I Love a Cliche

“Is this some kind of religion?” Richard asks. He has risen and stands a few feet away from me, his expression one of absolute bewilderment.”

“It may be, “ I reply, trying to picture the world through his eyes.

“You’re all crazy,” he says with my voice. But we don’t pay much attention to him. Annie is talking to Shoeless Joe, Karin has returned with a hot dog and a Coke. After the national anthem, I watch as Moonlight Graham trots to right field. If he is nervous he does not show it, for his stride is solid and his shoulders confident. He turns to face the infield and pounds his fist into his glove.

“Crazy,” says Richard.

- From Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella

I just finished reading Shoeless Joe, the beautiful baseball novel on which the movie Field of Dreams was based. I bought it at Logan Airport in Boston, on my way home from my first semester at UMass. I devoured it on the plane ride, swept away by the mysticism and romanticism of the book’s pages.

Naturally, the book was better that movie. Immensely so, and different. The famous author Ray kidnaps and takes to Fenway Park is J.D. Salinger. After picking up a hitchhiking Moonlight Graham, the gang breaks into the Twins’ stadium (pre-Metrodome) and takes batting practice in the middle of the night. The themes of family and love, of connections to the earth and something bigger than yourself, themes of dreams flit and float throughout an entirely unrealistic story, bring it to earth and, despite the mysticism, it is a relatable romance that only a baseball fan can truly understand.

I don’t normally read books like this. If it wasn’t about baseball, I’d never pick it up. Mysticism and fantasy just aren’t my things. As I reread this book I wondered why there aren’t more novels about baseball. There is a handful of fantastic baseball fiction on my bookshelf. Why isn’t there more? It seems like baseball lends itself to the metaphors that make fiction work.

I was pondering this question as Opening Day unfolded and I found myself wanting to wax poetic about this holiest of baseball days. I desired to write a beautiful soliloquy to this beautiful game. So, I sat at a keyboard and ran through my options.

Baseball as a metaphor for life? Trite.

Baseball as a connection to generations past, particularly the father-child connection? Hackneyed.

Baseball as poetry, romanticism, and first love? Cliched.

Taking the time to write about how baseball tropes are trite, hackneyed, and clichéd? That is quite possibly the worst kind of cliché out there.

None of that changes the fact the baseball is all of those things. It’s a fantastic metaphor for life. It IS poetic, romantic, and for many, a first love. Its lingering appeal is directly linked to this connection we feel to players past and the fans who passed down their love of baseball.

Baseball is the most clichéd sport out there. You can’t talk about baseball without speaking in clichés. And sure, we all roll our eyes from time to time at the flowery language these clichés draw forth. But, we love these clichés, we need these clichés.

It may be there is no original way to write about or think about baseball. It may be that the poetry of baseball has been waxed more times than a 57 Chevy.

My 10th grade English teacher was a poet, and a devout fan. He counted down the Mariner’s Magic Number in the fall of each year (this was the late 90’s, when they had such a thing) and often scribbled out baseball poems on the classroom chalkboard. But he railed, RAILED, against the use of clichés in both prose and poetry. They were antithetic to his very existence.

So how does a creative type like that become a baseball fan and embrace all the banality that comes with it?

Because the clichés are true. The truthiness (thanks, Stephen Colbert) is stark and vivid and so very real. We love to bask in those clichés that envelope us like a sunny summer afternoon at the ballpark.

The only thing more cliched than baseball may be love. Yet when we feel love we rhapsodize about it as if it’s something new. But anyone can fall in love. Not anyone can be a baseball fan. There are infinite paths to love. There are finite paths to baseball fandom, to understanding the game, to recognizing its tempo in your soul.

These paths are cliched because there are so few. The uninitiated don’t understand and sigh heavily at the metaphors and the rhapsodizing.

But we know. We understand. We are baseball fans.

That Feeling That You Get

Your bladder is burning. Under any other circumstance, you would have high tailed it to the bathroom.

You are out of beer. Under any other circumstance, you’d be grabbing one from your fridge or braving the line at the stadium.

But your seat is firmly planted in a seat. You are not getting up. You are not taking your eyes off the field or the tv.

One of those players is up.

As I write this, I’m sitting through MLB Extra Innings’ commercial break because Bryce Harper is up next. He has hit a homerun in each of his at bats so far today and despite the 3 cups of coffee I’ve had since the game began, I’m not going anywhere.

