WriteOutLoud

Crispy Critters Hang Ten

What do you mean? It makes perfect sense!

On Saturday, my 12-year-old niece and I went to the Malibu Noseriding Championships, where many of the best surfers in the world (plus a number of local tow-headed children) competed to see who could spend the most time on the front 24" of their boards, specifically with as many toes as possible hanging off the tip. The very coolest posture to adopt: all ten toesies off the end, hips forward, shoulders wayyy back like you're leaning against a wall, arms dangling casually. On a board 8 or 9 feet long, the back six feet buried in a wave ten feet high, moving 40 or 50 mph (I'm guessing)--it's still impressive after all these years. Not that I'd given the subject more than a passing thought since 1964, of course.

Though I was fascinated by the drama unfolding before me, I somehow wound up sound asleep face down for two hours. So now I have BBBs (Badly Burned Buns) and my niece's stomach (she never blinked) is a deep new shade of red. I'm pretty sure it was worth it, though.

THE BIG GRINGO GOES FISHING: (Not Entirely) A Baseball Story

So there's this guy I know who loves two pastimes above all others: baseball, and deepsea fishing. He's a big guy (6'2", 220#). He always has a lot on his mind, lots of responsibilities, stress--one of those Big Men who are the go-to guys for the rest of us when things get hairy. He does more than his share, all day every day, and rarely complains, but he's crusty, can be brusque or distant when he's busy or uncomfortable. And his politics are pretty awful, overall.

Anyway, he gets invited on a dream trip--fishing in Mexico, wayyyy down somewhere nobody ever heard of, in Baja. All excited, he packs up his gear and sprints for the plane. On the way, though, he makes a stop at a sporting goods store and picks up a couple dozen softballs. Dumps them in his bag, and away he goes. He doesn't even know where, exactly--it's a surprise--just somewhere deep in Baja.

The fishing is excellent, the water calm deep blue, the sun hot, the humidity high, and most of the people in the little village are poor as dirt--Third-World poor, precisely the kind of poor that keeps me out of Mexico, it upsets me so much. They're lined up at the dock when the boat comes in, pleading to be allowed to clean fish or do whatever, to make a few bucks.

My friend tells the fishing guide about the softballs and asks how to distribute them. "Don't just hand them out," the guide advises, "because they'll probably just sell them." He thinks a minute. "Give them to the priest."

So on Sunday morning, here goes our crusty guy, headed up the street to the church with this sack of softballs. But although the church is open, it's empty; he missed the service, or there isn't one, or something. He checks all around, looking for the padre, calls out a couple of yoo-hoos, but nada. Nobody en casa.

OK, so now what? He's standing in this church with a sack of softballs and nobody to hand them over to--what to do with them? He looks around. And around. And then he stashes them under the altar, where only the priest will see them. The crusty guy with the pretty awful politics goes off whistling--and catches the biggest dorado of the season so far, 51 pounds.

Don't you just know there's at least one little kid in that village who hasn't just been hoping, but has actually been praying for a baseball? Just one besbol--can it be wrong to ask God for so little? Kid's a little worried about it, but can't help wanting that ball so badly.

That little kid--I hope, more than one little kid, but one will do--will think God answered his or her prayers.

I'm pretty close to thinking the kid's right.

The Narrative That Is Baseball

As I have said elsewhere, the chief ingredient (for me) in story satisfaction--after deft writing, interesting characters, plausibility--is justice. To succeed, the story has to come out "right." Everybody in good fiction gets what they deserve--as opposed to Life, where we all just get what's coming to us whether we deserve it or not. We root for our favorite characters as we root for ourselves because we see something of ourselves in them.

So in baseball, it's easy: when your guys win, it's justice! The story develops as you go along, and you seldom know for sure how it's going to come out.* I fully realized this for the first time last night, watching the Red Sox alllllllmost not beat the Dodgers after slogging through a pitching duel until the 7th inning, when they finally scored a run. Ahhh! At only 1-0, in the 7th, they sat back. Was my Hubris Alarm the only one to go off? You can't tell, when you're watching a story unfold, what anybody else would think, in your place. You can only read on--in this case, afraid it's going to come out the way so many other Red Sox narratives have.

