Читать книгу 100 Miles of Baseball - Dale Jacobs - Страница 6

Dale: It’s Opening Day for the Tigers, and we’re at Motor City Brewing on Canfield, sitting at the top of the oval-shaped bar, across from the television mounted over the taps and a bumper sticker that reads “Cass Corridor: The Heart of Detroit.” We had not planned to be in Detroit for Opening Day, but yesterday’s scheduled home opener was washed out, the casualty of trying to play baseball in Michigan in March.

Like every other bar in Detroit today, the place is packed and noisy. It doesn’t matter that the Tigers traded away Justin Verlander, JD Martinez, Justin Upton, and Ian Kinsler. It doesn’t matter that the Tigers are at the beginning of a massive rebuild. It doesn’t even matter that the Tigers are likely to lose many more games this season than they win. It’s the Home Opener for the Tigers and that means, despite all meteorological signs of the past few days, that spring is coming to Detroit. What matters on this day is not the quality of the team, but the fact of baseball itself.

Heidi: This year Opening Day snuck up on me and I find the sudden appearance of baseball in this still-cold weather jarring. Even those filling this Cass Corridor bar, donning Detroit Tigers caps, t-shirts, and jerseys in celebration of Opening Day, seem indifferent to the actual game on TVs scattered around the room. I see Jordan Zimmerman on the mound, blowing on his hands to keep them warm between pitches. While I recognize Zimmerman, there are many Detroit players whose names I’ve never written in my scorecard. In years past, the players have been my main connection to the game. Not knowing most of their names feels indicative of my current relationship with baseball.

Early in our season ticket days, the Tigers had a “Who’s Your Tiger?” theme, and I unabashedly answered Curtis Granderson. I know it sounds both trite and hyperbolic, but I cried real tears of grief in December 2009 when the Tigers traded Curtis to, of all teams, the Yankees. It wasn’t just that I lost my favourite player, I lost something bigger: Curtis was my connection to baseball. It was from watching Curtis that I learned what the game could mean to me and the space baseball could and would occupy in my life. I wondered then if my love for baseball could survive not having Curtis step up to the plate for the Tigers 162 games a year.

I take a drink of my beer, glance up at the TV. The Tigers just loaded the bases with no outs in the first. Maybe this team won’t be as bad as everyone predicts. But Ivan Nova, the Pirates pitcher, settles down, getting three quick outs, including strikeouts of both Nick Castellanos and James McCann on weak swings on sliders away. It might be a long year for the Tigers after all.

And here I am watching it all unfold on a TV screen, at a bar less than two miles from Comerica—a ballpark where Heidi and I watched so much baseball since coming to work at the University of Windsor in 2000, the same year the Tigers moved from Tiger Stadium to Comerica Park. In those years, the Tigers were woven thoroughly into the fabric of our lives, from days of having whole sections to ourselves in the 119-loss 2003 season to Magglio Ordóñez’s walk-off home run that sent the Tigers to the World Series in 2006 to the next ten years of partial season tickets that saw us at the park for every Sunday home game. Though we had skipped quite a few Home Openers over the years, preferring to forego the rowdiness for the calm of the first Sunday, we’d never been in Detroit on that day and not been at the game. It’s our second year without season tickets, but it still feels very strange to be drinking a beer in Detroit on this particular day, getting ready to go to a baseball game that isn’t the Tigers.

Until recently, I used to look forward to two things arriving in my mailbox in late January. One, the Veseys Seeds spring bulb catalogue, which miraculously comes every year on the day when I have the least faith it will ever get warm again. And two, the Tigers season-ticket renewal package. Both reminded me that the grey-dark days of winter were finite, and, while I could see no outward signs, spring, sunshine, and green were on their way.

This year, I clung to the Veseys catalogue but quickly recycled the envelope of promotional materials the Tigers sent to tempt us back into season tickets. I distinctly remember the dark January night when, hauling our recycling to the curb, I saw the Tigers envelope in the bin and placed my box of cans and bottles on top so it wouldn’t blow away in the snowy gusts. Shuffling back to my warm house, I mourned both the absence of summer but also the self who sent the Tigers season ticket renewal back the day it arrived.

I recall sitting on the corner of my bed in January 2013, looking out my window at a grey day, phone on my ear, patiently waiting to talk with a Tigers ticket representative about switching our twenty-seven games to a smaller package because we’d be travelling a lot that spring. While I was on hold, they replayed Dan Dickerson’s play-by-play highlights of seasons past. After hearing the replay of Ordóñez’s 2006 walk-off home run, the Tigers answered. “How can I help you?” and without missing a beat I said, “I’d like to renew our regular package if I could please.” After reliving that home run, I knew we’d make that twenty-seven-game package work. I couldn’t imagine a spring without baseball and spending every Sunday home game with my Tigers.

In 2015, I became part of a historical research team documenting the 1934 Chatham Coloured All-Stars—the first Black team to play in the Ontario Baseball Amateur Association (OBAA) league and the first Black team to win the OBAA Championship. In 2016, I spent most of my summer days scrolling through microfilmed newspapers to recreate the All-Stars 1934 season through box scores and game recaps and my weekends and evenings watching the Tigers.

