Time Begins on Opening Day

Today, about 11.00 (PT), while sitting in a meeting at a client location, a frisson went through the office. “Snow!” This said with invective, phlegm in the voice, sheer unadulterated loathing, even from the ski fanatics in the mix.

Why has the attitude changed (other than that it’s been spring on the Wet Coast for a month now)? In large measure, because the amount of light — now more than darkness — the green things awakening and growing, the fact that most of us are walking around in light jackets or coatless also says it’s time to switch from winter mode to summer mode.

(My apologies to the rest of Canada. Spring shall come!)

And … with the calendar reaching for the end of March … Opening Day looms on the horizon.

I know, I know: the Boston Red Sox and the Oakland Athletics have already played the first game of the 2008 season, a few nights ago in Tokyo. (Is there no sense of tradition left? Those wanting to be at the first game of the new season for upward of a century trekked to Cincinnati to see the Reds enjoy the first tilt annually. Now the Lords of the Game treat tradition as dust, in the quest for ever more, ever more. Sigh.)

Yes, the game counts in the standings, and Boston has one game in the bank toward its title defence. Still, Opening Day hasn’t yet come — not really. But it’s almost here.

Back in 1977, when the Toronto Blue Jays took to the friendly confines of their jury-rigged baseball park in the south-west corner of Exhibition Stadium for their very first outing, and that first Chicago White Sox batter stepped into the box against the very first pitch to be delivered from the mound by this new team, snowflakes swirled around, too. How much we all enjoyed that day! — frozen to the bone, yes, and covered in one of Toronto’s regular early April reminders that winter looses its grip on the land not lightly and easily, but with a fight worthy of the return of the glaciers that covered this land a mere 12,000 years ago, but still, shouting joyfully for the first ever strike, the first ever out, the first ever half-inning played, the first hit … memories that will be carried forward and, with reverence, passed on, father to son, for years to come.

That is why time begins on Opening Day, each and every year. It is a division in the endless sweep of time: a point where before, and after, separate at a moment of anticipation and execution. Hope lives again. What true baseball fan hasn’t gone to the ball park on Opening Day expecting to see the first game of a 1.000 season? (Whether the old 154 game schedule, or the current 162 game one; whether in the purist single division format where all that mattered was first place at the end of it all or today’s wild cards, interleague games in the season and like, all of us share that hope as the initial wind-up begins and the first ball is fired at the plate.)

Even when we live far away from major league ball — even when the local team (a Single A club, here in Vancouver) won’t have its opening day for two more months yet — it doesn’t matter. (As June approaches, the same frissons of excitement get to come again, that’s all.) Opening Day is a signal that lazy, warm nights and the hot, blazing sun by day are coming. They signal that that eternal conundrum of baseball — that even the first place teams often lose four of every ten games, that the best batters barely hit their way on base cleanly a little more than three times out of ten, that this very hard game to play still, for all that, looks approachable and something anyone can do whether they’re eight, or sixty-eight, or any of the years on either side or in between — is about to begin.

Being a baseball fan is to acquaint oneself with loss, with defeat, with failure, and to still come away with hope.

For that is what the passing of the seasons also says. Winter, the time when defeat and despair can loom large: not one more time, out there, shovelling the walk; not another dark morning spent chipping ice from the windscreen; not another day spent at work, seeing only headlights and the dark coming and going! Late fall, with the mushy leaves underfoot, what, in my favourite of all haiku — Leaves falling / Lie on one another / The rain beats the rain — goes from colour and crispness to damp and chill, then bluster and wet, finally, as winter comes, quieting itself with snow replacing the endless dripping and occasional lashings of water from the sky. (And who, amongst fandom, has not huddled under an umbrella in mostly-deserted stands, watching the rain fall on the groundsheet laid down to protect the infield, and implored the clouds to part and dry up the rain so that the game may continue?) Even much of spring can be a struggle, as the battle between winter’s attempts to regain its footing and the possibility of good weather are fought for weeks at a time.

Still, and all, when the teams take the field, much of that fades away, and, whether through drizzle and chill or through one of those brilliant days of promise that spring can deliver, all cares fade, replaced with the question of whether today is our day, or theirs. Early in the season, there is little worry — so many games to come, so many chances await that a loss (or ten) does not loom too large. The intense caring of late August and September, as the race draws to its finish, is a long way off. Now is the time to enjoy the field, and what happens on it, purely for itself.

