Chris Arvidson - The Love of Baseball: Essays by Lifelong Fans

ALSO OF INTEREST AND EDITED BY
Chris Arvidson, Scot Pope and Julie E. Townsend

Reflections on the New River: New Essays, Poems and Personal Stories (2015)

Mountain Memoirs: An Ashe County Anthology (2012)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-3032-8

2017 Chris Arvidson and Diana Nelson Jones. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover: Safeco Field in Seattle, Washington, photograph by Mark B. Bauschke (Shutterstock)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

How can you not be romantic about baseball?
Billy Beane

We met over a piece of baseball writing. Diana, a longtime reporter and columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, wrote about Chris favorite Pirate that season, catcher Jason Kendall. He was not a big guy for a catcher, but he was scrappy and gritty and fun as hell to watch.

Because she was new to the city, Chris didnt have any Pirates buddies to commiserate with, so having that column appear in the newspaper felt like a real gift. Plus it didnt hurt that Diana was clearly baseball people and her love for the game and her team shone through the writing. Chris searched out Dianas email at the paper and sent her a fan letter about the column. The rest is baseball freak history.

Over the years, the two of us have gone to Pirates games together at Three Rivers Stadium and PNC Park. We havent lived in the same town in more than a decade, but weve stayed in touch, mostly electronically. Our lives have gone in a hundred different directions, but were still yakking on Facebook about our teams. As writers and super-fans, it was only natural for us to get together on a book about baseballabout why people, like us, love it so much.

In these pages weve put together the writing of friends, colleagues, friends-of-friends, classmates, and all manner of people weve run across over the years who share our baseball love. The book, in a way, is an extension of that conversation we baseball fans have all had. You know the one. A new acquaintance or maybe even someone youve known for a long time, says something about a game, a team, a player, and you realize youve found a kindred spirit. Another baseball freak. A wearer of MLB gear. A flyer of team flags. Someone who loves baseball like you do.

Weve organized the writings like a baseball season. We begin with stories about the hope and eternal optimism of Spring Training, follow it with the guts and the grind of the baseball season proper, and then wind up with writing about the anticipation, heartbreak, and the glory of post-season play.

We all have stories about how weve come to love baseball, and why we continue to love it so. In these pages were sharing some of these tales and we hope you enjoy them as much as we have in bringing them together.

The phrase hope springs eternal works wonderfully for the beginning of the baseball season. Spring training is the hope of a new yeareverything is possible for our teams. Injuries have healed. The bad taste of last years end-of-season slump is long gone. No more sour grapes. All is new spring wine.

Spring is also reminiscent of the beginnings of our love of baseball in general, and calls to mind the first days warm enough for us kids to step outside and clear off the snow, toss a ball between friends and dig the bats out of the garage. Its setting up our teams for the coming summer and maybe watching the local college players take their turns at bat. Its remembering being a kid and standing at home plate in our imaginations, taking that mighty game-winning swing

DIANA NELSON JONES

Blue blue skies, wafty clouds like a jets trail. And those palm trees. They line the outfield wall.

How can a high fly ball that hangs above a band of swaying palms not look more like a baseball than a high fly framed by red seats on a brisk, cloudy night in the Rust Belt? Are we fans really romantics, or does good sense draw the line here? How can this green grass and breezy sweetness of an 80-degree afternoon in March be the remarkable perception point?

Isnt everyone a romantic under these conditions?

***

Back when there were 44 days before pitchers and catchers would report to spring training, the year had just begun and the skies were brutish, maybe blowing snow in the fans northern city. The fan, who could be any fan in any northern city, begins considering booking a flight to Florida. She checks the Spring Training schedule to book several days of home games into a 5-day trip.

The night before one such trip, four inches of snow-rain-sleet-slush have begun encrusting the earth and another eight are predicted through the night. An hour before midnight, like a caged-dog with rabies, the fan finishes packing and flees her warm home to trawl through a misty sleet, the carry-on full of shorts, T-shirts, sun block and paperbacks beside her on the seat.

It seems crazy for her to be doing this, but it would be crazier to miss that 8 a.m. flight to Florida.

The little car is a skiff cutting through the crackly, slidy detritus of a God-forsaken ocean. It seems the world is flat and that, not being able to see the drop-off, she is surely on the edge of it.

Holding her breath and going 30 mph all the way, she exhales when the ghostly parking lot lights of the airport blur the air up ahead.

The airport at this hour has the hum of a giant refrigerator, a thick layer of white noise over silence, with a janitor pushing a sweeper and zombie people in warm-up suits sitting at the Roy Rogers. Looking to find a place to sack out, the fan spots a flight attendant pulling a wheeled suitcase across the concourse.

Have you tried the mezzanine? the flight attendant asks. A bunch of people up there look pretty comfortable.

Up the escalator and around a corner, bodies lie everywhere: a man on his coat with his knees sticking up, his hands over the wide part of his tie; another man on an overturned couch. A woman on her back on an overturned couch, her ankles crossed and her arms clutching her purse to her chest. Someone is breathing as though he had a referees whistle clamped in his teeth. Several people take the form of question marks under heavy coats.

The fan sets off person-alert sensors as she looks for an empty space. Eyes open then close again. She drags a couch and props it against a stretch of wall, scrunching the carry-on into a pillow and begins breathing for the first time in what seems like hours. Then the wake up call: the smell of coffee, the sound of Muzak, things being flipped on and humming. The next leg of the journey to baseball.

***

The motel is not on the beach this time, but the beach can wait. Late morning light floods the room, where the fan becomes a human hurricane, trading jeans and sweater for shorts and a T-shirt. Boots off, flip-flops on. Into the radiant sunshine, into the rental car, up Manatee Avenue, hanging a left onto Ninth Street West, she catches the sob before it floods her body, blinks back tears.