For so many years, it was Ken Griffey Jr. He is, to me, the very personification of those types of players. You never, ever, not for a nuclear war, got up when he was due up. No matter how commonplace it became, you never missed a chance to see him cut loose that achingly beautiful swing.

Old time baseball scouts love to say that you just know when a player is special.  You feel it in your gut.

With all due respect to baseball wisdom, I say you feel it in your bladder.

Happy Opening Day!

It’s Not Hope That I’m Running From, It’s the Heartbreak I Know Will Come

“A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;”
- Ernest Thayer Casey at the Bat

Dave Niehaus used to read Casey at the Bat during the radio pre-game show each year on the anniversary of its publication. The poem so perfectly captures the tumult of sports fandom; despair, hope, elation, then tumbling back down into dispirit despair. It so perfectly captures the tumult of being a Mariners fan.

Par exemple, the 1997 Mariners hold the single season team home run record. Steroids, schmeroids, that team could hit baseballs very hard and very far very often. The 1997 Mariners had on their roster Future Hall of Famers like Ken Griffey Jr, Alex Rodriguez, Randy Johnson, and Edgar Martinez (Cooperstown, Schmooperstown he’s a Hall of Famer).  The 1997 Mariners were picked to win the World Series by people who were supposed to be smart enough to know those things, leading my poor, naive 15 year old self to believe them.

The 1997 Mariners won one playoff game that year.

That is a season that lives so vividly in my mind I think you’re crazy for suggesting that it happened 16 years ago. That is a season that grows ever more heartbreaking as the years pass.

So here we stand on the threshold of another season that I know I’ll only survive thanks to a healthy mix of sarcasm, subterranean expectations, and several kegs of the finest Northwest microbrews. I know this because I’m a wizened Mariners fan who has had her heart broken too many times to risk it again.

But here we stand on the threshold of another season and all I see are home runs. All I hear is that perfect crack of perfectly placed bat on ball. I can smell, taste, and feel that stupid hope hopping around down there in my chest.

Homers, bombs, dingers, mashers, going yards, moonshots, four baggers, round trippers, long balls, taters, big flies, roof shots, jacks.

Be still, my heart. It’s only Spring Training.

Like You Imagined When You Were Young

I’ve always felt like the players I watched when I first became a baseball fan were better than ones who play today. Memories put a soft hue on the past and the moments that were so monumental, because there were so few to compare them with, stood as towering accomplishments, whether they actually were or not.

(Of course, I became a Mariners fan in the 90s, and it’s tough, nay impossible, to argue the Mariners of the 90s actually weren’t better than they are now.)

The first no hitter I saw was Chris Bosio’s. I had already gone to bed and my Dad woke me up to see the end. The specialness of that moment has always branded Bos as a better pitcher in my mind than he was. I’ve never cared that Randy Johnson’s career was defined on teams other than the Mariners. My childhood worship of the fastballs he slung through the strike zone and the way Mr. Snappy made batters look like overmatched fools are no match for reality

We view things differently when they are new and fresh and perspective hasn’t tainted our wide eyed wonder. I’d long accepted that I would never see the moments and players of my adult fandom with the same reverence and awe that I did when I was young.

Felix came along at a time when I was mad at baseball for tarnishing my unblemished memories with steroids and I was disappointed with the Mariners for squandering the chance to become a real team. I watched him with curiosity and appreciation, but I didn’t let myself get attached.

During a tough part of my life, baseball was there. Felix was becoming Felix. Happy Felix Day was a thing, and I relished watching him develop and channel his cocky swagger of talent into the most entertaining pitching I’ve ever seen. I started to feel like he was special and I could be excited about the Mariners again.

But, he still didn’t feel like the fuzzy memory players.

Then, at 3:00 this afternoon, I was shut in my boss’s vacant office, clutching my phone like it was the source of life, listening to the game through its tiny speakers. Every time Felix set to throw the ball, my heart thumped like I had murdered and buried someone below the floorboards. My head was dizzy, my body was numb.

He did it.

Felix threw the perfect game he had been building towards his entire career.

I felt a feeling that I hadn’t felt since the Indians were defeated in the final game of the 2001 ALDS.

That moment, that pitcher. I am going to love them forever and they will live forever in that part of my brain devoted to sacred baseball memories.

The One That Got Away

For every No Hitter in history there are stories about people who could have been there, but weren’t. No Hitters aren’t the rarest thing you can see in a baseball game and a smattering of them are thrown every year.

Today, Phil Humber threw the 21st perfect game in baseball history against the Mariners and I missed it.

