I don't remember how long I have been infatuated with baseball. It's an infatuation that has grown and ebbed over time, other occupations, other loves, but it has existed for as long as I can remember.
When I was a very small child, my grandfather gave me a baseball bat. No matter that my grandfather was of the generation that fought in World War II, and might have been expected not to give such gifts to someone such as myself, his daughter's daughter. But that baseball bat was one of my prized possessions, though rarely used for baseball; instead it was key to half of the Rube Goldberg devices I would construct in the attic of my childhood home or the basement of the house where I spent my adolescence. It was battered and scarred by my ill-use of it, and had a blue band just above the handle, where the 'fat part of the bat', as the news announcers would have it named, swells out. I remember there was writing on it, but I don't recall what the brand was; it might have been a Louisville Slugger. I remember its pale wood, though, and the patterns of its grain.
I sobbed for a week when my father and my brother managed to misplace that bat at one of my brother's community-league baseball games. It was the most important thing my grandfather ever gave to me, one of the few gifts I knew was truly from him, and it was my bat.
My brother has always been far more athletic than I am. His rounds of the various community leagues of sports were things that the family would occasionally go to - meaning always my father, occasionally myself, and my mother almost never. His teams were always Charlie Brown teams, heartbreakingly putting in their effort and never quite managing to pull through to a win. The baseball league had a pitching machine instead of a live pitcher, in case the juvenile arms couldn't manage the accuracy required to take the mound.
I had always held a quiet dread of gym classes; I'm an intellectual, in many of the perjorative senses of the word, and kinesthetics has never been my strength. But, unlike most of the non-athlete girls in my class, I'd always put in the effort. I was a middling halfback in soccer, and actually fairly good as a halfback in indoor soccer, since I could calculate angles and trajectories on my instinctual grasp of the physics involved, and had a certain devil-may-care attitude towards blocking on occasion, despite my tendency towards easy injury. I loved to play the versions of softball that came up in gym classes, though, if only because I could hit.
One of my fondest memories - and there are few of those - from my junior high school was the time that the pitcher in one of those games, knowing my overall incompetence with sports, moved to stand barely ten feet from me and threw me a mockingly fat pitch. I sailed the ball sweetly over the head of the shortstop, completely boggling the left fielder, who was clearly not expecting to have to work that inning. Base hit. I don't remember any of the people involved clearly, though I could probably make an accurate guess as to who threw that pitch, but it's a little moment of sweet victory that I cherish as one of my few sporting accomplishments.
My father is also not an athlete, but he, my brother, and I would occasionally occupy the tiny backyard of our house, or the weirdly shaped front corner, to practice throws and catches, since my brother could often use the help for his fielding in the community games, and because it was one of those things termed 'bonding experiences'. Sometimes the neighborhood would break out in father-son baseball games, and I was the switch player, playing for either the kids' team or the parents' team depending on which was short players, and usually winding up playing right field in any case, since I don't have the reaction times to be a good infielder.
During the season, sometimes my father, my brother and I would go up to Frederick, whose major attractions were twofold: a gigantic used book and used CD store called Wonder, and the Frederick Keys, which is the A Minors team for the Baltimore Orioles. I have many fond memories of Keys Stadium, which was a tiny little place with benches around the bases and dirt in the foul zones along the outfield, most often occupied by people on beach towels and several dozen adolescents waiting for the chance to scramble for the foul balls. After the games, the Keys would come up from the dugout near first base and get swarmed by kids with pens and cards and programs. I probably have the autographs of a handful of Orioles players now, come to think of it, somewhere on my old Keys programs.
Part of the fun of the games was, of course, watching the games and scoring them in the programs - I still remember how to formally score a game's progress, and do so every time I actually get to the ballpark. And there were some wonderful games with the Keys - the game which, after the game, the team won not only 4-2 in runs, but also in errors (but which would have been a 1-1 game in errors had there just been no second basemen present at all). The game where both teams ran out of pitchers entirely and one had the first baseman pitching. The first time I saw someone successfully steal first. The weirdly executed rundown that went on so long I ran out of space to notate it.
