Hope Springs Eternal

Pitchers and catchers began reporting to Spring Training camps today (Mets report tomorrow). With so many negatives stories in recent weeks, I think I’d like to take a moment and remember why we all love this game. I would try to put the proper words down to express that sentiment, but I think former Commissioner Bart Giamatti said it best in “The Green Fields of The Mind”

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.

Somehow, the summer seemed to slip by faster this time. Maybe it wasn’t this summer, but all the summers that, in this my fortieth summer, slipped by so fast. There comes a time when every summer will have something of autumn about it. Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game’s deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight. I wrote a few things this last summer, this summer that did not last, nothing grand but some things, and yet that work was just camouflage. The real activity was done with the radio–not the all-seeing, all-falsifying television–and was the playing of the game in the only place it will last, the enclosed green field of the mind. There, in that warm, bright place, what the old poet called Mutability does not so quickly come.

But out here, on Sunday, October 2, where it rains all day, Dame Mutability never loses. She was in the crowd at Fenway yesterday, a gray day full of bluster and contradiction, when the Red Sox came up in the last of the ninth trailing Baltimore 8-5, while the Yankees, rain-delayed against Detroit, only needing to win one or have Boston lose one to win it all, sat in New York washing down cold cuts with beer and watching the Boston game. Boston had won two, the Yankees had lost two, and suddenly it seemed as if the whole season might go to the last day, or beyond, except here was Boston losing 8-5, while New York sat in its family room and put its feet up. Lynn, both ankles hurting now as they had in July, hits a single down the right-field line. The crowd stirs. It is on its feet. Hobson, third baseman, former Bear Bryant quarterback, strong, quiet, over 100 RBIs, goes for three breaking balls and is out. The goddess smiles and encourages her agent, a canny journeyman named Nelson Briles.

Now comes a pinch hitter, Bernie Carbo, onetime Rookie of the Year, erratic, quick, a shade too handsome, so laid-back he is always, in his soul, stretched out in the tall grass, one arm under his head, watching the clouds and laughing; now he looks over some low stuff unworthy of him and then, uncoiling, sends one out, straight on a rising line, over the center-field wall, no cheap Fenway shot, but all of it, the physics as elegant as the arc the ball describes.

New England is on its feet, roaring. The summer will not pass. Roaring, they recall the evening, late and cold, in 1975, the sixth game of the World Series, perhaps the greatest baseball game played in the last fifty years, when Carbo, loose and easy, had uncoiled to tie the game that Fisk would win. It is 8-7, one out, and school will never start, rain will never come, sun will warm the back of your neck forever. Now Bailey, picked up from the National League recently, big arms, heavy gut, experienced, new to the league and the club; he fouls off two and then, checking, tentative, a big man off balance, he pops a soft liner to the first baseman. It is suddenly darker and later, and the announcer doing the game coast to coast, a New Yorker who works for a New York television station, sounds relieved. His little world, well-lit, hot-combed, split-second-timed, had no capacity to absorb this much gritty, grainy, contrary reality.

Cox swings a bat, stretches his long arms, bends his back, the rookie from Pawtucket who broke in two weeks earlier with a record six straight hits, the kid drafted ahead of Fred Lynn, rangy, smooth, cool. The count runs two and two, Briles is cagey, nothing too good, and Cox swings, the ball beginning toward the mound and then, in a jaunty, wayward dance, skipping past Briles, feinting to the right, skimming the last of the grass, finding the dirt, moving now like some small, purposeful marine creature negotiating the green deep, easily avoiding the jagged rock of second base, traveling steady and straight now out into the dark, silent recesses of center field.

The aisles are jammed, the place is on its feet, the wrappers, the programs, the Coke cups and peanut shells, the doctrines of an afternoon; the anxieties, the things that have to be done tomorrow, the regrets about yesterday, the accumulation of a summer: all forgotten, while hope, the anchor, bites and takes hold where a moment before it seemed we would be swept out with the tide. Rice is up. Rice whom Aaron had said was the only one he’d seen with the ability to break his records. Rice the best clutch hitter on the club, with the best slugging percentage in the league. Rice, so quick and strong he once checked his swing halfway through and snapped the bat in two. Rice the Hammer of God sent to scourge the Yankees, the sound was overwhelming, fathers pounded their sons on the back, cars pulled off the road, households froze, New England exulted in its blessedness, and roared its thanks for all good things, for Rice and for a summer stretching halfway through October. Briles threw, Rice swung, and it was over. One pitch, a fly to center, and it stopped. Summer died in New England and like rain sliding off a roof, the crowd slipped out of Fenway, quickly, with only a steady murmur of concern for the drive ahead remaining of the roar. Mutability had turned the seasons and translated hope to memory once again. And, once again, she had used baseball, our best invention to stay change, to bring change on.