By July of that year, Dale and I started dragging on Sunday mornings, reluctantly assembling our ball caps, water bottles, and sunscreen. By August, as we waited in line for the border agent to let us into the US, one of us said something neither of us had ever said before: “I sort of wish we weren’t going to a game today,” and the other agreed. What had happened to us and baseball? Maybe we’d feel differently in the spring. But we didn’t. In February 2017, we didn’t renew our tickets. I thought I was through with baseball.

Though we occasionally attended a local men’s league game in Woodslee, Ontario or a Mud Hens game in Toledo, Ohio, since moving to Windsor baseball had, for us, really become Major League Baseball. More specifically, baseball had become synonymous with the Tigers. Without tickets in the 2017 season, I found myself at a loss, wondering where baseball fit into my life.

We saw a few Tigers games that summer, making the drive across the Detroit River when we found ourselves free and the weather conducive to baseball. But those nights at Comerica were infrequent and I still wanted to see as much baseball as we had in previous years. I started to seek out other forms of the game across different levels of baseball. Minor league and NCAA games in parks close to us in Michigan. Amateur men’s league games in Essex County. Everything within easy driving distance of our house in Windsor as I tried to maintain a connection to baseball that seemed to be slipping away.

One beautiful spring night we saw the University of Windsor Lancers club team at the Libro Centre in Amherstburg, the sun a perfect orange as it set beyond left field. The hill beyond the outfield was covered in dandelions and seemed to shine in the twilight. There were only about thirty people there that night and we were close enough that I could hear the talk on the field, see the way a pitch would break out of the pitcher’s hand. Kids chased foul balls. Players acted as coaches at first and third base. It was sloppy at times, but there were also beautiful defensive plays. I felt like I was back in Alberta, in Amisk or at Czar Lake, sitting with Dad behind home plate or chasing foul balls with my friends. It wasn’t the same—I wasn’t the same—but it felt familiar, like coming home to a place I didn’t know I had left and didn’t realize how much I had missed.

On one of the first warm days of May of 2017, I took a break from a research day at the Chatham Public Library and walked east to Scane Street, near where Boomer Harding grew up. If you know what you’re looking for, you’ll find Stirling Park, the field where the neighbourhood gathered on evenings and weekends to cheer on the Chatham Coloured All-Stars. I was alone in the park but conjured the crowds and placed the players whose faces I knew from team photos at their positions. Earl “Flat” Chase was pitching his legendary smoke balls. Left-handed King Terrell making brilliant plays at third base. Boomer Harding smiling back at the boisterous crowd after a somersaulting catch at first base that saved the game. Boomer, Flat Chase, and all the other Chatham Coloured All-Stars were showing me a different side of baseball. When, a few days later, Dale suggested we go see other kinds of baseball in the region instead of watching the Tigers, I eagerly agreed.

As we travelled around Southwestern Ontario and eastern Michigan in the summer of 2017, I started to understand that baseball could still have a place in my life and in the life I shared with Heidi. As we talked, sometimes driving, sometimes sitting on our porch in Windsor, we both realized that we live in an incredibly rich area for baseball. If we drew a radius of one hundred miles with our house at the center, what kinds of baseball experiences could we have? What if we took a summer and devoted ourselves to such a journey? What if we wrote about that summer and what we learned about baseball, ourselves, and our relationship with the game? And just like that, the idea for this book was born. One question that lingered was whether this story was bigger than the two of us. Would anyone else care?

We sent a synopsis of what we wanted to do to Sharon Hanna and Dan Wells at Biblioasis—fifty games within a hundred miles of our house in Windsor between the end of March and Labour Day, when classes at the university would resume. A summer of baseball that would take us from London, Ontario in the east to Albion, Michigan in the west to Cleveland, Ohio in the south and to Sarnia, Ontario and Saginaw, Michigan in the north. A summer of baseball that would encompass high school, college, amateur, historic, and professional games.

At Anchor Coffee in Walkerville, Dan and Sharon listened as we explained what we hoped to explore about baseball, about the region, about ourselves. When the conversation finally hit a lull, Dan looked up, asked, “When would you start?”

“Tomorrow. Wayne State plays tomorrow.”

“OK. We’re in. We’ll publish the book.”

In under an hour, we had gone from proposing a book to Biblioasis to having a book contract. Walking through the cold rain to our car after our meeting with Sharon and Dan, Dale and I were excited to have the go-ahead for our new project. When we got home, Dale went online and found games we could go to on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and I started to understand the full scope of what we had just committed to do: amongst all our other commitments, we would travel a 100-mile radius to watch fifty baseball games in five months. I hoped my panic wasn’t visible to Dale. I comforted myself by saying to him, “At the end of this weekend, we’ll only have forty-seven more games to go.”

Instead of heading south to Comerica when we finish lunch, we drive north to Harwell Field for the Wayne State-Ashland game. We are going to a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division II on Opening Day in Detroit. I don’t know what to expect from this project, from this movement through different kinds and levels of baseball. I just know that baseball has somehow become diminished for me. The Tigers alone are not enough to sustain my interest in this game that I’ve always loved, this game that my father loved, this game that Heidi and I have shared for so long. Right now I just want to see where these fifty games take us. No preconceptions, just a summer of baseball.

Putting on my coat and mittens to get ready to go to Wayne State, I look at the TVs over the bar. The bases are loaded and there’s one out. The Tigers hit into a double play to end the inning. No one in the bar seems to notice or care. It’s the end of the fifth, the Tigers are down 3-2, and I’m about to go to my first of fifty games.