Reading, Writing and Baseball
By Karlsie
For a writer and lover of reading and the Red Sox, things don't get too much better than they did last night. In the .406 club at Fenway, a panel of some of the greatest writers spanning a couple of generations sat down to talk about baseball and writing.
Leslie Epstein (father of Theo and author books like "San Remo Drive: A Novel from Memory" and "Pandaemonium") gave a brief talk about what baseball meant to him before turning the mike over to moderator Andre Dubus III (author of "House of Sand and Fog") to ask questions of a panel featuring: Roger Angell, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen King, Michael Lewis and John Updike.
For someone like me, it’s a glimpse of what heaven must be: great writers in the foreground discussing writing with green grounds of Fenway Park in the background.
Each author brought their own perspective to the subject. As a historian, Goodwin realized that her roots in keeping score of the Dodgers game for her father and then recounting each play when he returned home helped her form her perspective of using the narrative form to recount history. "It made me feel like I was telling my father a fabulous story," she said.
King also recalled some of his earliest memories around listening to the ball game on the radio with his mother on the front porch while he and others reenacted the play-by-play in the yard.
Michael Lewis spoke about how in baseball it really is man vs. man or man vs. fly ball or man vs. manager as opposed to sports like football where the blame isn't quite as easy to place. John Updike echoed the idea of baseball as a lonely sport - but there is a sense of repose or peace in it.
It was Roger Angell talking about how much baseball means to ethnic groups - citing Hank Greenberg to Jews in Detroit and the current deep ties between Latin America and baseball that crept into my notes more than anyone else. His sense of history of the sport and culture truly overpowered so much with an economy of words. He spoke of something that was so poignant that I finally began to understand one of my sons.
I speak to people of my 15 year old who decided a year ago that he didn't care about baseball any more. I refer to it as the second stage of Soxfandom - the belief that if you can just ignore things, if you just don't care they can't do it to you yet again. It is confusing for me to see a boy who loved the Sox and baseball so much that he tried to argue with the Rabbi about wearing his Red Sox cap signed by Jim Lonborg for his Bar Mitzvah instead of a kippa. (He lost and wore the Snoopy kippa I made him years earlier.) Angell spoke about how when you are passionate about something you do it over and over and over again but that eventually talent drives out non-talent and it truly is a painful process.
My son's rejection of baseball came after he joined Senior League baseball - the intermediate ground between Little League and Babe Ruth ball. One kid was whining and lamenting about how horrible a winter it had been, he could only get to Baseball Unlimited once a week to practice. My son looked at him and said, "Yeah, I have something called a life. You might want to think about getting one."
After that, the kid made sure to throw at my son's head every chance he got and his coach and I began to worry about his safety. My son, on the other hand, began to realize that kids no longer wanted to play for fun. They were thinking about scholarships and the ever narrowing path to the show. He was more realistic, knowing that the odds were against any of them making it past high school or college ball - so just enjoy the game and play for your heart.
He left the team because his old little league coach needed someone to help him with his daughter's t-ball team. He was in a good place teaching kids how to do alligator catches and monster walks to learn how to properly field, catch and throw. He gave the kids nicknames like "Babe" and "DiMaggio" and "Yaz." ("Don't worry, I didn't call any of them Ty mom because he was a bastard," he told me later.) His departure from baseball saddened me - but when I heard Angell's words, I finally understood.
The discussion went back and forth - occasionally Dubus recognized people in the audience, the regular schmucks like me as well as authors such as Stuart O'Nan and Dennis Lehane mixed in with the riff-raff. Lehane made a comment that really described my feeling about baseball and writing. He referred to the "poetry of soft noise" that is a baseball game and how baseball was "built for [a writer's] brain waves" as it gave us action and then time to pause and reflect.
This morning, when I looked at my programs from the season so far, I could see all the notes and narratives I kept for myself.
The story of a mother telling her little boy fairy tales about how, in his dream world, Johnny Damon, Trot Nixon and others came to teach him the basics of baseball after he was sad about striking out and being the last out of his little league game. The next day, after waking from his dream, he remembers the lessons they taught him and stuck to his basics - winning the game as a result.
There is a note about a father and trying to teach his daughter about what's going on in the field at her first game and her asking when the rally monkey comes out of the dugout to jump up and down. A brief notation reads: "If you're going to skip work, it probably isn't a good idea to keep score on the manila folder your work papers are in."
The list goes on and on and on.
Numbers are a big part of baseball, but so is writing. I guess if I wanted to, I could make a case for why baseball is truly and educational experience but I won't right now. I'll just make sure I have a couple of cold ones in the fridge for tonight and pick up the fixings so we can make our own pizza. I believe the Sox will hand the Cards their ass on a platter tonight - but I believe that every game the Sox will do that. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't and sometimes I write about it.
