bums to the laid-back kings of La-La Land. These are the tropes, the stories that have been built up over a century, the archetypes that are so easy to play with. Pick up the threads; it’s almost too easy. After all, other hands have been weaving them for years.

Then again, maybe it’s just that there’s so much there. Every game has its heroes and villains, its underdogs and its goats. Each team gets the same fair shot – 27 outs whether you want ‘em all or not, 9 innings, 9 men on the field – to do with as they will, a multitude of encounters matched in duality. If the hero is the crippled pinch-hitter who has one good swing in him and goes deep in the bottom of the ninth, he’s matched the goat, the guy who gave up the bomb. It’s serious stuff. So sayeth Kirk Gibson and Joe Carter, so sayeth Mitch Williams and Dennis Eckersley.

Or it could be because baseball makes everyone a storyteller, because the score never tells you what happened.

Never.

Writing is like baseball because they’re both about the precision of inches applied over vast differences. Willie Mays made The Catch 450 feet from home plate. An inch of difference one way and that ball is popped up, an inch of difference the other and it’s gone. Instead, it’s poetry. Change one word and see what happens. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

Time doesn’t begin on opening day. It ends there, and on every day the rest of the season. Every game is somebody’s first, someone’s magical moment, someone’s legend born and retold. Their story, for them to tell and retell for the rest of their lives.

For me, it was September 26, 1980. It was a night game, Phillies-Expos, both teams fighting for the N.L. East pennant. Our seats were borrowed field boxes, right at the end of the Phillies’ dugout on the first base side. Nine years old and the proud possessor of almost a complete set of 1978 Topps cards, I’d brought some cut-down 5”x 8” index cards with me for autograph hunting. During the game my father passed them to the security guard stationed at our end of the dugout. “Can you get someone to sign them?” he asked. The guard nodded and disappeared for a minute. A few seconds, or minutes, or pitches by Montreal’s David Palmer later, he returned, a card in his hand. There were five names on it:

• Catcher Bob Boone, who later set the record for most games played at the position.
• Shortstop Larry Bowa, a slick-fielding All-star and future manager with a fiery temper. He was my favorite Phillie, as much for his diminutive stature as anything else. Years later, he’d manage my beloved Phillies into the ground, but that would be later. In 1980, he was the little guy who caught everything.
• Outfielder Bake McBride, a former Cardinal with a ferocious ‘fro. 1980 was his last hurrah. After the season, he’d never play regularly again, but that night, he was magical.
• Ramon Aviles, a backup infielder. Good field, no hit, and in 1980 he’d hit the only 2 home runs of his career. I was a fan; I can still lay hands on a half-dozen copies of his 1981 card at a moment’s notice.
• First baseman Pete Rose. Liar, gambler, tax cheat, fraud, drug addict, American Ixion in the making. All that was in the future; in 1980 he was a first baseman with a high on-base percentage and no power, the Phillies’ first dive into that newfangled free agency thing. The other story had not yet been written.

None of the autographs were personalized, except that by the mere fact of their existence, they all were. They were mine, made for me in the heat of battle and given to me from the mysterious depths of the dugout. Bowa’s signature was cramped and tight, Rose’s fat and loopy with a “P” than ran all the way out to the “R” of his last name. McBride’s signature was smooth and flowing, the downstrokes going way, way down below the letter line. Boone’s looked distracted, the letters written one over the other. Aviles? His “R” went down and his “A” went out, and every other letter went every which way. I stared at it, heart thumping, fascinated.

If a foul ball had come our way, I would have been doomed, as I refused to let them out of my hands all night.

I still have that card. It’s on my desk now. And when lumbering left fielder Greg “Bull” Luzinski saved the game with a running, stumbling catch by the left field foul like, it seared itself into my memory. When Bake McBride, the same Bake McBride who’d signed that piece of cardboard for me, hit a home run to break a 1-1 tie in the ninth and win the game, I was plunged into pandemonium.

Shake’n’Bake, the scoreboard said. 27 years later, and I still remember the scoreboard, remember the ball disappearing over the outfield wall, the ballpark erupting into chaos.

Pure magic.

And the next day, I couldn’t wait to tell all of my friends all about it.

Writing is like baseball because both go better with a beer. Or maybe that’s just me.

Just as I still have that card, I still tell the story of that game. Maybe my memory of that night is faulty, maybe I’ve jumbled details and filled in gaps and built a myth out of the first game out of yet another three-game series that honestly didn’t decide all that much.

Except that in my story, it does. It’s a story I learned that night and that I’ve been telling ever since. That’s what keeps me going back to the ballpark, the search for another story like that one. I’ve gotten close a few times – a game-winning grand slam by a long-forgotten catcher named Bo Diaz, a Keystone Kops triple play in Kansas City as the Tampa Bay Devil Rays ran amuck on the bases, a start for a one-armed pitcher named Jim Abbott at Fenway Park against the dreaded Roger Clemens, a My-God-Did-You-See-That? Play from Durham Bulls wonderphenom B.J. Upton throwing out a runner from his backside. There have been other moments – heckling a player only to discover his girlfriend was sitting right in front of me (she agreed with me, for whatever it was worth), agreeing to look at an old autographed baseball as a favor and discovering that the autographs turned out to have names like Aaron and Spahn and Mathews, sneaking into my father’s bedroom closet to oh-so-carefully take down his old Brooklyn Dodgers yearbooks and read once again about Campy and Shotgun Shuba and all the rest.

Moments. Stories told and retold, and me always looking for more.

Did that game make me a storyteller? Probably not, but it did demand that its story be told. And so does every game, because every game has a story, or two, or as many as there are players and moments in it. The score says nothing, the agate type of the box score is merely a plot outline. But the game itself, and every other one played, is a story waiting to be composed and relayed, made up and told.

That’s the real link between writing and baseball, I think. All the rest helps, but all the rest is details. It’s a game of stories, and it calls to the storytellers in us. Not all of us, perhaps, and not every time, but enough of us, and more often than not.

So maybe time does begin on opening day, and end there, and everything else in between. That’s my story, and I’m sticking it to it. And the story? It’s sticking to me.