And sure enough, the Dodgers scored in the top of the 9th. Uh-oh. "NOW we have a ballgame!" crowed Vin Scully, as if we hadn't had one all along. Fortunately, LA then walked Boston's first batter, Johnny Damon, and his hair. Boston's deus ex machina--this time in the substantial form of David Ortiz--was in excellent working order and arrived just in time to drive in Damon. So last night's Fenway story had everything--excellent characters, protracted conflict leading to rising action and--this time, anway--the heroes' triumph over their tragic flaw, enabling a just and satisfying resolution.

(When it comes out the other way, and the tragic flaw reigns supreme, you have tragedy. Unless you're a Yankee, and eat your young; then, you just kill again.)

But does this sense of narrative justice also operate in other pro sports? Maybe in basketball; definitely not football. Soccer, yes, but not hockey. Common denominators? Lore aside (football and hockey have plenty), it's the uniforms. Basketball, baseball, and soccer are played by people we can see; hockey and football players are obscured by their equipment. They look like robots; they could be anybody under there. We know who's playing baseball; they have nowhere to hide; they have to own their characters in prime time--the difference between Masterpiece Theater and America's Most Wanted.

*Except for games like Saturday's 3-1/2 hour, 15-4 LA/Boston rout. Excruciating.

On Loving Baseball

Given that I grew up in the Bay Area in the early 60s, and we lived about 12 feet from Candlestick Park, where Willie Mays and the Alous were then in their prime, I should have been much younger than 35 when I had my first live MLB experience. But the biodad was no sportsfan.

And so it was that when Frank, a Berkeley gradualschool colleague, escorted me into the Oakland Coliseum one warm, bright spring day in the mid-80s, and I saw the field spread out before me, all emerald green, baselines gleaming white in the sun, my first words were, "WOW! Real grass!"

Pathetic, huh? I was expecting astroturf. I forget why.

Frank, a Red Sox fan from birth, was nice about my obvious retardation; having recently learned that he had nothing much to fear from people who didn't go to Harvard, he'd loosened up a lot and was able to explain--without being condescending hardly at all--that we were about to watch Tom Seaver face Roger Clemens, and why that was a big deal. We had excellent seats on the third-base line, practically on the field. If I were a "real" baseball fan, according to some people's definition, I would remember not only who won that game but all the box scores.

But that's not what I remember. That's not how I love baseball. How happy I was to soak up Frank's explanations of the geometry of what was going on in front of us--live! and so close!--the different kinds of pitches, their speeds, the fact that hitting a fastball is the single hardest task in sports, and we got to eat hot dogs and drink beer and sit in the sun while watching big, handsome experts do these things--the novelty and pleasure of these sensations, that's what I remember. Who forgets falling in love? That's what I was doing.

We went to more games, and I went to games with other people, and I learned more, especially from my former student, Matthew, who had pitched so hard in high school that he'd broken his arm, no snapping, just pulled his humerus in half, right in the middle, and was sentenced not to throw so much as a spitwad until he was 25 lest he grow up lopsided. (So of course he took up soccer and is now perfectly proportioned 6'4", looks exactly like Anthony Perkins.)

Matthew did the best color. We'd sit up high, right behind home plate, and he'd stream-explain what we were seeing: "OK now, we have a lefthanded pitcher and a righthanded powerhitter, so watch the outfield--see? they're moving way back and shifting over to left field. . . who's the first baseman looking at? Right, the second baseman, because when he goes like this [swipes left hand on pant leg], then . . . see? He did it! and now the first baseman will . . . That was a fielder's choice. Huh? OK, fielder's choice is when . . . and . . . got that? Good. OK now that was a pitchout, that's when . . . ." Matthew taught me wayyyy more baseball than I taught him English.

He taught me, and others have taught me, but I never remember, from one season to the next, what a pitchout is, or a fielder's choice. Or I sorta do, but not really. I love having it all explained to me all over again, every year. Last season, Pica taught me how to keep score, which makes me feel a lot more engaged in the game--or explains to me why I'm engaged (or bored, but rarely), why the drama grips me so tightly, why every pitching duel has the potential to become what Randy Johnson made of it the other night, why I love the Red Sox--because the ride is so bumpy, the suspense so great, the heartbreak so excruciating when, at the last moment, they blow it, as they always do, in some stupid, Bill Buckner way, whether it's an individual game or the pennant. Last year, Pica and I agreed that we were never going to get that far into it ever again, no matter what, because it was just too hard on us, in such real ways, when the Yankees did it to the Sox yet once again.

But we both know that, given the chance to get that far into it again, we will.