Phthursday Musings: Opening Day

Yes, friends, it’s an unprecedented double dose of META-SPIEL for Opening Day. This offsets last week’s big skip (vacation is vacation!) and also doubles down on the hope of baseball, on this wonderful 42 degree day.

I had started the Baseball Is Family piece while the lockdown was still under way. I kept making changes, kept getting sidetracked, then wound up on vacation. It all actually speaks to why Phthursday Musings have become my go-to, because the format forces quick kickout, and also undermines the idea of deep editing.

One big change I made was to eliminate the entire opening section, as it no longer quite fit the family theme, so I’ll share that here now, in a slightly different form:

I was 7. It was my first time playing any kind of organized ball. T-ball.

I was on a Rockford Park District team. We played our games on the huge lawn outside the Singer Mental Health Center. (Was this weird at the time? It’s certainly weird to consider now. Stupendously weird.)

I don’t remember anyone’s name. Really, T-ball is a bizarre experience, isn’t it? For like eight weeks, you show up at a specified time, for an hour or whatever, and play a game. You don’t know anyone else on the team, and you never see them again. I guess other sports or activities you sign kids up for might be like that, but there was something especially ethereal about T-ball.

But this story isn’t about the ethereal. It is about the greatest play I have ever witnessed in person.

We were in the field. I’m not really sure where in the field I was, but I’m thinking I must have been the catcher, because I’m not sure how else I would have had the correct vantage point. At third base, we had a girl with curly hair spilling out from under her hat.

The other team had their biggest kid at bat. In my mind, he was at least three inches taller than everyone else, and not scrawny. He was That Kid, the one you figured was most liable to actually HIT the ball, you know?

And he did. He got up there and the ball was put on the tee and he swung and - by 7-year old standards - he scorched it. A sharp line drive, right down the line. Just a little foul.

And our third baseman caught it.

She was playing almost on the line. In my memory, she left her feet just a bit when she reached back across her body. Between the little hop, the reach, and the pop of the ball in the glove, her curls bopped around her hat.

Yes, this was T-ball, so the ball couldn’t have been hit that hard. But, this was also T-ball, so the bases were pretty close. The ball could get to third base pretty darn quickly. It was pure athletic reaction on her part. I have, to this day, never seen another play quite like it, at least not in person.

When I think about playing T-ball, that is the play I think about. Everything else about being out there builds upon that moment.

This is what I mean when I talk about the magic of baseball, about the clarity it provides to what might otherwise be a confusing collection of memories.

I don’t remember the third baseman’s name. I don’t remember anybody’s name! But I have zero doubt that she went on to do amazing things.

It’s 42 and raining, which, I’ve got to say, is not baseball weather.

I remember a game when I was 11, I think we were playing the 8:00 game, and it was just cold out there. Probably about 42. And I was in right field and just standing there and… that is not fun. The game was not fun.

Last year there were a couple of evenings where my boy’s games were in the low 50s, maybe the high 40s. Honestly, I don’t think they should be playing in weather like that at all. It doesn’t make sense. Just push the baseball season into the summer. If these kids are miserable, and so are their parents, that’s totally defeating the purpose.

This gives me a jumping off point:

As a dad who happens to also be coaching in two sports, it is very illuminating to see the differences in how the local baseball and soccer organizations seem to operate.

The local soccer organization covers a large area. Information is relatively easy to find on the website. Communication is frequent and does not seem to assume you know / remember everything that’s going on.

The local baseball organization covers only our suburb. The website is a little clunky. Communication is infrequent and seems to assume you’re already familiar with how things work.

The way baseball is run, actually, feels more familiar to me. It reminds me a lot of playing in Rockford. The league itself feels very steeped in internal politics, and in turn, it is perhaps not surprising to find that some of the board members are also local elected officials. Now, I’ve met some of these people. I’m not knocking them. Rather, I think there’s something cultural going on, whereby the league is operating largely based on a sense of Tradition. And when you operate on Tradition, well, I think you just miss how all of the new people around you don’t know how things work.

The soccer organization seems to operate more out of a sense of Inclusion. And this makes some sense; the organization itself does not compete with other organizations. This differs from baseball, where travel teams are put together and compete against travel teams from other places. When these travel teams compete, it’s not just the players, it’s also the organizations competing. And so, I think, the baseball organization more naturally thinks of itself in terms of how it’s externally positioned. But the soccer organization doesn’t need to think of that. It just needs to think about what it does.

These cultural differences, I think, translate into other kinds of cultural differences. When you have an organization that operates more out of a sense of Tradition, less attention is paid to things like making new people feel welcome. There’s an insularity, something that even I, as a straight white male, can be acutely aware of. And so there’s a lot of reinforcement of things. It doesn’t have to be steeped in anything untoward… I’d actually counter that it could be steeped in more of a familial tradition, because as you’ve all read, Baseball Is Family.

My advice is that these kids’ sports leagues go all out in the name of Inclusion. I’m not using the word with any particular political meaning; what I mean is to make anyone new to the community feel super welcome, instead of feeling like they need to feel about and find their way.