Today, I joined the ranks of baseball fans who could have seen history, but didn’t.

If I felt any worse about this, I’d be on suicide watch. No perfect game in my scorebook. No “I was there” stories. No admission into one of the most exclusive clubs in baseball fandom.

Did I mention I turned down FREE tickets today? A certain someone who’s initials are MM pretty much owes me his first born child in a pagan sacrifice.

My perfect game story involves me checking Twitter and praying to every god I could conjure that it wouldn’t happen.

But it did. And I missed it.

And that really fucking sucks right now.

The Nostalgia of Fun

“Fun is the one thing that money can’t buy, something inside, that was always denied, for so many years.” – The Beatles

When I look back at my period of fandom between the ages of 0 and 14, before I become the obsessive fan I am today, I feel like one of my favorite players was always Brian Turang. Turns out, he only played on the team for 2 seasons and a total of 78 games. But I loved that his at bat music was He’s So Fine by the Chiffons and that a 1994 issue of Mariner Magazine describes him as an “avid surfer.” Other than the surfer part, I’ve found many old Mariner fans fondly remember Brian and his at bat music.

He didn’t make a mark with his performance on the field (his career batting average is an even .222 and his Wikipedia page is a single sentence). But fans who remember him always react with surprise and delight when he’s brought up. Brian Turang is a fun player to remember.

Last night when Munenori Kawasaki came into the game, I was thinking about how much fun it will be to look back on his time in Seattle.

Only one word can possibly describe Kawasaki and that word is delightful. He flaps his hands, he does push ups when he’s on base, and the dude never stops talking, mostly to himself it would appear. He’s the most Japaniesiest person I can imagine (I have a Japanese friend so I can say that. Hi, Deena!) all wrapped up in one adorably delightful package. He is so delightful I don’t care what he does as a baseball player as long as I get to watch him play.

Kawasaki reminds me of the things that get lost in professional baseball, namely the chaotic joy and excitement of playing a game.

I like to think of the game as being real, gritty, nostalgic baseball, like I remember my brother’s Little League games. It’s played on uneven fields in stained and patched uniforms by players who live and die with every at bat. Every hitter is chased from the batter’s box by a cloud of dust, churned up by determined cleats and a steady stream of chants and cheers as background noise.

In Major League Baseball everything is so aesthetic-al from the obsessively curated playing surfaces to the perfectly honed player mechanics. There’s just smooth infield dirt, the perfect mix of soil and sand and water. Expertly manicured outfield grass for easily catching perfectly read fly balls. Surgically exact chalk lines enclose the batter’s box around the precise swings of professional players. Even bad swings and throws put arrogant Major League skill on display.

Of course, that isn’t a bad thing at all. We want to see polish and refined skill. It’s just that sometimes the exactness of professional baseball takes away the joy.

Munenori Kawasaki is to Phoebe running through Central Park on Friends, as Albert Pujols is to Usain Bolt. Not as good, but ridiculously more fun.

We won’t forget the polish or love it any less, but it’s the fun that we’ll remember in 20 years with surprise and delight.

Rue-ing In The Deep

“You had my heart inside your hand and you played it, you played it to the beat.” – Adele

Oh, Mariners.

I love you. I want to love you unconditionally. So many people in Seattle want to love you unconditionally.

Why do you make it so difficult to love you at all?

The baseball stuff alone makes it hard enough. Losing season after depressing, losing season. Payroll slashing. Staggering leadership ineptitude.

You add to all that by speaking out against a new sports arena in SoDo. A sports arena that would bring back an NBA team, the loss of which, much of Seattle is still grieving as acutely as always. Whether your concerns about the location are valid or not, you look scared of the competition for fandom dollars.

Then, last night we have the Great Home Opener Debacle of 2012. Credit and debit card machines stop working, ATM lines were long, then the cash machines stopped working. None of this, you felt the need to communicate to the fans. I haven’t heard of one person who had a great time last night.

Blame last night on Friday the 13th, blame your position on the arena on concern for the fans, blame the atrocious product on the field on the various general managers, field managers, coaches, players, etc.

Blame whoever you want. Maybe you’re working on a book titled “How to Lose Fans and Alienate a City.”

Get your shit together, Mariners. I know you’re banking on a small section of your fan base to never abandon you. We know we’re being used, and for now we’re hanging in there.

But there’s going to be a breaking point for us too.

In the meantime, I’m getting ready to go to the game tonight. I’m excitedly putting on my jersey and packing up my scorecard.

There’s nothing I can do. I only want to be with you.