the great american pastime
yeah, it's a baseball letter
i usually send these out earlier in the day but this time i didn’t. also! i have an article out today! it’s an interview with lyndsie (of wwld fame) about her novella, and you can read it at interstellar flight magazine.
my favorite piece of writing about baseball (and please understand that i don’t read any sports journalism) is from shirley jackson’s second collection of family stories, raising demons (affiliate link).
“Before the children were able to start counting days till school was out, and before Laurie had learned to play more than a simple scale on the trumpet, and even before my husband’s portable radio had gone in for its annual checkup so it could broadcast the Brooklyn games all summer, we found ourselves deeply involved in the Little League. The Little League was new in our town that year. One day all the kids were playing baseball in vacant lots and without any noticeable good sportsmanship, and the next day, almost, we were standing around the grocery and the post office wondering what kind of manager young Johnny Cole was going to make, and whether the Weaver boy—the one with the strong arm—was going to be twelve this August, or only eleven as his mother said, and Bill Cummings had donated his bulldozer to level off the top of Sugar Hill, where the kids used to go sledding, and we were all sporting stickers on our cars reading “We have contributed” and the fund-raising campaign was over the top in forty-eight hours.”
this is only the first half of the first paragraph and i assure you it gets even better from there. (if you do not like that kind of conversational writing, well, i am not sure what you’re doing here.)
my second favorite piece of writing about baseball is from my friend shana’s newsletter, and you can read it yourself right here. (shana is the sort of writer i can only dream of being, the kind who can write five thousand sprawling words that mean more than the sum of themselves and tie everything together perfectly while tearing your heart out.)
when i was eleven years old, the new york mets, still relatively fresh off their 1986 world series win, were the team to root for if you lived in new york. to be certain, the boys in my sixth grade class sure rooted for them. every wednesday afternoon i rode the bus to another elementary school for gifted & talented with two of those boys, and let me tell you: they never talked about anything but baseball. it was autumn of 1989 and all i ever heard was “let’s go mets.”
i decided then and there that i was a yankees fan. this fandom was largely in name only, but i’ve held onto it for decades.
a league of their own (imdb) came out the year i turned fourteen, and i saw it in a movie theater on 86th street. it showed me that sports movies are exactly my kind of movie, especially if they’re an underdog story.
in 2002 i moved to los angeles and some friends of mine found out that i’d never been to a major league ball game. They dragged me to dodger stadium where we sat in the cheap seats and watched the dodgers play the giants. my friend was a giants fan and he wore a giants cap to the game. we got booed. i had an amazing time. i’ve been to two (i think) dodgers games since then, for stitch ‘n pitch nights with my old stitch ‘n bitch group. i don’t think i watched the actual game either time. i have felt just fine about rooting for the dodgers these last twenty-odd years, because they were from brooklyn originally.
i come back to baseball about every decade or so. most recently, a combination of several sports romance novels and the abbi jacobson series a league of their own (imdb) pulled me in. i even watched a couple random games on tv in the spring, coincidentally at shana’s house.
i don’t follow baseball, but i enjoy it. for some people, this is the wrong kind of fandom and i am a fake fan. i do not care what those people think. baseball is fun and it is okay to take fun things seriously, but it is also okay to not take them seriously. i have continued to root for the yankees in new york and the dodgers in los angeles and just enjoy baseball when i cross its path.
this world series is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.
obviously that is a hugely hyperbolic statement, but choosing a team to root for was extremely difficult. i have only told three people which team i chose. one of them was sticking needles in me at the time (via a tattoo gun), one vowed to love me forever no matter which baseball team i like (also, he doesn’t particularly care for baseball), and one is my son, who asked why i can’t just root for both teams.
we’re two games down. i’m watching on tv, because dodger stadium tickets started around a thousand dollars a pop. i fucking love baseball.