What are we going to do until spring?
I have already heard enough about football for this year. The threshold is not high. I have never cared for football. When I was a child, my parents tried to interest me in books from the library on the rules of the game hoping that I would be “interested in something,” though they would have had similar luck if they had checked out a copy of, say, the Belgian tax code (which sounds, in fact, considerably more compelling than football).
Each year at Thanksgiving, a group of families in my parents’ neighborhood gets together to play football, a ritual in which I participate with the same sense of disorientation and concern typically found only in Japanese game show contestants. Years of experience suggest that avoiding contact with the ball spares me the embarrassment of the public eye, but little else is clear.
Early in my life, I committed to willful ignorance and learned helplessness in the face of the game. While these are objectionable traits under most circumstances, I stand by them in this particular context. If I go to my deathbed uncertain of what a “down” is, I shall die a happy man indeed.
Like my high school, New York does not have a football team. Perhaps this explains part of my attraction to the city. If I had permitted myself to develop into a wretched coastal snob, I might point out that football is a particularly “bridge and tunnel” fascination — literally, in this case, since the nearest facilities for the game are across the Hudson in East Rutherford, New Jersey. New York, one must remember, is a city of finite space whose people are concerned greatly with land use. Just as our apartments have no space for large or useless objects, our city has no space for a football arena. We use the space that we save for a far more worthy cause: two baseball stadiums.
That I should regard baseball as a worthy use of the city’s precious real estate will doubtless be shocking to many readers who have known my position on sports over the years. I include a refresher course on my football thoughts as reassurance to them that, in other sporting matters, I remain as bitter and hateful as ever before. Baseball, though, is different.
In a city with two baseball teams, a man must inevitably address the question of his allegiance to the Yankees or the Mets. It is a question for which I have no satisfactory answer in the traditional sense. If I were to align myself with a baseball team, it would probably be with the Detroit Tigers. In New York, mine is a loyalty of convenience, determined by schedules, ticket prices, and subway service changes. (For example, the $85 minimum ticket price means that this parenthetical remark will be my only acknowledgment of this week’s Yankees playoff participation.)
Should I be proud of a Yankees loyalty that all but dissolves if the 4 train is running local? No. Nor am I proud of a commitment to the Mets dependent on the time of the game and its correlation to peak direction express service on the 7. You can’t have a spine everywhere.
I am loyal to the idea of baseball. I have what would at best be considered a cursory understanding of the game, despite the best efforts of my grandfather — a former minor league player and high school coach — to hand down his knowledge of the particulars of the sport and its strategy. I am the baseball equivalent of the congregant who makes a church appearance on Christmas Eve and Easter Morning (and I dress the same way at a baseball game that such a person might dress for church).
In a baseball city, Opening Day has, in its way, the same inescapable appeal of Christmas, even for the non-practicing among us. The sun (if it is out) seems brighter, and there is some sort of primal instinct to put on the radio and work on a car engine with the distinct sound of AM radio baseball in the background. In New York, where most people do not own a car, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority runs a special historic train non-stop from Grand Central to Yankee Stadium, complete with vintage advertisements and wicker seats. The super-express subway service compels me to become a Yankees fan.
I experienced this for the first time while I was visiting New York in high school, and I returned last spring on my lunch break to take part in the spectacle and watch men in Yankees outfits drink beer at 11:30 in the morning on a century-old subway car. There is a great sense of occasion, culminating in the train’s emergence from the tunnel around 157th Street as it pulls up next to the stadium, replete with passengers cheering and whooping, and onlookers waving up at the train. It is a fantastic celebration of the end of winter, freedom from football, and the beginning of something indefinably euphoric.
On a work trip to Minnesota last summer, I went to a Twins game with my colleagues. The Twins lost but we, the spectators, were the real winners. It was a perfect summer evening — the solstice, in fact — and I discovered both the Official Grilled Cheese of the Minnesota Twins and something called the State Fair Family Value Stand, which served hot dogs for one dollar — a foretaste of what was to come at the end of the summer.
In this way, baseball is an aesthetic experience as much as an athletic one. There is blue sky, green grass, an organ, and no particular need to do anything except eat dollar hot dogs with an interesting diversion in the background. What could be more pleasurable? What could be more fulfilling of the ambitions of humankind? (People talk about going to Mars or whatever, but that seems like hard work, and they do not have State Fair Family Value Stand there.)
Then there is the fact that baseball is just so American. “American” is a loaded term, but I mean this not in the sense of an America of suburban sprawl, defense spending, single-use plastics, and Rikers Island as a top psychiatric care institution. I mean this in the sense of an America of jazz, National Public Radio, Amtrak dining cars, high school marching bands playing Sousa, and free ice water at restaurants.