It’s not easy. The same kind of phenomenon, I also notice at the school level. Simply having two kids spaced out a few years can mean that when the second kid goes through the system, you already know your way around, you’re better able to advocate for that kid. But parents new to an area, with their first kid entering a school, people who aren’t super outgoing and who can just show up and immediately participate in things… even if a local community is tacitly friendly, happy to have new people involved, that doesn’t mean that it’s Welcoming, that it focuses on Inclusion. It doesn’t mean people are bad. I myself, as a PTO President, feel that I am piss-poor at following through on the advice I’m giving. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try and try harder and make Inclusion a centerpiece of everything.

I am quite sure that Inclusion is threatening to Tradition, if even in the most abstract sense. But I don’t see these things as incompatible - quite the contrary! What does Tradition always need? New people to uphold it! And if the issue is that the Tradition is stodgy, well, it can be Tradition but still evolve, still modernize.

I’ve thought to write something like this before and then thought, no, I don’t want to come off as critical to my neighbors or anything like that. But my point here isn’t to be critical. It’s to help, to help the people who want to be included, and to help the groups who really need an infusion to carry on the wonderful traditions so many of them have.

This is a good time to remind people of one of my favorite origin stories.

Richie Ashburn, who would eventually be elected to the Hall of Fame, was selected in the expansion draft in 1962, putting him on one of the most infamous teams ever: the ‘62 Mets.

Ashburn played center. The shortstop, Elio Chacón, was Venezuelan, didn’t know much English, and, apparently, what English he did know did not include “I’ve got it!” This led to a handful of fly ball mishaps in shallow center, as Ashburn would try to call Chacón off, unsuccessfully.

The story goes that finally Ashburn asked Chacón how to say “I’ve got it!” in Spanish. And so one day, on a fly ball to shallow left center, Ashburn succesfully called Chacón off…

… only to be run over by 200 pound left fielder Frank Thomas, who subsequently asked, “What the hell is a Yellow Tango?”

Roger Angell tells it a little differently - that it was Gus Bell, not Frank Thomas, who ran into Richie Ashburn. But the telling above is Ira Kaplan’s. And it was from this story that Ira, the longtime Mets fan, and his wife Georgia pulled the name of their band: Yo La Tengo.

Here’s Yo La Tengo’s cover of the Nightmares’ “Baseball Altamont”:

It being 42 and rainy, I did not take my boy outside to play catch. Instead we threw a ball around in his room.

I would have watched the Brewers - Cubs game today, but, alas, we don’t get Marquee Sports Channel. The Ricketts are definitely among those owners who just don’t seem to give a shit. Yeah, they were smart enough to hire Theo Epstein. But does it really feel like, at this point, all of that was about baseball to them? Now they’re talking about buying into Chelsea, one of the few sports teams in the world as prominent as the Cubs. I guarantee you they don’t give two red hot shits about soccer. They just want to rub elbows with sheikhs.

Still, it is Opening Day, and Opening Day is wonderful.

Intentions, well, they’re intentions. You may as well write the entire word out of grains of salt.

My intention this year is to go to more games. Any games. Just to be outside on warm summer evenings. To find independent ball where they’ve got kid activities going on. Chicago Dogs, Windy City Thunderbolts, why not? And, finally, this year, I want to get to at least a couple games in other cities. Kansas City, Cleveland, places I might stand a chance of visiting otherwise. But why stop there? Seattle! San Diego! Schenectady!

Oh, there’s other things going on too besides baseball. Last week I was in California. This week I was in Texas. This… is not normal. It just worked out that way.

And I have thoughts about it all. For one: Why are California highway signs such crap? Weird plastic wrap coming off, wildly different shades of green, what’s with that? And why is there no Vitamin Water to be found at DFW Airport? COME ON.

But hey, today was about overloading you all with baseball.

I would, I think, be remiss if I didn’t leave you with a baseball card.

This is the 1985 Topps card of, well, obviously, Rollie Fingers, such a prominent figure in both Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic about the early ‘70s A’s and Nine Innings which spotlighted the 1982 Brewers.

This particular card is wonderful because, like so many cards of its vintage, it makes so little sense as a baseball card. It is not an action photo, it is not a proper portrait. It is a photo of the man in the periwinkle-with-blue-and-maize piping, captured mid-thought, leaving us to imagine what he might have been witnessing, or perhaps daydreaming about. Pepsi or Coke? Did Jim Gantner catch that pop foul? What exactly am I standing in front of to produce such weird coloring?

Rollie Fingers won the 1981 American League Cy Young and MVP! This still blows my mind.

I guarantee you, this card is the thing my wife is going to ask about. In all of the madness about baseball, she’s just going to zero in on the handlebar. So I had to include it.

Alas, it’s almost midnight here, time to wrap up. I did watch the Mets - Nationals game, which was mostly lackluster, except it did feature a Juan Soto bomb. The dude is still only 23. If he stays healthy… I shudder to think.

The Sox open Friday in Detroit. This is the year, isn’t it? World Series or bust.

Don’t worry, friends, I’ll find something besides baseball to write about next week.

Maybe.