Once again the newspaper will have a column of box scores: for the fan who reads them, the theatre of the mind takes over, picturing plays not seen except in imagination, but now real for all of that. Once again the radio will be filled with the game — and radio, all sound and all imagination of the images before the announcer, is the best alternative to actually being at the park (and often a worthy adjunct to being in the seats as well). Television, with its inferior presentation of a game that requires broad vistas and minute attention to so many things going on at once, will also take its part (and again, without me: I’d rather imagine the game than deal with what is served up as “coverage”. Once again the calendar turns to those days a trip has been planned to a distant city, which includes a pair of seats purchased for the occasion (and sometimes, the whole point of going). A half-year of daily anticipation awaits.

We all have four calendars, whether we know it or not. There’s the one on the wall, of course, that says a new year begins on January 1. Then there’s an internal one, which starts each new year on a birthday, the marker of arriving as an individual in the world. A third one, never quite eliminated, anchors itself on the first day of the school year — for upward of two decades this starts a new cycle and the feeling that, in early September, it’s time to buckle down and “get to work” takes over for years to come.

Then there’s the fourth one, which takes shape this week. The one closest to our hearts and souls, fan or not, because it is tied, unlike any other sport, to the outdoor seasons of our life. Time truly does begin on Opening Day.

“With a dog, and a beer, and the umpire’s call, whaddya got? Let’s Play Ball!“

In Praise of Roger Angell

Too often in life we fail to give praise to people. It’s always one of those “I can do it tomorrow” things. To overcome that, give public thanks, which I shall now do for one of my favourite writers, Roger Angell.

The thread that made a difference for me is Angell’s writings on baseball. You can be a fan — even hold season’s tickets, be at the park constantly — and still miss so much. It is in the savouring of the game, again and again, that we need conversation and we need good writers to take us back. Angell is that good writer.

I was re-reading, yesterday, some of his essays (originally published in The New Yorker) covering the mid-1980s. Angell may report, but he is not just a reporter. He gets at feelings, and reminds me of the things I myself went through at the time.

For instance, in 1985 the Toronto Blue Jays made their first foray into the post-season. Angell writes about his on-going exchange of letters with a Toronto-area baseball reporter who, as he said, had made that transition into one of those who “belonged” to the baseball fraternity, living and dying with the team. (Angell believes that in many ways the fan of the team that makes a run at victory in September, and falls one game short, has it best of all. Baseball, as he notes repeatedly across his corpus, is filled with losing. Great batters fail to get a hit 70% of the time. Pitchers fail to keep runners off the bases, and half the time can’t stop them stealing. Great teams lose four games out of ten over the course of a long season. Streaks of good fortune and comedies of errors abound. Often the winning team for the season falls across the finish line.)

I recall that summer of 1985 — the terrible ups and downs, it all coming down to the final series, at the Mistake by the Lake, against the arch-nemesis, the New York Yankees. Buying tickets for all the games — could they clinch victory? Would it go to the wire? Sunday’s game — Phil Niekro’s 300th win — became meaningless with sealing the first place position on Saturday and it was so different, almost like mid-summer “lots of time left” baseball again, instead of the nerve-wracking September form when the team is in contention.

Then came the American League Championship Series against Kansas City. The Royals, of course, won it, and went on to win the World Series (losing to the eventual winner overall does make the ashes taste slightly better).

Comes the next year and a sigh of relief: we’re not good enough; baseball can be taken in peace and enjoyed for itself. But for Angell that year, the year came down to that 1 in 167 chance no fan with a favourite in both leagues wants to see: his hometown National League favourites, the Mets, face off against his American League favourite, the Boston Red Sox. (I know how he feels: my earliest baseball experiences tied me to the Red Sox, too; they are as much my team today as ever.)

Angell writes about the end of the 1986 season in a brilliant essay, “Not So, Boston”, which, with his previous essay on the 1975 season, “Agincourt”, precisely capture the pain and anguish of being a Red Sox supporter in one of those years where they reach the playoffs. My memories are (I discover) hazy, much like an old sepia-toned photograph with the edges rubbed and faded into the white of the edge. He sharpens them, brings the colour back, the light and the shadows.

From Angell I also learned what little I know about the game that I could pass on to my son as he has played. My own playing days were abysmal: errors galore, stuck in right field because no one hit there (usually), a batting average that began .0xx (right down there with American League pitchers when forced to the plate). I had little to offer from experience other than that all that personal defeat had not made the game unenjoyable. But Angell writes about catching, from conversations with catchers, and suddenly the dust-covered, aching-legged fellow wearing the “tools of ignorance” comes alive, and with it that very different perspective that comes from facing the field. (No wonder so many managers are ex-catchers: it is the position where a player can see the whole effort unfold at once.) Angell writes about slumps, for both hitters and pitchers, from the players’ perspectives. He writes about being stuck in the minor leagues, about never having made it but still having the fire of playing in one’s heart; he writes about the players who stayed on one season too long, and those who were cut short in the prime.