Baseball is, in a country that is often divided and difficult, one of the best things we have going for us and a window into who we are at our best: loyal to our communities, committed to fairness and to a single reality, invested in data, and all of this with easy access to junk food at the same time.
E. B. White (a Newsletter favorite) once wrote for the New Yorker that “Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad.” It was at the end of the ninth inning at a Yankees game last month that I — resigned to a Yankees loss — was looking up the exact E. B. White passage at the moment that the Yankees hit a grand slam to come from behind and win the game.
The madness that transpires in the moments following a win by the Yankees is incredible. Of course, there is yelling. Everyone leaps to their feet. In some control room, someone either clicks a mouse or slams their fist down on a panic button that flashes the lights and kicks on a deafening playlist of Frank Sinatra. Strangers embrace and chant and leap up and down — all of which I would consider Unacceptable Behavior in any other context, but which seem to make perfect sense in the cheap seats at a baseball game.
Then there is more chanting and the revelers pile onto the subway (among perhaps a half dozen terrified and miserable commuters) where, for a group of people who have each spent their evening idly eating hot dogs and popcorn, there is an astonishing sense of shared accomplishment and personal triumph.
I have spent two summers in New York and, during both of them, have only made it to a baseball game in late September. Each time, I have spent the train ride home lamenting that I did not go sooner and more frequently. What could be a more perfect summer activity? What could be more American in the best way?
The play Take Me Out (which returns to Broadway next week — see Distractions below) ends in the fall in an empty stadium. The last words of the play, cried out seemingly in agony: “What are we going to do until spring?”
I don’t know the answer, but let me assure you that it is not going to involve football.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
Take Me Out returns to Broadway next Thursday.
There’s a lot going on in Take Me Out, which I had the good fortune to see with a friend when it was on last spring. I am not a theater critic and will not attempt to give it a full review here. Instead, I offer this unedited soliloquy on the subject of baseball and democracy, which is lifted from the middle of the play:
“I have come to understand that baseball is a perfect metaphor for hope in a democratic society. It has to do with the rules of play. It has to do with the mode of enforcement of these rules. It has to do with certain nuances and grace notes of the game.
First, it has to do with the remarkable symmetry of everything. All those threes and multiples of three calling attention to … the game’s noble equality.
Equality, that is, of opportunity. Everyone is given exactly the same chance. And the opportunity to exercise that chance at its own pace. There’s none of that scurry, none of that relentlessness that marks other games…
What I mean is, in baseball there is no clock. What could be more generous than to give everyone all of these opportunities and the time to seize them in, as well? And with each turn at the plate, there’s the possibility of turning the situation to your favor. Down to the very last try.
And then, to ensure that everything remains fair, justices are ranged around the park to witness and assess the play. And if the justice errs, an appeal can be made. It’s invariably turned down, but that’s part of what makes the metaphor so right. Because even in the most well-meant of systems, error is inevitable. Even within the fairest of paradigms, unfairness will creep in.
And baseball is better than democracy – at least than democracy as it is practiced in this country – because unlike democracy, baseball acknowledges loss. While conservatives tell you, “Leave things alone and no one will lose,” and liberals tell you, “Interfere a lot and no one will lose,” baseball says, “Someone will lose.” Not only says it – insists upon it!
So baseball achieves the tragic vision that democracy evades. Evades and embodies.
Democracy’s lovely, but baseball’s more mature.”
“NYC Proposal Offers Cash for Spotting Parking Violations in Bike Lanes” By Fola Akinnibi and Skylar Woodhouse in CityLab.
There has been much hand-wringing of late about what is predicted by most to be a terrible fiscal crisis for the City of New York, which the Mayor tells us must be solved with broad cuts to municipal departments in the coming years. The financial models in play, however, fail to account for City Council introduction 0501-2022, which would allow citizens to report — and collect a bounty on tickets issued for — certain parking violations.
My promise to the leaders of the Nation’s Metropolis is this: If you make this a law, I will personally solve both the fiscal crisis and the problem of bike lane parking violations forever. Just as the bounties that I earn will pay for a fine penthouse apartment on Upper Park Avenue with three doormen and an elevator that opens right into the living room, the revenue from my tickets alone will run the City for decades. The bike lanes with be paved with gold. Each public school student will have their own private teacher who makes six figures. City Hall will be renamed after me. Of course, every bike lane parker with Jersey plates will be completely bankrupt, but what concern is that to us?