Joltin' Joe has left and gone away ...

I was never much good at baseball, and I was sorry about that. I was sorry because of all the team sports, most of which I find boring and pointless, the idea behind baseball wasn’t lost on me. I knew what was going on, and what had to be accomplished. On the other hand, I still haven’t a clue what a ‘down’ is in football, and have no desire to find out.

As for my paucity of skills on the diamond, it was like this. I could hit the ball well enough, and could even get a good hand-eye thing happening so that a bat (wood only, if you please) sometimes would make that satisfying ‘’crack’ of contact with projectile. Sometimes, less often, that projectile would be sent out somewhere in the field. More often than not it was foul, but I was still satisfied that I had hit the damn thing.

Part of my problem is that baseball is a dual skill sport. It calls for multitasking of a challenging sort. A body is up to bat, or a body is out doing field chores. The two don’t really relate. Slugger Babe Ruth, for example, was no screaming hell out in the field, so they always stuck him in the place where he could do the least damage, so that they could await the glories of the ‘Bambino’s’ time at the plate. I fancied myself a sort of Babe Ruth. I self-deluded a lot.

For me, being out in the field was a nightmarish part of the game. I was less than less than useless. A single prayer resonated through my brain when I took my place ‘out there,’ it was: “Please don’t hit the ball anywhere remotely near where I am standing.” I was like Lucy in the Peanuts strip, and to escape the pain of my incompetence out there – an incompetence that would regularly be called attention to by the wrath and scorn of my team-mates – I would try to immerse myself in other concerns in order to render it a sort of existential journey to the outfield. I would hunker down and permit myself to become engrossed in a laborious caterpillar trek in my little corner of the field, as fly balls whizzed past my ears. Juvenile obscenities would fill the air, but little did my team-mates know that it was better that I concerned myself with the task of the caterpillar than to make any vain attempt to catch that fly ball.

My problem with baseball was, I simply could not catch. I could be in possession of the most exotic flelding glove money could buy, and I still would have, at best, fumbled grievously. My fingers, alas, were indeed pure butter.

As I stated, I regretted the fact I wasn’t better at baseball, because it’s such a fine game, and one that is, to me, infinitely superior to so many others.

Football is predominantly a lot of long stretches of tedium, interspersed with a multitude of camera views of male posteriors – not the sort of thing dreams are made of; not my dreams at least. And then, for a couple of seconds there is a violent interaction between a bunch of guys and nobody really has any idea of what they are actually doing. At least, that’s how I see it.

Canada’s so-called ‘national’ sport, hockey, is too reminiscent of a Baghdad street scene for me to find it enjoyable. Anyway, I always had a difficult time seeing where the puck was, and I’ve never really trusted people with missing front teeth, regardless of the cause. Hockey is hardly Canadian any more in any case, since the vast majority of the teams are American, even if they are populated by Canadian (and Russian, and Czech, and Swedish) players. When Miami and Las Vegas have hockey teams, it kind of kills the connection with the ‘Great White North.’

I do like basketball as a spectator sport, especially if the basketball involves borderline incompetents, like a high school team, rather than pros. But, I was never any good at it.

Soccer is increasingly popular. Soccer is essentially ice-hockey on a field, in my esteem, and the players and spectators are of the same visceral and primal groups that give spawn to hockey. I was crummy at soccer, too.

So, back to baseball.

When I was a kid, a notable highlight of the year was the World Series. Some have been given to wondering why it is called the ‘World’ series, since it only involves two American leagues battling for the crown. Those knee-jerk and insecure Canadians, who look to blaming American arrogance for all ills in the world, see the name of the series as being typical Yank braggadocio. Actually, in terms of a point of trivia, the newspaper the New York World started the series concept, and it simply stuck long after the World ceased to exist.

For many of us in school in the 1950s, the Series provided a good excuse to retaliate against the authoritarian and humourless regimes that ran schools in those days. We would lug cumbersome, pre-transistor portable radios to school so that we could keep up on the action of the games. Of course, we weren’t permitted to tune in while class was in session, but we tried to, anyway. When we got caught, we would be warned, and then we would be punished if we tried it on again. The more severe teachers (which was most) would confiscate the radios. Some teachers (usually female) would outright ban radios from the classroom. Others would let us bring them in, but forbid us to turn them on.

Baseball in those days, especially World Series baseball, was the Dodgers. Not the Dodgers of today, but the Brooklyn Dodgers who played on their home turf of Ebbet’s Field. ‘Dem Bums.’ It’s never been the same since they left Brooklyn and moved to LA, of all places. Bums in La-La Land. It’s never really worked, in my mind.

The old Dodgers were everything that was good in baseball. They were polite, they were good to their moms, they brushed after every meal, they were patriotic, they were God-fearing, and to a man they all loved kids – especially boys – and even boys who weren’t very good at baseball. Maybe that was because the Dodgers sometimes weren’t very good at baseball, either. Even the heroes, like Duke Snider and Pee-Wee Reese sometimes had their off days. Often they had off-days, alas. They were the perennial underdogs, and we loved that about them.

The Yankees, on the either hand (their nifty pinstripe suits notwithstanding) personified for us all that was evil. They were the darkside, the antichrist. If the Dodgers were Macs, the Yankees were ubiquitous and vulgar Gatesian PCs. The Yankees, in our minds, were vulgar, crass and cruel, given to drinking heavily and beating their wives. And they hated kids. Especially kids who weren’t good at baseball. If the Dodgers were Gary Cooper, the Yankees were George Raft. Unfortunately for us Dodgers fans, the Yankees took the series far more often.

Some characteristics of baseball:

Baseball is a stately game. It is accused of being boring, but is only so accused by the lowly of mien that do not understand any game that doesn’t involve gratuitous violence and bloodshed. Baseball grew out of cricket, and cricket is even statelier. Cricket is so stately and complex that virtually nobody outside of the UK, Australia, and assorted steaming ex-colonial enclaves has an idea of what it is all about. Sometimes I think cricket is boring, but that’s because I don’t get it.

Many years ago, when I lived in England for a year, I made a concerted effort to understand cricket. I would wander down to the nearby green to watch them play of a morning. Each time I thought I had the ground-rules mastered, somebody would do something unexpected and throw my understanding askew. Ultimately I gave up. Any game in which single matches sometimes last for days is a bit gratuitously stately, in my esteem.

Something else I noticed about cricketers is that they seemed a bit on the gentlemanly side. They never adjust the paraphernalia below their waistlines, and they don’t spit.

Spitting seems to be a very important component of baseball. All ballplayers seem to spit a lot. There is a reason for this. It’s a vital aspect of a psychological ploy, much like the aforementioned ‘adjustments.’ It shows the player is self-confident. A player who can, with impunity, scratch parts of his body his mother told him he must never scratch in public, and who can likewise expectorate in a manner that would have gotten him sent to the woodshed, is afraid of nothing. The fact that he is unafraid is that he can carry out these seemingly antisocial activities before hundreds of fans in a public venue, shows a person who is prepared to throw caution to the winds – to throw Mom’s wrath to the winds – for the sake of winning the game. Of course, the fact that the guys on the other team do exactly the same thing tends to neutralize the psychological advantage.

I think if contemporary baseball can be faulted for anything it is that the players have become too good. If everybody participating in a ball game does what he is supposed to do, then nothing much happens. A game of perfect pitches, for example, can be just a little too stately for the fans.

What we need, maybe, is to have games that involve mediocre teams playing really terrible teams. Then the action would be almost constant. Errors and crises would abound, and anger would flare with regularity. A well-tempered ballet would become a Three Stooges film.

Then there would be hope for guys who play baseball like I once did.