He writes about the parks, about sitting in this place or that. (He shares my refusal to ever again sit in the left field bleachers at Yankee Stadium, where the most noxious of their fans sit — my one and only game at the Stadium was spent there, and I will not go back if that is where the ticket is.) He is as frozen at Candlestick as I was in mid-summer. He has as much affection for the ivy at Wrigley as I do. He makes me want to spend March in Arizona (which has kept a little of the laid-back approach to spring training; it is not the profit centre that Florida has become).

But his most powerful essay is the one that has led me to how I volunteer at my son’s league. You see, I am a scorekeeper (and according to the people in the league, one whose scorecards can be used to teach from). This all comes from an essay Angell wrote, about a fan of his who sent him a scorecard for a game that had never been played: Boston’s worst players of note, historically, with Angell himself pitching at Fenway, against the all star team of all all star teams across both leagues through history. Imagine facing off against Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth and the like! The Bostons struggle but constantly manage to keep the score for the all stars at zero: they never get anyone across the plate. Meanwhile, come the bottom of the ninth, Angell — the pitcher (this game is played by pre-designated hitter rules!) hits his way on, advances, and finally scores to win 1-0.

Angell’s telling of this, given to us as a full-bodied telling of the game and what happened all by looking at a scorecard alone, awakened the interest in scoring, and in doing it in a way that you could tell by looking what had unfolded. Elsewhere he mentions his own scorecards, with their annotations beyond what is required. The game in a few pencil marks — and the theatre of the imagination.

Having moved away from a MLB city, today much of my following of my teams necessarily occurs in this way: reconstructing the night before via the box score, catching a game on the radio when I can. (I, like Angell, prefer the radio to the television; with television you see what the camera shows, whereas in radio you see the entire field in your mind.) But I am close to the play for all of that, thanks to Angell’s bringing alive games I never paid attention to, in seasons going back to the 1960s.

If I see Koufax and Drysdale pitching, or the sad-sack Mets of their early days, or the great Oakland teams of 1972-1974, as clearly as I do the games I have been to in person, it is thanks to that writing. Thank you, Roger Angell.

An Appreciation for the Game

Those of us who grew up in major league cities (regardless of the sport) are somewhat blasé about that good fortune. The ability to just go and see the team play, more or less at will, without having to plan a trip to do so, provides the stimulus to also connect with the regular radio or television broadcasts that “fill in” the time between visits to the stands. It’s not, of course, that minor league, semi-pro or even teams for youth can’t do that in terms of going to see the game, but it’s the major league teams that get the columnists offering opinion, the reporters providing coverage, the regular place in the sports pages so that game reports can be perused, and so a sense of “being there” evolves such that every game becomes a part of the fabric of one’s life. Indeed, after a while, even the games where you were not there, where you didn’t hear a broadcast, and have only the box score to count upon start to form up an image in your mind, so that, in that sense, you were there just as any other day…

I had been a baseball fan, first getting hooked on the game in the last season of the old Toronto Maple Leafs (AAA club, affiliated in that last season with the Red Sox organization) playing down by the lakeshore in the old Maple Leaf Stadium. I was playing baseball — extremely poorly — myself at the time. We went a decade without professional ball, and then the Blue Jays franchise was admitted to the American League, and from the first Opening Day (in the snow) I was hooked. I went from being a television and radio fan with occasional trips to Exhibition Stadium, to a shared season’s ticket holder when the SkyDome opened. A fan as with many others, I suppose, but I enjoyed the game even more than the winning and losing toward the end.

One of my most favourite memories, actually, is of game six of the 1993 World Series. We were in France; my father-in-law phoned us there, very early in the morning, to tell us of Carter’s home run giving the Blue Jays their second Series win in a row. He was not the fan, but he knew I was, and that it would be another full day before the International Herald Tribune would have the final box score. Quite the gift, and right up there with the silence that lasted for what seemed an eternity when, in game seven the preceding year, Jimmy Key got the final out in the thirteenth inning to win the Series: you could hear a pin drop, and then the doors started opening. At nearly 1.00 am people went outside so as not to disturb their sleeping family members, and then the whoops of delight began.

1994, of course, was the year of the labour shutdown when the owners decided come hell or high water baseball would be returned to its nineteenth century ideas at any cost. We were moving at just about that time, disrupting my attendance (it’s hard to get to games when you end up in Connecticut). Between the move and the loss of the season I just fell out of the habit. I went a couple of times to see the AA team in New Haven, but didn’t reconnect with the sport. (Going to New York once Major League games resumed didn’t appeal to me: the Yankees were a team that, going all the way back to 1965-66, I had seen as “the enemy” [there's a great deal of Red Sox fan in me even yet; we do tend to reach back to our origins] and I had never particularly liked the Mets, or Shea Stadium for that matter.) Boston was just a little too far to consider — much as Seattle is now — as a place to “drop into”; a trip must be scheduled and planned. As I spent much of the next five years travelling — and we moved across the Atlantic and back — even my radio habit died out. Baseball was gone.