That is why it breaks my heart, that game–not because in New York they could win because Boston lost; in that, there is a rough justice, and a reminder to the Yankees of how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another. It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.

Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.

From A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett
Giamatti, © 1998 by A. Bartlett Giamatti.

www.metspolice.com

Hugo Chavez Hates The Mets

Never thought I’d be writing about Hugo Chavez on this blog.

Apparently the leader of Venezuela is quite ticked off at MLB teams, particularly the Mets, for not allowing Venezuelan players to represent their country in the World Baseball Classic.

Chaves was quoted as saying “They take away the athlete’s right and duty … to represent Venezuela”

A duty? Really? Playing in the WBC is a duty?

Of particular concern is that the Mets may not clear Sanatana to pitch in the tournament.

Unlike my colleague MetsPolice, I am actually a big supporter of the WBC (more on that later), but let’s be real, no way is it a duty.

Then again, if the US Congress can waste time and resources to hold hearings on steroid use in baseball, I guess Chavez can blow off some steam about MLB too.

www.metspolice.com

The Last Week of Shea – Part 2

On Wednesday morning I drove through the city. First I came down the Deegan and saw the two Yankee Stadiums. I’m sure I’ll come to love New New Yankee, but it seems completely useless right now with a perfect stadium right next to it.

Then I looped around and approached Shea from the south (heading north on the Grand Central). it’s very strange to see a stadium off to the right of the unnecessary tennis stadium (the newer one being unnecessary).

Then I pulled up to poor Shea. Not much left, and I’m apparently a really lousy photographer.

Hopefully the below works. If not enjoy the one and I’ll post the rest after the weekend.

You are invited to view Mets’s photo album: Shea Feb 11
Shea Feb 11
Shea Stadium –
Feb 11, 2009
by Mets
Message from Mets:
These pictures were sent with Picasa, from Google.
Try it out here: http://picasa.google.com/

www.metspolice.com

Flushing Islanders

In case you missed it – there was a small flurry yesterday and frankly I forgot about it – the VP of the Queens Chamber of Commerce suggested the Islanders come to Willets Point.
 
Now the Isles can’t go anywhere until 2015, and there’s no hockey arena next to C-Field but let’s pretend for a second there is (unless you want to go back to steroid talk).
 
Would it work?
 
Would fans from Suffolk trek to Queens?  I don’t see it.    Nassau?  Maybe, but I doubt it.  It’s kind of annoying to drive from Nassau to Queens on a weekday or Saturday between 5 and 7pm.   I guess people do it for baseball.
 
Would you work in the city all day, go to the arena, and then head home?  I don’t see it, but then again I guess people do it for baseball.
 
Would the Nets come there?  Brooklyn is a pipe dream.  The Nets should cut-bait and head to Newark.   Would you go see the Flushing Nets?
 
I’m wishy washy on this one, but I think it wouldn’t work.  It’s better than the KC Islanders, but it’s not the best choice.  I still think an arena on Route 110 between the parkways is the best idea. 
 

Suspend A-Rod? Asterisks? Time For Bud To Go

Time for Bud Selig to step down.
 
Bud Selig has been the commissioner for the Steroid Era.   It’s time for him to turn the reigns over to someone else.   Fay Vincent doesn’t look so much like a cranky old man now, does he?  Where’s Bart Giamatti when you need him?
 
Bud spoke to USA Today.  (http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/2009-02-11-selig-rodriguez-suspension_N.htm).   Bud is thinking about suspending A-Rod.
 
Will he suspend the other 103 players?   Whatever happened to privacy and anonymity?
 
Are we really going to have 103 players (or however many are active) sit out 50 games?
 
In the same article Bud talks about reinstating Hank Aaron as the home run champion.
 
Asterisks, huh?  That didn’t make sense for 61* and it doesn’t make sense now.
 
The ball flew over the fence, it’s a home run.  Deal with it.
 
Below is the section for “Most Home Runs In A Season” from the Baseball Record Book (Selig Edition)
 
Bonds             73*
McGwire         70*
Sosa                66*
McGwire          65*
Sosa                64*
Sosa                63*
Maris               61
Ruth                 60**  (154 games new double asterisk)
 
Gotta be honest, looking down that list a little further I’m seeing a bunch of names from the 1930’s, some suspects like Luis Gonzales (57) and that 58 Ryan Howard hit in 2006 really catches my eye.
 
Brian Cashman said, “No one can wave a magic wand and make it all go away.”
 
As Howie Rose would say, “Put it in the books” and move on.