John Miller, head coach of the Brussels Kangaroos and a reporter for a major American newspaper, is chronicling his team’s 2008 season in a column that will appear every Monday on mister-baseball.com. It is the first of several Mister-Baseball Blogs this year.
These days, I head straight home after work. No baseball team to coach. No laps to run. You can’t play baseball in the dark yellow, color of Brussels afternoons and evenings between October and March. So for my baseball habit, I follow America’s championships, catching the playoffs and World Series during lost sleep, delayed TV and sneak office peeks.
The preferred method is to rouse myself in night’s middle, trying, usually in vain, not to wake my wife, and roll downstairs to the couch for some hours with the laptop on, well, my lap. To spend the time richly, I indulge in adolescent nonsense. (Beer, peanut-butter sandwiches, Playstation.)
Occasionally, guests (dad, brother) drop in. During break, I flip on clips from recent games and nuggets of the election campaign collected in the memory of this digital hound.
The next day is painful, but worth the moment. I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years, since the days of catching AFN radio broadcasts from my bunk bed. That was tough, picking out words through static like clutching at strawberries caught in thick thorns.
If I miss the game, the battle is one of willful ignorance. I don’t want the score. I read the paper papers, and not the electronic editions shouting out how the contest went. I avoid conversation with sports fans colleagues, like my boss, who blurted out “How ‘bout them Rays?” before I became aware of the Fish’s Game 2 triumph.
When it comes time to load up the event, I’ve trained my eyes to avoid those parts of the screen that contaminate the eyes with information, instead of leading the mlb.com customer to a simple replay, or to the magically inventive condensed version.
The postseason has been, well, OK. The Manny Dodgers were great while they lasted. The impetuous Rays taking down the daddy Sox were fun. The steady Phils have been good copy.
But at age 31, what has changed this year for me is a new appreciation, a new consciousness of critical appraisal.
The mind plays cruel trick on the young, whispering that the Major Leagues are accessible to all, and at the same time that those we watch are chosen demigods. The hint is that we might be demigods, too. Both those fantasies are lies. The Show is not for us, but that is because its players are better at baseball, not because they’re special in any other way.
Now I listen to baby monster Evan Longoria chats in his Fox intro about his preference for Guitar Hero, and I’m stuck by his kid-ness. He is like us. Except his body can do what most of us can’t. And I see this, and the age and coach in me appreciates talent and effort in a normal person.
A life in baseball has also connected me in various degrees of separation to professional baseball players and people. My friend Jaime from Mount Saint Mary’s is a personal hitting tutor of Rays utility whiz Ben Zobrist. I watch Zobrist loading up his hands in the World Series, and I see Jaime back in college, whacking mini plastic golf balls in the library.
And so, more than ever, I notice the arms of Rollins and Rafael Furcal; they throw harder than other major leaguers. Upton’s hitting hands are superior, faster. Varitek swings a slider-speed bat. Moyer throws very, very slow, but he is also a cocky, charged stud who hits corners with precise, deliberate anger. (Did you see him field Crawford’s bunt in Game 3?)
This new awareness makes the game more fun, more subtle, entertaining to watch, no matter what the score or teams. This is a game learned with patience.
One more column to go. Write to oldworldpastime@gmail.com