Baseball, You Saved My Life

Only a small handful of years ago I was 25-ish, and heartbroken enough to retreat to the edges of the capital city. I did so with a book called The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach, clasped under my wing.

The air seemed clearer and cleaner in Chilanga then. The commute to and fro work, an independent production house, was hellish but worth it. I jogged, I thought, within spitting proximity of Munda Wanga Zoo: over a bridge, past a bustling marketplace, and beneath a cluster of trees anyone who’s ever driven out to Kafue will recognize.

I lived in a room, pretty much — one I once submerged in water, thus drowning all my paperback Franzens, before leaving to reclaim my life in the city. I heard birds in the mornings, and at night I fell asleep to the gentle hum of the cement factory right across the street. 

Harbach’s name was in heavy circulation shortly after publishing this novel. He’d garnered additional notoriety after The New Yorker published a treatise on literary merit, who gets to get published and who doesn’t, called ‘MFA Vs NYC’. I gobbled all of it up — Harbach’s own N+1 literary journal, its accompanying podcast, his conversations with everybody else’s journals - and I bought the book. 

I discovered The Art of Fielding by accident, way before my crash course in all things Harbach. A revelatory high school shortstop named Henry Skrimshander is scouted by Mike Schwartz, the captain of a losing college team. They are both unassuming men of singular purpose. Schwartz wants to correct history, and give his fading career one last shot at going pro - perhaps as some sort of relief personnel. Skrimshander navigates a baseball field, collecting runs and throwing them back to base, with angelic grace. The narration suggests the novel gets its title from a work of non-fiction by Aparicio Rodriguez, who instructs all that follow after him in the intricacies of the shortstop position. I’ve reminded myself for several years to Google whether or not this is a real book, Rodriguez a real man - but have yet to do so.

Skrimshander is, of course, duly recruited by Westish College. I’m not here to discuss the mental health struggle he faces after he tosses a wayward ball into a particularly significant spectator’s skull, nor all the dark places the novel consequently goes. I simply remember the book cementing my (then) casual adoration for the game of baseball, and its classical sensibility, its odd diagrams, and the ease with which authors like Harbach can use it to frame spiritual comparisons to the latent poetry of, say, Moby Dick. 

ESPN was a matter of religious faith for me in my twenties. I watched the NBA’s Eastern Conference galvanise LeBron James into the demigod he is today. I became a New England Patriots fan, I do apologize sincerely, after mourning a Super Bowl loss to Eli Manning’s less-than-perfect New York Giants - and then beholding the carnage and destruction of arguably the greatest receiving tight-end tandem in NFL history. I never quite knew what to do with baseball. Starting pitchers brandished and burnished reputations not at all dissimilar to those of revered gunslingers in cowboy movies. Hitters doffed their hats at cheering crowds, after knocking home-runs over the wall. They got pie in their face if they secured walk-off wins. It was all just … gorgeous to me. 

I got up sometimes for Yankees games, and witnessed the twilight but nevertheless high-performing years of Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, and Mariano Rivera. I was never an A-Rod guy, but largely because hitting didn’t appeal to me until July of 2020. It was my birthday back then, or just about, when I woke up to SportsCenter highlights of Stephen Strasburg pitching absolute lasers on his Major League debut for the Washington Nationals. 

That lasted a couple years. I was gifted a slightly oversized Nationals jersey by (I suspect) an older, libertarian American couple I found myself friendly with for a few months. A moment in the sun for Boston-area cinema (Good Will Hunting, The Town, Gone Baby Gone, and The Departed) formed the impression that Massachusetts was home to the toughest sons of bitches in the world - one that was calcified by the never-say-die Patriots and the street-basketball of the 2008 Boston Celtics. I had to reconcile all of this with the existence of the Red Sox somehow.

It took several years, and a pandemic, and some delightful colour commentary by Desus & Mero, for me to realize those particular butterflies never actually came.

*

I spent much of the summer — Zambia’s winter — lying on my side in the dark with my phone streaming things off YouTube. I’m not a humanitarian, but I’m still very much of the opinion that competitive sports should not be ‘back’ in any capacity — if not in the bubble format the NBA successfully engineered for two months of pure sci-fi dystopia. 

Such intensive isolation, though, seems like a lot to ask of all my favourite athletes. It flabbergasts me that there’s a virus surge all across Europe, but elite soccer teams still fly across the continent for (let’s be real) pedestrian Champions’ League fixtures against one another. There are ordinary citizens in the stands for college football in the US. Just this past week, a member of the Los Angeles Dodgers playing staff was allowed to celebrate a World Series victory, on the field, after testing positive for COVID-19. It’s been a weird time to be a sports fan; but also the perfect one, I guess, to refresh myself in the ins and outs of what was once America’s favorite pastime. To declare my love, once more, for the St. Louis Cardinals and their magnificent logo. 

Coco-Pop, an ardent supporter of Chelsea Football Club, and workmate, and friend, asked me one time what on earth there is to love so much about baseball. 

“It’s the only sport besides football,” I said, “whose very nature attempts to snatch and compile all your favourite moments of that athletic performance - and no one has to get their head smashed in. Imagine soccer if soccer was exclusively a quest for half-volleys, rabonas, and bicycle-kicks.”

In order to convince Coco-Pop of anything besides abstract soccer concepts, one must construct logic capable of penetrating his awesome beard. So I don’t know if I even made a dent that day, but the man listened and he nodded — like a comrade who must admit failure in his efforts to sway another from the allure of a crooked woman. 

This past MLB season was Commissioner Manfred insisting he saw no need to mimic the bubble of the NBA, for the sake of player safety. It was the Yankees and all their hitting — Aaron ‘the’ Judge, DJ LaMahieu, Giancarlo Stanton, Luke Voit, my God, what hitting the Yankees have — and it was Fernando Tatis Jr., at times, singlehandedly lighting up the skies. I watched so much baseball, in the dark, adrift of myself, that I let Trevor Bauer, starting pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds, show me what it really looked like to travel from state-to-state of a virus-felled America. 

You saved my life again, baseball, and I love you for it.