Nine Innings

1.

So as not to bother A. when she’s in her office and I’m in the gym, I synch the stream of a game on the muted television with its radio counterpart on a pair of headphones. This permits me to largely avoid commercials, as I can simply remove the headphones for two minutes and only have to deal with the muted visuals. A suboptimal fix, because by now I can recite them in their relentless vapidity by heart. They corkscrew into my brains like syphilis, nudging me nearer what I have recently learned is a psychological state referred to by those in the know as disregulation. (Perhaps not entirely not to be confused with the Clintonian de-.) I am not unembarrassed by this.

It isn’t only the season of renewed hope. There’s embarrassed rage, too—at the relentless monetization, the cancerous river of surge capitalism flooding the zone, the Limbonic mimeograph of a chyron scroll given over entirely to gambling odds, commercial breaks installed between pitches, corporate logos woven into the sleeve of a player’s jersey: initial buboes of a plague that cannot but ultimately result in Nascaresque grotesquerie.

2.

Time was, in the pristine early days of the world wide web, you could locate regional stations to tune into games. Then the owners figured it out and got to consolidating. Now, for $33 a month during the season, you can stream games live on their platform—and nowhere else except piratically. At first commercial breaks were just blank, which was nice then and is now, in hindsight, unimaginably luxurious. The owners figured that out and started selling the time.

Part of the charm of listening to a game was that at least they were local commercials from different parts of the country. Here’s looking at you, Usinger’s Sausage of Milwaukee, Laborer’s Local 758 of Long Island, “Blue Bell, the best ice cream in the country...” Then the owners figured that out, and last year (was it last year?) they sold the radio airtime themselves. To Coke, and Scott’s Turf Builder, and Coke, and Scott’s Turf Builder, and Coke, and Scott’s Turf Builder. Sometimes to Scott’s Turf Builder—for instance (or Coke)—for many segments in a row. The same commercial on repeat, over and over. Like being waterboarded by a bad Scottish accent. (I apologize for that.) These blocks of airtime fit inexactly over the more organic local breaks they’re superimposed on, so don’t be surprised if the game cuts away from the action a little early or comes back a tad late. What’s a pitch or two, in the grand scheme of things? Once, last year (was it last year?), they ran commercials through an entire half inning. Imagine how pissed I was, sweeping my front porch, headphones on.

3.

On the muted tv, tastefully hirsute men squinting in direct sun don hard hats in slow motion. Tough Guy Voice narrates: Life doesn’t come with an instruction manual… A three ton Dodge Ram quivers compellingly on its shocks as a forklifted load of dusty bricks pours into the bed.

Even muted, the basic, saccharine guitar notes accompanying the Chick-fil-A ad pluck in my mind. Tiny, cheerful aneurysms. You have to admire the brand’s holism: the song, the stories of the commercials (actual Chick-fil-A customers and uniformed employees, glossy with flesh, sharing a sofa in a celestially empty white room, relating dear, small-town anecdotes, major-scale melody plucking throughout) are variations on the theme of mesmerizing inanity thriftily encapsulated in the spelling of Chick-fil-A. It’s embarrassing, embarrassing, to hate so much.

4.

Oh, the game? You could argue—people do—there’s never been a better time. We’re awash in a bumper crop of extraordinary young talents. To be alive and a baseball fan in the era of Shohei Ohtani, Juan Soto, Elly de la Cruz, Aaron Judge, Paul Skenes, Ronald Acuna Jr.! Skillsets so varied, multiple, emergent and exciting it’s somehow possible to forget for days at a time that the only truly world-historical player of his generation is still tilling an outfield somewhere in Anaheim between shoulder injury rehabs. Between gambling, Chick-fil-A and QT adverts they flog their phenoms in brief hagiographies: slo-mo montages of mundane baseball badassery set to superhero-dramatic scores rife with end times-reminiscent pealing of bells and sputtered superlatives of feverish pundits.

The pitch clock’s a hit, at long last. The challenge system employing instant replay has obviated the sport’s colorful tendency for human error and public misbehavior. Grown-ass men no longer stomp on their own hats and kick dirt onto umpires’ shins. We’re all buttoned up now. Collegial. Pros.

5.

Except for the players, who generally no longer abide by the Gentlemanly / Repressed White Boy (take your pick) dictums of old. Rather, paeans are composed in the electronic purlieus of baseball journalism to the range and artfulness of celebratory bat flips. (I’m embarrassed to have written that sentence, this sentence, and the next.) Time was if you struck a fellow out you did so calmly; if you knocked a ball over the fence you placed your bat on the ground and hurried ‘round the bases to emote only if at all in the secluded shade of the dugout, not to show anyone up. Everyone was Spock.

Then noted Yankees man-child and relief pitcher Joba Chamberlain happened, and hot-blooded young Dominicans dripping with sprezzatura flooded the black ink lists of lead leaders. Let the kids play was the sports’ official motto for a minute—a pointed rejoinder to its humorless cops and wardens led by the pro tem of the Gentlemanly / Repressed White Boy caucus, World Series MVP (and son of western North Carolina) Madison Bumgarner. (Whose name I did not in fact just make up.) As a person aging with keen embarrassment into grumpiness I studied my own reactions to this controversy, and study them still. Sports have a way of causing one to identify embarrassingly with one’s own tribe. This seems to be in their very DNA. Or perhaps that is self-exculpatory nonsense. It’s embarrassing either way. But: grateful for the example of stoicism set me by the Bumgarners of my own youth, I saw in Let the kids play an irresolvable paradox. Those kids are the actual kids’ role models!