It took my own son going into Little League play to reawaken the spirit of the game. I like Little League. He’s moving up to the next level this year, and I’m right there with him. Even the tryouts and drills to see what the players can do interests me. (I’ve never made a trip to Spring Training, but I’d like to, now.) We’ve also made our annual pilgrimage to Seattle each summer for a weekend of games — Cleveland the first year, Toronto the second and last year, Oakland. This year, I’m thinking of taking him to Toronto to visit the SkyDome and let him see his beloved Blue Jays play at home. (As for me, over the last few years, I’ve given equal thought to the Red Sox as to the Jays, so the dream trip for me would be to see a game at Fenway.)

In any case, somewhere in the past three years the soul of the game has reawakened. I am reading my old Roger Angell books, counted down the days until pitchers and catchers reported this February and have been diving for the news from Arizona and Florida each morning, look longingly at the fields getting ready for a new season locally, and am thinking seriously about season’s tickets for our Class A Vancouver Canadians and spending the summer at Nat Bailey Stadium.

It’s a game of the mind, and can be played in the mind. I look forward to baseball again on the radio (I’ve never really enjoyed it on television, although turning the television sound off and substituting the radio play-by-play to the pictures works) I’ll be at Opening Day down at Currie Field in Memorial Park for our local Little League — it’s nice to walk to and from the game — and be keeping score for my son’s team.

Baseball is a game where you get used to losing much more than you win; where success three times out of ten is brilliance; where 999 times out of 1,000 you are flawless in your fielding and everyone remembers the one time you err. In other words, it’s an awful lot of life packed into those green diamonds. It is also something that — and let’s never forget that the reality is even Little League Majors play better than most of the people who watch them ever did or will — is still close enough to the human, in scale, player size and equipment, that we can dream of being out there, in the sun, ourselves.

It is a wonderful way to dream, amongst the murmurs of games past, plays made, options for what comes next. Play ball! Spring has come.

Six Unimportant Things

One of my blogging confrères & favourite authors, Raphael Alexander, started spreading around a meme where he would tag other bloggers, requesting they post six unimportant things about themselves.

One of his recipients of this geas was another favourite author of mine, Patrick Ross, who has, in turn, sent me on the quest. So, here we go: 

I have moved progressively “leftward”, which is why I am so conservative: Left and right are meaningless. The most natural linkage in our politics is blue (Tory) and green (Green). This, of course, sends everyone in fits of ragelaughter, but it’s the sort of paradox I thrive on. Besides, Liberals are anything but liberal: they believe whole-heartedly in group privileges.

I’ll read anything: Not only have I purchased almost 100,000 books in my lifetime, I have been known to pick up newspapers anywhere in the world I am and try to puzzle out the stories. But the real proof of the pudding comes online, where I have to check into Twitter every 30 minutes or so to keep up with all the tweets, have over 250 blogs in my RSS reader, and a long bookmark list of websites that are subscription-based or otherwise don’t just provide a feed.

I am a very lazy person, which is why I work hard: I do work hard, running my own company and all, but actually most weeks if I put in 20-25 hours I’ve got everything done. That’s because I try to work smart. That email inbox is kept empty (helps make the new ones stick out), and I write everything mentally meaning it just needs transcription. (Hey, if it worked for Mozart it might work for me, too.) My failing is that anytime there’s a tax form lying around I put it off, something to do with not wanting to be in the government paperwork or tax collection business.

I love campuses but would not much like being on one: I’ve been an adjunct professor (at the graduate level) three times now, in three different faculties and at two different universities, and frankly I’m just not interested in putting up with campus life, although I loved going to class, and still like being around a university.

The one sport I’d have season tickets for isn’t prominent where I live: I used to share season’s tickets at the SkyDome with a (now deceased) friend of mine but, of course, Vancouver only has a Single A club. Quite watchable, but not the same thing as MLB. Fortunately a Little League game is equally entertaining. As for the rest of the sports available, none of them awaken me from my dogmatic slumber.

I am very easy-going; I have an opinion for every occasion: Clients tell me that I make outrageous claims, but they take them semi-seriously and get the underlying point. Yet there are few places where, if someone wants to disagree, I’m going to go to the mat for a point. I take great pride in watching the world work out the way I think it will. Oddly enough, I’m a better pessimist, so the last year has been “my kind of time”.

I just don’t know yet who to tag with this, so I’ll post what I’ve got and think about it some more. Every decision has its time.