Читать книгу 100 Miles of Baseball - Dale Jacobs - Страница 19

Tecumseh Thunder U18 vs Amherstburg Sr

Lacasse Park, Tecumseh ON

Game Time Temperature: 21°C

The cold has returned. That’s all I can think as we walk, shivering, into the park for this Essex County Senior Men’s League game. As I walk up the steps of the ancient grandstand, its coats of green paint peeling down to worn gray wood, I notice a sign bolted to one of the risers admonishing, “NO SPIKES ALLOWED IN THE GRANDSTAND.” I hunch into my jacket as I watch Amherstburg in their bright red jerseys and sparkling white pants take infield before the game. They’re a mix of younger guys, mid-twenties, former high school athletes still vaguely in playing shape, and older men whose former athleticism is more hidden, beginnings of beer bellies masking the ability to scoop a hard grounder at second before making the pivot and throw to first. Experience versus youth tonight.

There’s a chilly wind and I count fourteen people in the stands, including us. Again, the game just starts. No anthem, no ceremony.

Since the last game, I’ve been thinking about how to be more deliberate in my baseball watching. This week I dusted off Koppett’s The Thinking Fan’s Guide to Baseball, which has been on my bookshelf, unopened, for nearly a decade. Perhaps this is painfully obvious to everyone else, but I did not know—or at least did not phrase it so clearly to myself at any point—that baseball is based on a round object hitting another round object. This fact of physics is at the core of everything. And that the only thing a batter can do is hit it squarely. After that, everything else is a consequence. It’s odd that something so obvious can also be mind-blowing.

In our first years in Windsor, we went to a lot of baseball games with Dave Burke. We would often have whole sections to ourselves. Dave and Dale would gently tutor me in the finer points of the game, either by directly pointing things out and teaching me how to keep a scorecard or indirectly, as I listened in on their conversations about the game. I remember when Dave pointed out the Thome shift and I marvelled that I’d never seen it before. Once he’d shown it to me, I saw it every time after that. When I asked, “What is the manager telling the pitcher?” Dave paused and said, “I think he’s saying, ‘Don’t suck, okay?’” From that moment on, I’ve always assumed that’s basically what they’re saying. It’s Dave’s voice I hear as I count out the players during the first game of the season to remind myself of the nine numbers of the positions to use on my scorecard: pitcher-catcher-firstbase-secondbase-thirdbase-shortstop-leftfield-centerfield-rightfield. When there’s a grand slam home run, Dave’s voice bursts into my head: “Colour that box in!” I’m not entirely sure when or why I stopped actively trying to learn more about baseball. I do know that baseball got much less interesting around the same time that I stopped trying to learn new things.

Through one inning the teams seem evenly matched, no runs scoring despite the Amherstburg pitcher giving up two walks in the bottom of the first. As on Sunday, the PA announcer is calling out only the first name for the opposing team. “Now batting, #17, Mitch.” It’s a source of endless amusement to the Amherstburg bench, but to me it’s a bit unsettling, this stripping of identity from the visitors. Maybe it’s working, though, as Amherstburg once again fail to score in their half of the second.

Bottom of the second. There are runners on first and second, one out, and two runs already in when Ardi Kelmendi comes to bat for the Thunder. It’s the third time I’ve seen him this week, since he plays not only for the Thunder Midget Major team, but also for his high school team, Riverside Secondary. Like his teammates—from Massey High School, Tecumseh Vista Academy, Brennan, St. Anne’s, Kingsville, Holy Names, Villanova, St. Joseph’s, Sandwich, and Kennedy—Kelmendi is among the best high school baseball players in Essex County, and, like them, he’ll play on multiple teams over the course of the summer. Right now, he watches a wild pitch skip past the catcher, allowing the runners to advance.

My colleague’s comment last week about baseball being boring continues to wend its way through my thoughts. I’m wondering if saying, “Nothing happens in baseball” is like when people say, “Why don’t poets just say what they mean instead of writing all these hidden meanings.” Having taught English, I’ve encountered the notion of the “hidden meaning” dozens and dozens of times and given my share of lectures about the relationship between language, meaning, and form.

But I also recognize that unless you know what to look for, you can only go so far in understanding a poem. If you’re not aware of diction, metre, form, the poetic tradition, sound, and language, then poetry is just words on a page. If, for example, you look at a few lines of poetry, say, John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 14,” you can see a deliberateness in his choice of words:

“Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.”

It’s probably not an accident that he relies on single-syllable words (only three of the thirty-eight words have multiple syllables) or that he uses hard sounds (batter, heart, knock, seek, that, break) and soft sounds (breathe, shine, mend), and lots of words that start with “B.” If you only look at the words for what they say—and not, for example, how they sound—you’re only seeing part of the poem. Similarly, if you only look at pitching as something that enables or prevents home runs, you’re only seeing part of the game.

I feel compelled to confess that while I’m not overly fond of Donne, this poem often pops to mind when I think of batters at the ballpark. In fact, I’ve even considered writing a poem about Curtis Granderson that starts “Batter—my heart!”