6.

Let the kids play because Let the millionaires play was a little too close to home? A little too on the nose, as the kids say?

If not bat flips, most of the better journalism concerns money. Minimum wage in Major League Baseball this year will be $760,000. Probably the strongest union in the world belongs to major leaguers, a rich irony for a collective that skews meathead-apolitical-good ol’ boy. When ideology peeks out from the box score it is invariably fringe right or pentacostal. Of the big three major American leagues, baseball’s is the least socialist, most conservative, most stratified by inequality. Mets rightfielder Juan Soto will make a hair under $62 million this year in straight paychecks. A kid in rookie ball will pull in nearly $20k—itself a sizable raise over previous levels thanks to the minor leaguers’ recently having unionized themselves, an event Baseball Twitter covered with enthusiasm. Players are skewered for letting the owners get one over on them with insufficiently gawdy contracts. Consider the lamentations when Acuna Jr. accepted a deal for only $100,000,000 over 8 years. Every spring I am embarrassed anew to invest my finite time and funds in this commercial bog of wealthy rednecks. Fitting that they play every game on a diamond.

7.

It’s embarrassing to routinely despair at the casual slaughter perpetrated against the English language and grammar by the latest crop of commentators. Matriculated players, mostly, filling out the jockocracy quota in the anachronistically titled “color” ranks alongside Selfie Generation play-by-play guys who spend a fifth of every game self-referentially violating the fourth wall. Embarrassing to feel swashing back and forth in one the waves of grumpiness to do I suppose with journalistic standards or whatever.

Photo by Thomas Park on Unsplash

Each interview another opportunity to hear the word “unbelievable” seven or eight times, the refrain “words can’t describe”. Interviews of players by sideline reporters could be miniature plays put on by fifth-graders. “What was going through your mind when…” “Yeah no it was unbelievable…words can’t describe…” “What does this feel like right now?” “Yeah no I’m just so happy…words can’t describe…it feels unbelievable…”

8.

Overnight two years ago (was it just two years ago?) they all but destroyed long extra-inning games by adopting a Little League rule whereby the batting team starts the 10th with a runner on second. No one liked long extra-inning games anyway—except some fans. A game that refuses a timely conclusion wrecks pitching staffs and plays hell with travel schedules. They become epic stories, sure, among the most memorable to be found among the welter of standard-shaped contests that litter the summer. A game that becomes an accidental double header and threatens to creep into the twenties of innings is a dreamlike aberration. Odd filibusters of play that warp a lineup bizarrely and tax a manager’s creativity and reward the diehards who remain in the stands.

Off the top of my head I can summon memories of three specific long extra-inning games. No: four. Five. Caminiti finishing off the Marlins in 1999 with a no-doubter to left. A Mets game, same year. Always the Astros and Mets. Obviously ‘86, Game 6, NLCS. A game about which books have been written. A game I remember cellularly, as hand-me-downed lore. The Bruntlett RBI and the Chris Burke shot to finally beat the Braves happened the same postseason, I think: that strangely traumatic and finally magicless run in ‘05—that ended in extra innings (six). Though actually maybe the Bruntlett game-winner happened during the regular season. Seven: the 1-0 win in 18-innings (a postseason record) over Seattle in the decisive Game 3 of the ALDS in ‘22. 6 hours and 22 minutes to get to one-nill. Of the twelve longest postseason games in history, fully a third involved my Astros.

9.

As I write this, the Cubs and Dodgers are playing the first game of the year tonight in Japan. The home plate umpire got the first pitch wrong, calling a strike what was clearly a ball. Luckily for him the new balls-and-strikes challenge system they’ve been polishing in the minors and introduced this year in Spring Training isn’t in effect yet. It would be embarrassing, having to overturn the first call of the year. Just as it is embarrassing to be such an ardent defender of baseball’s most prominent pariah team, to be so critical all the time, to derive so much joy from fantasy baseball, rosters of which I had to ensure last night were ready to go for today, a nervous dad fretting over his kids’ first day at school.

The automatic balls-and-strikes system will be here next year in all likelihood as the sport continues whacking itself clean of any remaining fat of personality. I’m not opposed to the system, but I am leery of being philosophically aligned with Vegas.

10.

I’m on the treadmilll, 7:12 a.m., a latter-day Mr Sandman above the room where A. sleeps, in the glow of a muted tv, sweaty headphones cradling my colossal head. Life is funny: love enabling hate. Maybe you’re embarrassed by what you treasure. Maybe it’s hard to deguilt pleasure. But here comes the season of lazy Sundays and lawnmowers, opened windows and cold beers, triples and big flies, bad hops and letting it eat. We will end up on the couch, me petting her feet, Gary Keith & Ron chatting amiably in our living room. After every third out I’ll press the mute button and return to my book.

The game! The game!