The Frederick Keys aside, however, what I am most truly is a die-hard Boston Red Sox fan. This started out as a simplistic sort of decision: I was born in the Boston Lying-In, now Brigham and Womens, which is in the same region of Boston as Fenway Park. I am from Boston. Therefore, I should root for the Sox. Over time, though, the stance and loyalty adopted on such a principle changed into something else - a sense of the history involved, the shape of the game. I am of one of the most masochistic of sports fans - I believe in the Boston Red Sox, no matter how many times trying falls fingernails short of achieving.
I've seen games in Camden Yards, and I've seen games in Fenway. Despite the fact that I wind up seated behind a pillar in Fenway, I would still rather be there than Camden Yards; it feels more real. Instead of one of the factory-issued gigantic stadiums where the people in the affordable seats need binoculars to track the progress of the game, Fenway feels intimate and alive. The Green Monster is one of those unique, wonderful, personality-ful things. Fenway, old and battered though it may be, is a real place, a homelike place, unlike the modern monstrosities.
Like a myriad of other baseball fans, I got discouraged by the labor disputes that cancelled the World Series and a half-dozen other things. It sullied the purity of the beautiful game that I loved to play, love to watch. I don't much care for watching other sports - I'll play soccer or basketball in a sort of half-hearted manner on occasion, even though I'm not very good at them, but baseball I'll watch. I didn't do much more than keep track of the standings by peeking at a newspaper every other week or so until the postseason of this year (1999).
Not being someone who's paid much attention to names, faces, statistic crunching or the like, I didn't know who any of the players were on either side of any of the postseason games I watched. At least, I didn't when I started; I now have a competent understanding of the Boston Red Sox (of course), as well as the New York Yankees and the Atlanta Braves.
What really caught my heart and brought me back into the game, though, was not the fact of my beloved Sox being in the postseason, though that was enough to get me watching again. There's a certain never-say-die attitude to the Red Sox, despite the eighty years of superstition riding like a black beast on the team's back. I saw each of the players making those plays that were, truly, in the spirit of that tradition, despite being supposedly down and out and half written off.
Not all of those efforts worked out - if they had, it would quite possibly have been a very different World Series. It wasn't just the home runs, the men piling onto the bases. It was Trot Nixon's throw from deep right that had him floating off the ground and landing hard on the turf from the effort of it. It was seeing John Valentin diving into the bags and after ground balls despite the fact that I know he has bad knees (and I know how bad knees can be, having bad knees myself). It was seeing Butch Huskey round third and limping home when his knees surely entitled him to a rest to wait for another batter - but the Sox needed a run, and he was going to get across the plate. It was Nomar Garciaparra somehow managing catches that should have been physically impossible without rocket propulsion, and that would have sailed well into left field otherwise, to score runs. It was Jose Offerman's look of disbelief at the second bad call that had him out incorrectly at second. It was the wide-eyed look of wonder on Trot Nixon's face when he put out his glove and there was a fly ball in it. It was the look of anguish on Nomar's face when he was called out at first on another bad call, despite the team being almost unrecoverably behind at the time - he and all of Boston really wanted that base, and we all groaned with him. (Except those who threw things at the umpires.)
And beyond that, still. It was Pedro Martinez dancing around in the dugout and using the empty Gatorade canister as a signalling drum in the early innings and when the Sox have a lead, clearly enjoying himself immensely, and watching intently in the late innings as if his fixed stare could shift the tides of the game. It was singing along with the crowd in Fenway the merry little tune, "Where is Roger?" and remembering wistfully watching him pitch in Fenway for the Sox back when I was in school. And above all else, it really came down to watching Nomar - because it's quite obvious that what he really wants to do is go and play ball, and he does such a beautiful job of it that what I really want to do is sit and watch him play, which I could do for hours. It was remembering what a joy there is to the game, the moments of victory and the moments of defeat, but above all the moments of pure, glorious elegance, that has brought me back to a true romance with the game I have always loved.