Talking Baseball
By Karlsie
It is June and time for things like lecture series and such to wind down. Fortunately for me just as one passion is winding down for the season, another is gearing up.
The other day I had the privilege of attending the first of a new lecture series as Fenway Park that will focus on great sports writers. The series founder, George Mitrovich, is modeling the series after two others he founded: The Great American Writer Series (out of the City Club of San Diego) and The Denver Forum. The kick-off speaker for the Fenway Series was Dan Shaughnessy speaking about his current book "Reversing the Curse." In introducing the series, Mitrovich talked about how he had been reading the sports page every day since 2nd grade and how we undervalue sports writers.
He's right - a lot of us learned to read and do math on the sports pages. I think I mastered percentages long before a number of my peers because it's just something baseball fans need to know. Baseball is a game played with heart, soul and sweat but measured by percentages. When people try to play money ball - they end up watching games like yesterday's. (On paper, Embree should've wiped the Angels off the bottom of his cleats… but, as Yogi Berra once said, "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.")
Trying to explain to my kids that there used to be an editorial cartoon on the sports page (which often comes up when we're watching a movie like "The Natural") is sort of like our parents explaining the world before television to us - just something that's difficult to comprehend. Either way, the sports page is still one of the major introductions to reading and math for a lot of kids as they try to build a bridge between childhood and the adult world.
Like him or hate him, Shaughnessy is an interesting speaker with a quick wit. When asked about Damon's book, "Idiot," he replied, "He writes the way I play centerfield - quality, quality work." He described winning the World Series last year as our equivalent of the Apollo 11 moon landing, an event that changed history. When you think about it, it truly was an amazing thing that united a number of us fans and large numbers of non-fans. There was some sort of mystique that surrounded that win and made the world sit up and take notice. For a few hours last fall, where the world has failed didn't matter because so many eyes were on Boston and what our team achieved that it seemed as though anything could be possible. He is right about one thing, when it comes to the Sox, we just can't make this stuff up. Fact is truly stranger, and more interesting, than fiction.
Another passion of mine is children's literature. Today I attended the last lecture of the season out at the Eric Carle Museum in Amherst. Paul Zelinsky, an incredible artist whose work blows me away every time spoke about the process of making his recent pop-up book. (Well, it's more animated than pop-up as things move and slide rather than pop up.) I had been waiting for this all year as his work is just truly a marvel and I hung on almost every word… that is until it started creeping closer to game time.
Here I was in Amherst and the Sox were about to take on the Angels in the rubber game of the series. After yesterday's shellacking, there was no way I wanted to miss what happened today. What a tough decision: schmooze with an artist I admire or catch the game?
The choice became easy for me. After listening to the insipid morons at Fox Sports call yesterday's game, I needed to get back to a real play-by-play. (Look - if you don't like the Sox or Boston, then why are you calling the game? Cut a deal with NESN and have a couple of guys who actually care about the ball game instead of the hot chick in the tight red t-shirt in the right field luxury boxes call the game.) So I hopped in my trusty van and headed home.
Fortunately the Red Sox radio network extends to Springfield, unfortunately, I couldn't find it and the AM radio in my car wasn't strong enough to pull it in from Worcester across the Tofu curtain all that clearly. (There's nothing like Troup's voice drowned out by the acceleration of my engine climbing the mountains to get to the Pike to get a girl frustrated - unless it had been the dumb as a bag of rocks FOX duo from yesterday.)
What did come in loud and clear from the Hampshire College campus to the Mass Pike was the Yankees-Twins game. When I was listening, the Yanks were up 2-0. The announcers were going on about how great the Yanks look; the depth of NY's bench and bullpen and this was the best they had seen them play all year. They were obviously proud of the team, but once I hit the Pike and could pick up the Sox, I gladly said goodbye to the Yanks and began to feel good about the 3-0 lead we had against the Angels.
The signal grew stronger as I got closer to Worcester and suddenly the engine stopped drowning out Troup. This meant I could groan loudly as the Angels caught up. As both games continued on, I sort of regretted having lost the signal to the Yanks game. I wonder how their play-by-play and color men were eating crow after their proud declarations early on in the game.
The fun thing about the Pike is you see the other folks with Red Sox plates on their vehicles and they're all like me - hanging on each play as we're cruising down the highway. It didn't surprise me to hear a horn honk and see someone else's fist punch the air when Bellhorn finally connected with the ball, knocking in the go-ahead run. I know there are others with regular or out of state tags doing the same as the folks I noticed, but there's something about the Sox tags that make me feel like I'm part of a special club.
In the end, it was all good. One lecture series overlapped with the other so I don't have to face the summer with nothing but beach reading to stimulate (or kill - as the case may be) my brain cells. So, even though I'll be missing listening to artists talk about how they create worlds for children through their work, I'm looking forward to lunch at Fenway and listening to folks talk about sports writing - which is truly an art form unto itself. Sometimes it really is just good to be in a place like Boston where you can have it all.
