Andrew Forbes - The Utility of Boredom: Baseball Essays

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Text copyright Andrew Forbes, 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Forbes, Andrew, 1976-, author

The utility of boredom : baseball essays / Andrew Forbes.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-926743-69-1 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-926743-70-7 (epub).

1. Baseball. I. Title. II. Title: Baseball essays.

GV867.F67 2016 796.357 2016-900941-6

C2016-900942-4

Edited by Andrew Faulkner

Cover & Interior designed by Megan Fildes

Invisible Publishing | Halifax & Toronto

www.invisiblepublishing.com

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.

If only every day were opening day.

Mary Schmich

Annie Savoy: Have you heard of Walt Whitman?

Ebby Calvin Nuke LaLoosh: No. Whos he play for?

Sportswriters, as stakeholders in the game, occupy an interesting perch. They like to keep reminding their audience that baseball is a business, yet their job is about the love of sport, and the good ones cant help sniffing the same glue as the fans.

Diana Goetsch

sanctuary

Theres an old synagogue in South Bend, Indiana where they now sell baseball caps and T-shirts and foam fingers. The South Bend Cubs of the Single-A Midwest League play just across the street at Four Winds Field. The synagogue closed for worship several years ago and it proved too tempting an edifice for Andrew T. Berlin, the teams owner, to resist; he bought it and had it converted, removing the bimah and the Ark of the Covenant, installing shelving and a cash counter, and now it opens to service a different sort of adherent.

This seems entirely appropriate to me, though I understand how it might offend the Orthodox. The ballpark-as-temple notion treads the line of blasphemy, but does so acrobatically, since in the cases of both baseball and religion were talking about community endeavours with long historic roots, endeavours that call on us to uncover our better selves.

Ill go further and suggest that houses of worship and houses of baseball serve similar if not identical functions, namely the promise of a safe place of assembly from which to organize our efforts to reach something higher. They offer sensations like few other things in this life do, a sense of the uncanny, heaping doses of wonder, and the tingle on the skin that occurs when we find ourselves in the presence of something that makes possible the miraculous.

There is a feeling I get just before a summer rain interrupts a warm day, a sense- and emotion-memory so strong its like teleportation: I am just days shy of my 13th birthday and, in the manner of all people that age, on the cusp of so much I cannot anticipate and yet for which I remain both eager and reticent. I am with my parents outside Doubleday Field, the tiny brick ballpark just a block from the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, where my parents have taken me for my birthday. Everything hums. The warm August day has turned dark and the sky threatens. The pavement smells warm, and seems to know it will soon be wet and black with rain. Soon well venture up the little grandstand and watch a half-inning of a little league game being played there. In 18 years Ill stand on this very spot holding my first child and point out Ferguson Jenkins as he signs autographs. That first afternoon, the one when Im almost 13, the rain is coming but it has not arrived yet, and my mother and father have given this to me. This place, this experience. Baseball is being played, and I have just seen the Hall of Fame for the first time, and Doubleday Field is built of brick and it offers welcome, its roofed grandstand saying, Even if the sky breaks, I will keep you dry . In the confluence of all these things I locate a feeling like safety such as I have not felt since infancy.

Twenty-six years later Im still there in many ways. Worshipful, reverent, and certain that my lifetime of watching and studying this game has not revealed to me all its secrets; that several more lifetimes would leave still more mysteries. And Im grateful that, though I have permitted so much wonder to be drummed from me, allowed my capacity for sincere surprise to ebb away, I have maintained those feelings where baseball is concerned. It has not lost any of its ability to awe me; when I watch Im still that kid.

The ballpark is where my otherwise firm secular humanism begins to grow soft, to give out at its edges, to take on a porousness into which seeps something very like belief. Its the place where my weariness and cynicism abate, replaced by an openness and desire for grace. Ive followed that feeling to all manner of places. Like a pole star it has determined my direction. Ive forgone Paris in favour of Chicago, Seattle, and Allentown, Pennsylvania. Ive passed over London for Milwaukee, Phoenix, and Burlington, Vermont. Ive tithed it my meagre funds. Ive felt wonder at seeing a champion crownedascending to the games heaven, as it wereand then known the despair of the season ending, followed by the reliable joy of the day pitchers and catchers first report to Spring Training, and finally registered the elation of Opening Day, with its unsubtle suggestion of rebirth.

It shows us what a human being might be capable of, with extreme dedicationfor if we cant beatify Jackie Robinson or Roberto Clemente then who among us is worthy? We also learn daily just how complicated our lesser saints are, how conflicted and human. Such doubt, of course, confirms faith. Josh Hamilton erred and then righted himself, achieving years of sobriety before a second slip, which he himself reported. Angels owner Arte Moreno cast him out but the Rangers accepted him back into the fold. After that dark hour, Arlingtons Globe Life Park probably felt like a sanctuary for Hamilton. He hit a double on the first pitch he saw and two homers the next night. If thats not grace.

Across 9 innings, through 162 games, season after season and decade after decade, baseball asks for devotion, attention, dedication, and it rewards with clemency. It hints that faith and patience and penance will eventually yield pennants, though some paths to the promised land are more arduous than others. In this devising, Chicago Cubs fans represent the most hardcore of ascetics. Here is where that old synagogue in South Bend doubly proves its provenance, for those Midwest League Cubs are but several rungs down the same ladder as the long-suffering North Siders, and the world the Cubbies inhabit is most certainly an Old Testament one.