I was 9-years-old. Another night was swirling past. It was 2 or 3 in the morning on a school night and I was thinking about baseball again. Over and over the green grass the p'ting of the bat, the reaction the jump racing after the fly ball accellerating so I just might be able to dive and snag that fly before it hits earth... then the color drains out of the scene. The imaginary me pulls up, no longer cares and the ball drops. It doesn't really even matter if I pick it up. The runner might as well take a right at first base and go back home and play with his other friends. The pitcher might as well roll the ball home, there are so many other things we could be doing. The whole game is completely ridiculous and utterly pointless, and I've been wasting my time thinking about playing it, watching grown men play it on the scratchy black and white television or listening under the crack in my door to radio broadcasts..
Who really cares if you dive and snag that fly. Who cares if you dig in just hard enough on your last step to lunge the extra inch and make a snow-cone catch that you roll up with your wrist to keep the ball from slipping out?
I remember crying and rerunning the scene in my head over and over. Each time the joy of chasing after a pop up just at the edge of my range seemed more impossible to locate. It really is an absurd game, and caring as much as I did about it was, it seemed to me for the first time that night insane.
I had spent every cent of my allowance for the past three years on baseball cards. At times even resorting to theft to collect more of the Topps images with the player's stats on the back. I had 5,000 cards by the time of this existential crisis.
We had serious inflation in those days, in 1974 at the beginning of the season I paid 10 cents plus a penny tax for a pack of 8 cards. Later that season Dougherty drugs upped the price to 15 cents plus 2 cents tax. I remember packs going up to 10 cards and going up to 20 cents plus 2 cents tax. Whatever the price and however I had to scrounge, all my sense in those years was given over to baseball.
And what did I have to show for it? I'd alphabetized them, sorted them by team and home run totals and wins (for pitchers), by years of service, by all-star status. And I would build huge houses out of them that I would bomb with other cards.
I would pull out the card of the player at bat when WTIC's Boston Red Sox broadcast and put him at home plate on my mother's diamond-shaped living room Oriental rug... "Rico Carty steps up to the plate," Ned Martin would say. "He's been struggling this season to find his stroke," Jim Woods. Would pitch in.
"There's a long fly deep left field..."
But what conceivable difference could possibly be made whether this fly ball off Bill Lee on April 13, 1976 would find the screen over the monster.
That night, I recognized for the first time, that there was no point. It didn't matter any more than whether I put on my left shoe first or the right.
After sobbing some, I steeled my emotions. It was a very similar sensation to the realization I had come to at age 6 when I realized that Gramps Beale (my great grandpa) was just the first person I know who died and that everyone else including me was destined to follow. I desparately wanted to talk to my Mommy, who was sleeping in the next room. I crept out of bed stood at my parent's closed door and planned to tell her about how sad I was with the revelation that baseball was completely pointless and that I didn't care whether I hit caught or threw a ball ever again...
I had woken my parents 2-3 times in the past few years when I was sick. I remember a particularly disturbing digestive condition that required an enema... This felt just as bad, but still I felt funny and couldn't wrench the courage to knock on my parent's door. I sat down on the landing. Relaxed a bit and thought about what I felt I had to say to my mommy (who incidentally thought baseball was ridiculous). I was tired, worked up, but with my guard down the image of a fly ball again popped into my head. Adrenaline surged as I accellerated, it didn't matter, but it was the only way to play the game. I surged forward in my mind the gray tones flamed green, I leapt I caught the ball. It was fun and right and the only way to play the game to try and to care. Not just for me in that moment, but for the batter who wanted a legitimate hit, not a gimme... And for the pitcher and for all the other players on my team and all the other teams in the league. The game, the season, the records and the history only work if everybody is allowing their marrow to govern their actions. Anything less is oblivion.
I crept back into bed and woke up loving baseball more than ever. Thirty years later I would much less precipitously, but just as thoroughly come to the same conclusion about fiction. Pointless, yes, but there are more than enough dividends to justify the willing suspension of disbelief. That will be the subject of my next blog.
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