The Thwack! of the Bat. The Boom Boom of Gary Glitter. It’s Baseball!

by Jim Washburn

I went to two baseball games recently, my nephew’s Little League All-Star game, and an Angels’ home game. Those little scamps really hustled, but I have to say the Angels are a stronger team, entirely more confident at bat and taller in the field. Had they played each other, I can tell you which team would have bicycled home hurt and humiliated.

Children: They show so much promise until you pit them against an adult.

At least the kids were fun to watch. They were playing on one of those chill, cloud-packed days we had before the heat set in. The announcer had a four-watt boom box playing feel-good rock between innings, but the wind whipped it to shreds. The sky looked grim, as ballgame weather goes.

The day did not favor my nephew’s team. The opposing All-Stars looked like they’d been fed a diet of swordfish and Floyd Landis’ pancreatic juices, leaving them a head taller and several Nelsons blonder than our swart little fellows.

Our comic little sports held them at bay for a while, then the injuries piled up. First one kid hurt his ankle and had to be carted off in a wheelchair. My nephew then pitched several innings, and did admirably until he clearly started wearing. He’d hurt his back the week previous and hadn’t rested it. When he was next at bat, on his final swing, he wrenched his back it so badly that he, too, left the game in a wheelchair.

The next pitcher put his heart in it, but the other team got so many walks off him that they were soon parading across home plate, game over.

Sitting on a wooden bench a few yards from the baseline, and not many more yards from a snack shop where they were barbecuing tri-tip out the side door, it was a pleasantly engaging game, though alien to any experience I’d ever had with baseball or softball as a kid.

When we lived in La Puente and I was eight, some business friend of my stepdad has us over for dinner. With the open-heartedness that truly drunk people have, gave me his autographed, framed photograph of Stan Musial. Stan looked like a nice guy, in his crisp Cardinals uniform, but he could have been U Thant for all I knew. The gift didn’t mean a thing to me. The guy probably woke up the next day wondering where his Stan Musial photo was.

     
Musial, Thant: separated at birth?

My stepdad insisted I play Little League, which he probably hoped would be the antidote to those girlish Beatle boots I wanted, over his dead body. I might as well have been wearing Beatle boots on the field, I had so little aptitude for hitting, fielding or running. I lasted a few weeks, then blessedly got the mumps or something. It had been a belittling league for me, with the coach intent on haranguing me until I toughened up or went away.

In grade school PE, they’d made me catcher, I think, so they wouldn’t have to carry me so far when I caught a ball with my forehead. Most of my coordination came from reading comic books, and it was not applicable on the field.

This story is typical of my career in sports: When I was nine, I got a beautiful new catcher’s mitt. I’d oiled it, and worked it in, and you would want a couch made with leather that supple and fine. Just before one of the first games I was going to use it in, I dropped it into a school toilet that already had a turd in it. I hadn’t meant to, but that’s what I did. The day did not get better from there.

My streak of dreadfulness continued through high school. I’d spend half the year in marching band, then we’d land back in PE, where the coaches would be ultra-assholes to make up for lost time. Marching band soccer had been the only sport I enjoyed. The mayhem was genial enough and no one much kept score.

Back in PE, we’d be put in teams to play, among other sports, slow-pitch softball. That’s where a member of your own team pitches to you. The idea is he only has three pitches, and it’s in his interest to make them ones you can hit. When I’d get to bat, the dismay was so general that our pitcher could barely be bothered rolling grounders my way.

One afternoon, I was the last out up. On his third pitch to me, our pitcher was so resigned that he didn’t even throw the ball over the plate, but tossed it behind me instead. I swung 180 degrees in reverse and actually connected with the thing, getting a double off it, since the other team was already walking in off the field. That was my memorable high school sports moment, aside from a game the following year in flag football when the quarterback threw a pass to me. I caught it and threw it right back. I didn’t want the damn thing.

Failure did not go unremarked back then. Everyone told me what a piece of shit I was: coaches, teammates, 7th Day Adventists. Sometimes I think that if it wasn’t for those grating childhood failures, I would never have been prodded to become the success that I am today.

I’m half-kidding, since even the squirrels in my yard have amassed more wealth than me. On the other hand, I’m somewhat of a success in my own head, where thanks to those early taunts, I really do not give too much of a hang what other people think about me now. Sure, I try to pay attention to how others perceive me, and strive to learn and grow from that. But on occasions when I’ve been, for example, asked to write more like someone else, I walk. There’s already someone else who can write like someone else, and as Casey Stengel said, “I’m the one that’s got to die when it’s time for me to die, so let me live my life, the way I want to.”

Which brings me back to the Little League game. There was a “Spectator Code of Conduct” hanging on the chain link fence separating us from the teams. Among the admonitions was “Positive Comments Only,” and that’s what I was hearing. There was none of that “Pitcher’s got a rubber arm!” taunting; no confusing the kid at bat with “Hey, batter, batter, swing!”; no shouting, “Hey, your mother screws rodeo clowns!” at the first baseman.

It was a very civil game, with none of the parental misbehavior we sometimes read about. They were perhaps too supportive. It often sounded like a team’s parents were cheering the other team’s hits and runs. That wasn’t the case, I eventually realized. They were cheering their own kids’ failed efforts, along with gently calling out encouragements, such as, “Good try, Aaron, shake it off! Don’t let it stick to you. Concentrate!”

All good, positive stuff, and why not err on the side of kindness? But it made for a weird sort of conflict-free conflict. I mean, you didn’t hear Henry V crying, “Shake it off, men! Keep your focus!” at the breach.

Now at the Angels game, there was nothing but boos when the opposition, the Colorado Rockies, got a hit. That hardly seems sporting. They weren’t spiking the second baseman. They weren’t punching umpires or spitting tobacco juice at the batboy. They were just hitting the baseball, like they’re supposed to. No need to boo a man for doing his job.

     
Gary Glitter; Nancy Bea Hefley, Dodger Stadium organist, sitting in for whoever the Angels’ organist is or was

At least the booing was fairly tepid, as were all the crowd responses. This was the third and possibly last game I’ve been to in the modern, post-organist era of baseball. The stadiums still probably have the organists locked in a cage somewhere, where the Gary Glitter music is pumped in extra loud, while young facility managers taunt them, “You hear that? We’d rather listen to a child molester than hear your cheesy old organ anymore.”

I miss the organ. It was one of the things that made a baseball game unique. Instead, there’s a continual assault of “boom, boom, thwack!” drumbeats and oldies rock; and Jumbotron screens exhorting everyone to make some noise; and digital message boards scrolling along the stadium perimeter; and a goddamned volcano of fireworks that erupts if an Angel hits a home run, because who’d ever get excited by just a boring old home run?

From where we were sitting, I could see no fewer than 55 companies and products being advertised: cars, insurance, tools, junk food. (A milk shake there was $7.75.) The baseball stadium has become an environment where the fans are being told what to feel every instant, and are immersed in constant sensation. Even though my wife had been given lovely $65-a-ticket seats by a friend, the game seemed more remote than when I watch one on TV, maybe because the fans were so benumbed by the constant “boom, boom thwack!” that nothing short of a dirigible catching fire would get them excited. I say fooey.

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