The Microcosms of Summer

Thursday, June 24, 2004

The Giants are leading the Dodgers 3-1 in the sixth, and I'm pissed off about it.

And I don't know why.

I don't even know why I started with that -- except that the game on teevee is distracting me from this, my first entry in my first blog. I resisted blogging for maybe a year before finally giving in, prodded by a friend whom, I believe, I don't have to go out of my way to impress. Yet, I want to impress her. Guys are strange that way.

"There's a gazillion blogs out there," I've said to her. "Why would anybody wanna read mine?

Why, indeed? This isn't gonna be Joe Conason. It isn't even gonna be Birdie, the Avon Lady. I don't know what the hell it's gonna be -- except for a place to "sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world." (I'm not a Walt Whitman fan, but it's a great line.)

It's 5-1 now. I still care. I still don't know why. Walt Whitman was a baseball fan, so maybe there's a connection between baseball and barbaric yawping.

There used to be a connection between baseball and everything, or so it seemed. If you were a kid in New York City in the '50s and you moved to a new neighborhood, the first thing the other kids asked you, I'm told, was whether you were a Dodgers, Giants or Yankees fan. 

It was not a random question, it was a test of sorts; your answer revealed much about you to another kid -- though it was the kind of things that only other kids were aware of or cared about.

Four decades later, the politics of fandom are even more complicated. It's a lot harder these days to even be a baseball fan, since the finances of the game -- pardon, the business -- tend to make it about as appealing to the cognoscenti as network television. I never actually stopped being a fan, though the way the game's been jacked around for the last 15 years or so has alienated me. It's as if baseball's had Newt Gingrich as commissioner when it needed Tip O'Neill.

9-2. We're gonna lose four straight to those bastids. Jesus.

It'd be easier to be a Giants fan. San Francisco is an infinitely cooler city than El Lay -- god, I hate that place -- and it's a lot closer. (We can't even get the Dodgers on the radio this far north. Thank god for streaming audio, though I'm still trying to figure out how to take it from room to room, much less into the car. Same with AirAmerica, though I'm loath to get too involved in it because it seems like it might go off the air any minute.)

It'd be easier still not to care at all, like I pretended to do for the last 15 years. But baseball, like music, bores microscopic holes into your soul and embeds itself, daring you to disrupt its pulse with thoughts of nine-figure contracts and steroids and megalomaniac owners and agents who actually have a cable teevee series based on them.

I watch a game and see grass that's the same color as it was in 1965(there oughta be a "Ballyard Green" in the Crayola 64 box). I see guys wearing virtually the same uniforms they wore then, swinging the same kind of bats at the same kind of balls and wearing the same kind of gloves. (I wish they'd pull up their pants and show some stirrup, though.) I hear 40,000 people yelling the same stuff they yelled 39 years ago, and they're still eating hot dogs and drinking beer.

And I remember the first time I took the mound at Gene Robertson Park and wondered how the plate could seem so far away when I felt so tall.

Yeah, I care. I can't help it.

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