Ken Fortenberry
October 27th, 2005, 06:15 PM
Today is a day without baseball, the first day of this
off-season. It's become a ritual for me to revisit with
A. Bartlett Giamatti annually on this day.
The Green Fields of the Mind
by A. Bartlett Giamatti
It breaks your heart. It was designed to break your heart. The game
begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms
in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as
the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.
You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the
memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days
are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a
Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick
streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.
Somehow, the summer seemed to slip by faster this time. Maybe it wasn't
this summer, but all the summers that, in this, my fortieth summer,
slipped by so fast. There comes a time when every summer will have
something of the autumn about it. Whatever the reason, it seemed to me
that I was investing more and more time in baseball, making the game do
more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting
on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times
three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and
to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the
daylight. I wrote a few things this last summer, this summer that did
not last, nothing grand but some things, and yet that work was just
camouflage. The real activity was done with the radio-not the
all-seeing, all-falsifying television-and was the playing of the game in
the only place it will last, the enclosed green field of the mind.
There, in that warm, bright place, what the old poet called Mutability
does not so quickly come.
But out here, on Sunday, October 2, where it rains all day, Dame
Mutability never loses. She was in the crowd at Fenway yesterday, a gray
day full of bluster and contradiction, when the Red Sox came up in the
last half of the ninth trailing Baltimore 8-5, while the Yankees, rain
delayed against Detroit, only needing to win one or have Boston lose one
to win it all, sat in New York washing down cold cuts with beer and
watching the Boston game. Boston had won two, the Yankees had lost two,
and suddenly it seemed as if the whole season might go to the last day,
or beyond, except here was Boston losing 8-5, while New York sat in its
family room and put its feet up. Lynn, both ankles hurting now as they
had in July, hits a single down the right field line. The crowd stirs.
It is on its feet. Hobson, third baseman, former Bear Bryant
quarterback, strong, quiet, over 100 RBIs, goes for three breaking balls
and is out. The goddess smiles and encourages her agent, a canny
journeyman named Nelson Briles.
Now comes a pinch hitter, Bernie Carbo, onetime Rookie of the Year,
erratic, quick, a shade too handsome, so laidback he is always, in his
soul, stretched out in the tall grass, on arm under his head, watching
the clouds and laughing; now he looks over some low stuff unworthy of
him and then, uncoiling, sends one out, straight on a rising line, over
the centerfield wall, no cheap Fenway shot, but all of it, the physics
as elegant as the arc the ball describes.
New England is on its feet, roaring. The summer will not pass. Roaring,
they recall the evening, late and cold, in 1975, the sixth game of the
World Series, perhaps the greatest baseball game played in the last
fifty years, when Carbo, loose and easy, had uncoiled to tie the game
that Fisk would win. It is 8-7, one out, and school will never start,
rain will never come, sun will warm the back of your neck forever. Now
Bailey, picked up from the National League recently, big arms, heavy
gut, experienced, new to the league and the club; he fouls off two and
then, checking, tentative, a big man off balance, he pops a soft liner
to the first baseman. It is suddenly darker and later, and the announcer
doing the game coast to coast, a New Yorker who works for a New York
television station, sounds relieved. His little world, well-lit,
hot-combed, split-second-timed, had no capacity to absorb this much
gritty, grainy, contrary reality. Cox swings a bat, stretches his long
arms, bends his back, the rookie from Pawtucket who broke in two weeks
earlier with a record six straight hits, the kid drafted ahead of Fred
Lynn, rangy, smooth, cool. The count runs two and two, Briles is cagey,
nothing too good, and Cox swings, the ball beginning toward the mound
and then, in a jaunty, wayward dance, skipping past Briles, fainting to
the right, skimming the last of the grass, finding the dirt, moving now
like some small, purposeful marine creature negotiating the green deep,
easily avoiding the jagged rock of second base, traveling steady and
straight now out into the dark, silent recesses of center field.
The aisles are jammed, the place is on its feet, the wrappers, the
programs, the Coke cups and peanut shells, the doctrines of an
afternoon; the anxieties, the things that have to be done tomorrow, the
regrets about yesterday, the accumulation of a summer: all forgotten,
while hope, the anchor, bites and takes hold where a moment before it
seemed we would be swept out with the tide. Rice is up. Rice whom Aaron
had said was the only one he'd ever seen with the ability to break his
records. Rice the best clutch hitter on the club, with the best slugging
percentage in the league. Rice, so quick and strong he once checked his
swing halfway through and snapped the bat in two. Rice the Hammer of God
sent to scourge the Yankees, the sound was overwhelming, fathers pounded
their sons on the back, cars pulled off the road, households froze, New
England exulted in its blessedness, and roared its thanks for all good
things, for Rice and for a summer stretching halfway through October.
Briles threw, Rice swung, and it was over. One pitch, a fly to center,
and it stopped. Summer died in New England and like rain sliding off a
roof, the crowd slipped out of Fenway, quickly, with only a steady
murmur of concern for the drive ahead remaining of the roar. Mutability
had turned the seasons and translated hope to memory once again. And,
once again, she had used baseball, our best invention to stay change, to
bring change on. That is why it breaks my heart, that game-not because
in New York they could win because Boston lost; in that, there is a
rough justice, and a reminder to the Yankees of how slight and fragile
are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another.
It breaks my heart because it was meant to foster in me again the
illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse
that could come together to make a reality that would resist the
corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again the most
hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely
what it promised.
Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They
grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom
to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones
who can live without illusion. I am not that grown up or up-to-date. I
am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I
need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that
state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green
field, in the sun.
off-season. It's become a ritual for me to revisit with
A. Bartlett Giamatti annually on this day.
The Green Fields of the Mind
by A. Bartlett Giamatti
It breaks your heart. It was designed to break your heart. The game
begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms
in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as
the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.
You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the
memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days
are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a
Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick
streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.
Somehow, the summer seemed to slip by faster this time. Maybe it wasn't
this summer, but all the summers that, in this, my fortieth summer,
slipped by so fast. There comes a time when every summer will have
something of the autumn about it. Whatever the reason, it seemed to me
that I was investing more and more time in baseball, making the game do
more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting
on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times
three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and
to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the
daylight. I wrote a few things this last summer, this summer that did
not last, nothing grand but some things, and yet that work was just
camouflage. The real activity was done with the radio-not the
all-seeing, all-falsifying television-and was the playing of the game in
the only place it will last, the enclosed green field of the mind.
There, in that warm, bright place, what the old poet called Mutability
does not so quickly come.
But out here, on Sunday, October 2, where it rains all day, Dame
Mutability never loses. She was in the crowd at Fenway yesterday, a gray
day full of bluster and contradiction, when the Red Sox came up in the
last half of the ninth trailing Baltimore 8-5, while the Yankees, rain
delayed against Detroit, only needing to win one or have Boston lose one
to win it all, sat in New York washing down cold cuts with beer and
watching the Boston game. Boston had won two, the Yankees had lost two,
and suddenly it seemed as if the whole season might go to the last day,
or beyond, except here was Boston losing 8-5, while New York sat in its
family room and put its feet up. Lynn, both ankles hurting now as they
had in July, hits a single down the right field line. The crowd stirs.
It is on its feet. Hobson, third baseman, former Bear Bryant
quarterback, strong, quiet, over 100 RBIs, goes for three breaking balls
and is out. The goddess smiles and encourages her agent, a canny
journeyman named Nelson Briles.
Now comes a pinch hitter, Bernie Carbo, onetime Rookie of the Year,
erratic, quick, a shade too handsome, so laidback he is always, in his
soul, stretched out in the tall grass, on arm under his head, watching
the clouds and laughing; now he looks over some low stuff unworthy of
him and then, uncoiling, sends one out, straight on a rising line, over
the centerfield wall, no cheap Fenway shot, but all of it, the physics
as elegant as the arc the ball describes.
New England is on its feet, roaring. The summer will not pass. Roaring,
they recall the evening, late and cold, in 1975, the sixth game of the
World Series, perhaps the greatest baseball game played in the last
fifty years, when Carbo, loose and easy, had uncoiled to tie the game
that Fisk would win. It is 8-7, one out, and school will never start,
rain will never come, sun will warm the back of your neck forever. Now
Bailey, picked up from the National League recently, big arms, heavy
gut, experienced, new to the league and the club; he fouls off two and
then, checking, tentative, a big man off balance, he pops a soft liner
to the first baseman. It is suddenly darker and later, and the announcer
doing the game coast to coast, a New Yorker who works for a New York
television station, sounds relieved. His little world, well-lit,
hot-combed, split-second-timed, had no capacity to absorb this much
gritty, grainy, contrary reality. Cox swings a bat, stretches his long
arms, bends his back, the rookie from Pawtucket who broke in two weeks
earlier with a record six straight hits, the kid drafted ahead of Fred
Lynn, rangy, smooth, cool. The count runs two and two, Briles is cagey,
nothing too good, and Cox swings, the ball beginning toward the mound
and then, in a jaunty, wayward dance, skipping past Briles, fainting to
the right, skimming the last of the grass, finding the dirt, moving now
like some small, purposeful marine creature negotiating the green deep,
easily avoiding the jagged rock of second base, traveling steady and
straight now out into the dark, silent recesses of center field.
The aisles are jammed, the place is on its feet, the wrappers, the
programs, the Coke cups and peanut shells, the doctrines of an
afternoon; the anxieties, the things that have to be done tomorrow, the
regrets about yesterday, the accumulation of a summer: all forgotten,
while hope, the anchor, bites and takes hold where a moment before it
seemed we would be swept out with the tide. Rice is up. Rice whom Aaron
had said was the only one he'd ever seen with the ability to break his
records. Rice the best clutch hitter on the club, with the best slugging
percentage in the league. Rice, so quick and strong he once checked his
swing halfway through and snapped the bat in two. Rice the Hammer of God
sent to scourge the Yankees, the sound was overwhelming, fathers pounded
their sons on the back, cars pulled off the road, households froze, New
England exulted in its blessedness, and roared its thanks for all good
things, for Rice and for a summer stretching halfway through October.
Briles threw, Rice swung, and it was over. One pitch, a fly to center,
and it stopped. Summer died in New England and like rain sliding off a
roof, the crowd slipped out of Fenway, quickly, with only a steady
murmur of concern for the drive ahead remaining of the roar. Mutability
had turned the seasons and translated hope to memory once again. And,
once again, she had used baseball, our best invention to stay change, to
bring change on. That is why it breaks my heart, that game-not because
in New York they could win because Boston lost; in that, there is a
rough justice, and a reminder to the Yankees of how slight and fragile
are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another.
It breaks my heart because it was meant to foster in me again the
illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse
that could come together to make a reality that would resist the
corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again the most
hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely
what it promised.
Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They
grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom
to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones
who can live without illusion. I am not that grown up or up-to-date. I
am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I
need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that
state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green
field, in the sun.