The strike zone has begun to elude the Amherstburg pitcher, the wild pitch just the worst sign of it. Rather than load the bases, he finally throws a strike on a three-ball count. Unfortunately for him, Kelmendi singles up the middle, the scorched ball barely missing the pitcher on its way to center field. As he contorts away from the batted ball, I flash back to a ball that our friend Dave Burke, pitching in a men’s league for Woodslee, could not avoid. I wasn’t there that day, but in my mind, I see Dave dropping to the mound, unmoving, his brother rushing in from the bench. I see the players trying to attend to him. The ambulance and the paramedics. The operation. His worried family. The steel plate he now jokes about. And, finally, Dave getting back on the mound. It’s that last part I still find the most unbelievable. Not that he got hit in the head. Not how deathly serious it all was. But that he managed to overcome the fear, to throw a baseball towards a bat from sixty feet six inches away.

The Amherstburg pitcher wasn’t hit, of course. I don’t know if he’s ever been hit, but I do know he’s had at least one close call. The fear is there, just like it is with the hitter every time he steps in the batter’s box. A single that barely missed him scores two runs to make it 4-0. How will he react? K. K. Maybe that single was a wake-up call.

Until this project, I’d never really given much thought to all the invisible work behind those MLB players who make everything look so easy that we take their skill for granted. It’s like my friend John, the comedian, showed me time and time again—stand-up comedy isn’t just standing up and being funny. It’s years of practice, weeks of reworking, and hours of refining that make those twenty minutes work, seemingly without effort. The key to understanding anything—poetry, comedy, or baseball—is noticing what you’ve never thought about before.

As Koppett writes, “crowds invariably react [to fielding] incorrectly. The plays usually cheered loudest are not nearly so difficult as many others that go unnoticed.” Here’s where the artistry of noticing becomes important. If you’re only watching for home runs or a favoured team’s victory, you’re going to miss a lot of the game. Just as Alice Walker writes in The Color Purple, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it,” I wonder if the baseball gods get pissed off if you don’t notice a perfectly executed bunt.

By the end of the third inning, it’s 9-0 and Kelmendi’s single is long buried on the scorecard. It’s an impressive lead for this young Tecumseh team, though going by the look on their coach’s face, it’s hard to tell they’re ahead at all. No jokes or gentle teasing. No sense that he’s happy with what he’s seeing. Just the business of baseball.

After all three Amherstburg batters strike out in the third, they finally manage to get a man past first base in the fourth inning. Third base. No outs. Sac fly to center field to score Amherstburg’s first run of the game. After the ball is thrown back to the pitcher, the Tecumseh coach has him throw to third base, claiming that the runner left early, but the home plate umpire calls the runner safe. The coach is incredulous and starts chirping at the ump. “That’s six blown calls in two days!” I turn to Heidi, see her curious look, and shrug. Tecumseh are up 9-1 and it’s a men’s league game in early May. The biggest surprise, though, is that the coach isn’t ejected from the game.

As much as I try to focus on pitch movement, I am frequently distracted by a girl behind me who has talked non-stop since first pitch. She has pulled me into long, winding tales about her job, her apartment, her car, her dog, her brother’s car, her student loans. When the conversation switches to hernias, I take this as my cue to refocus on what Koppett taught me in this morning’s chapters: “Acquiring the raw materials is the science part of pitching, and so is the constant problem of keeping all deliveries in good working order [. . .] Only then comes the art, the process of deciding what to throw when, and where. The tactics and the thinking begin here.” As I watch through my new Koppett lens, I come to comprehend that this game is more than the 9-1 score. And that the Tecumseh coach is probably trying to get his pitchers to be deliberate for each Amherstburg batter. And that Kelmendi didn’t just go up to the plate without a plan or an idea in the same way that Donne didn’t just let whatever words came to mind simply fall on the page. Koppett says, “Far and away the most important thought of all, however, is: what pitch do I want to hit? This is where the artists are separated from the purposeless stick-wavers.” I can see why going into the ninth with a 1-0 score could be considered dull. Or why it could be, if you know what you’re looking for, the most amazing game you’ve ever witnessed.

But it’s not a 1-0 game tonight. It’s 10-1 for Tecumseh in the fourth, and if you believe the theory that scoring is the most exciting part of a game, this should be a great game. But it’s not. Sometimes it feels like I’m just logging hours at the ballpark, which is also part of this project—watching and learning from games at all levels. Much of baseball is exactly what these young players are doing—refining and reworking their skills and their understanding of the game to become, as Koppett says, artists instead of purposeless stick-wavers.

In the bottom of the inning, things go from bad to worse for Amherstburg. The new pitcher, their third of the evening, might as well be throwing batting practice the way the Tecumseh hitters are seeing his fastball. By the end of the frame it’s 14-1 Tecumseh and the only question is how quickly the top of the fifth can be played before the ten-run mercy rule can be invoked. I want desperately to get out of the cold; I’m not so much rooting for Tecumseh as for the end of the game.

I’m up on my feet, walking in place, and swaying to keep warm as Tecumseh take the field. The first batter walks—the first all game for a Tecumseh pitcher—and I find myself muttering under my breath. But then a crisply executed 6-4-3 double play gives me renewed hope. An easy ground ball to the second baseman should end the game, but the ball goes right under his glove. Never got low enough to the ground, either with his glove or his body. E4. The coach won’t be happy, even up 14-1. Finally, though, a fly ball to center field ends the game and we shuffle to the warmth of our car.

Final Score: 14-1 Tecumseh