Well, not quite. Yes, America's pastime is at the center of today's bit of whimsy. But, at the root of it all is, of course, life.
I've often said and written that, if you understand baseball, you can appreciate life. Because, at so many times and in so many ways, the sport and our sheer existence intertwine. The simple fact that every baseball season represents a life of sorts. You start with nothing in the spring. On Opening Day, you haven't won a game nor have you lost one. Everyone is tied for both first place and last place.
Birth.
Then, over the course of a long life or, in this case, a 162-game baseball season, your success and failure is measured not by flashes but extended periods of bliss and/or sadness. You work hard every day. Hopefully, you are rewarded at the end. Most are not and they come back refreshed the following April to begin the sequence all over again.
Death and rebirth.
When you are the fan of a baseball team, you follow a parallel existence. You watch on TV. You go to the stadium. Some, who are nuts like me with season tickets, get so involved that it overruns your world for most of the summer. I've done this most of my life, since the day when my father took an eight-year-old boy to his first baseball game. At Yankee Stadium of all places and Mickey Mantle hit a home run. The adults I was with enjoyed the contest. As for me, I ate a megaphone filled with popcorn and didn't know any better.
I would not live as comfortably in life without a baseball game at hand. For me, it is as routine a procedure as inhaling and exhaling repeatedly. Having been through many years of baseball fandom, I know mostly of the down times. Watching other teams move into October with reasons to still be on the field. Except for some isolated, yet divinely euphoric moments, I watch my teams stay on the sidelines when the air gets a little crisper at the end of September.
Yes, I understand disappointment. I have been, for most of my life, a New York Met fan. That mere declaration often will solicit words of sympathy from others. Now, as my life moved bi-coastal, I added the Los Angeles Dodgers to my world almost in the role of a second wife. And, almost as if I am always resigned to be the fan of an also-ran, I find myself suffering the same indignities every baseball season. Close, but no cigar, regardless of whether I smoke or not. Both my choices of baseball teams are now suspect.
But, still, these are the moments of my summers. When nothing pleases me more than to sit in a ballpark with the look and feel of a Dodger Stadium, stuck mystically and gratefully in the retro 60s. Marking my scorecard. Guessing the manager's next move and wondering why he doesn't have a left-hander warming in the bullpen during the seventh inning. Sure, I want my guys to win. Yet, the outcome is not always as important as how you get there. And there is nothing better than the promise of a baseball game in progress.
The real glory of baseball fandom with a particular team is watching the future develop before your eyes, just like the way my grandmother's rhubarb plants would get taller and taller each summer. Here is the promise of a Matt Kemp. I remember seeing him hit his first major league home run on television back in 2006. There is the hope of a pitching phenom like Clayton Kershaw. I was at his first major league start in 2008 and I felt that connection was strong enough for me to buy a jersey with his name and number on it. I've worn it his starts ever since. And then there is the disappointment when players we see begin their careers with the same promise and hope, yet it never crystalizes for these guys. James Loney is one of them.
Yet, being a part of their baseball lives from "birth" is what makes such fandom so special for us. And I've realized that I've enjoyed more of that than most. I was at Darryl Strawberry's first major league game for the New York Mets in 1983. I remember Mookie Wilson's first stolen base. And Dwight Gooden's first start on an April 1984 night in the Houston Astrodome. Enjoying it all as if I'm watching a new puppy take its first steps across a slippery kitchen linoleum floor.
In my baseball life, my teams almost never seem to have enough players. Or the money to go out and get them. Most notably, in the past six years as a Dodger fan, the ownership was so particularly stingy that I was convinced my parents were controlling the purse strings. "We're not made of money," my mom and dad would always say. And it always seemed like the McCourt family was channeling the same words.
They're gone now. My parents and the McCourts. The latter replaced by ownership with pockets as deep as the ocean and a spending passion like pirates who just came onshore and found out that whores were now two dollars for the whole night. They spend for this one. They trade for that very expensive one. They assume other people's debt as if they were a hedge fund on Wall Street.
Suddenly, this Dodger fan suddenly discovers there has been a nine player trade with the Boston Red Sox. Coming west is some very pricey junk, but, at the centerpiece of it all is first baseman Adrian Gonzalez who has the potential of doing to this franchise what I watched Keith Hernandez do for the Mets in 1983. Meanwhile, the Dodgers now assume contracts amounting to over 260 million dollars, which now sounds like one of Barack Obama's stimulus grants to a solar energy company. So many greenbacks have been spent that one newspaper writer now calls the Dodgers "the Yankees of the West."
Wait a doggone minute. That's not me. I'm never a fan of a team that spends money. What the hell has happened in a parallel universe? Is the planet now off its axis?
I don't know how to process this all. I'm a season ticket holder of a team that wants to win now, not tomorrow. Do I have it in my fan skill sets to even be a part of this? I suddenly think of the annual disappointment with the aforementioned James Loney, now headed for Yawkey Way in Boston. It's as if my son just went off to college and I don't think he prepared enough in high school.
I see all these new and expensive toys coming in. Josh Beckett, who I hear was the most hated-by-the-fans Red Sox ever, which is quite the accomplishment for a fan base that once regularly watched Manny Ramirez. Carl Crawford, who I hear is a good guy but just had surgery and won't even play till next May. Somebody called Nick Punto, who sounds more like a football player to me.
I think about the fans who went to their first games in the major leagues. They lost the likes of Beckett, Crawford, and Punto years ago. Did they have the same sense of loss? All of a sudden, there is 50 percent of a Dodger team that I have no connection to. I must build an instant relationship. Ah, so this is what it's like to be a New York Yankee fan all these decades? Hey, we need a left fielder who can hit 40 homers. Bang, there he is.
I realize that I now miss the promise and hope of watching kids emerge into stars. Being together. Fan and player from the very first pitch. I view this trade. Commentators call it an earth-shattering one for the Dodger franchise. I call it just a little bittersweet. Suddenly, in the arena of baseball haves and have nots, I am now a member of the 1%.
I don't know if I like it.
As in life, money is no guarantee of success. Gee, the Boston Red Sox this year are total proof of that. And, even with all this new-found largesse, there is no assurance the Dodgers will be still playing baseball as the leaves are beginning to turn in Massachusetts.
But, still....
I have great seats in Dodger Stadium. I think every year of what it would be like to sit in them for the World Series.
Hmmm. I guess I do have to learn all about Beckett and Punto.
I am learning to taste the sugar as we speak. Knowing fully well that sour waits anxiously for me just around the corner.
Dinner last night: Chicken apple sausage, rice, and chopped spinach.
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