Archive for the 'Memoir' Category

Finding Nomar

Ted, March 11, 2010, 0 Comments

My college days in New England overlapped with a large chunk of the salad days of the now-retired Nomar Garciaparra. I was surrounded by Red Sawks (and Yanks) fans for those years, and Nomar was the calling card of the pre-championship Sox. I learned, in time, to enjoy the company of these psychopaths, and I built up even an affinity for their ways, and that meant appreciating their devotion to their shortstop.

The reason, I think, that there’s such a national fascination with and disdain for Red Sox fans is that they are capable of creating a gunpowder fervor that is rare with many other fan bases. It can go either way: elation runs deep, and dissatisfaction festers and boils as hard a blood feud.

Nomar fueled the former, the celebratory side of the Sox fan’s dichotomy. He made Red Sox fans happy, and in those days it was a tonic against the since-evaporated angst: like a happy smile from a colicky baby. The cries of Nomah! that have since fallen into cliche were revelatory in their joy, coming from such a sad bastard people.

I was sure that Nomar Garciaparra would play his way into the Hall of Fame. A premier player in a big-time baseball city, one leg of the beloved ARod-Jeter-Nomar trifecta. I graduated from college in 2002, then left Vermont in 2003. In those years he was his usual great hitting self, with upper 20s home runs, over .300 average, etc.

Then I left, returning to the placid Houson Astros fan base. Next thing I know, Nomar is traded away, to the Cubs. A precipitous fall, it seemed to me, disentangled as I was from the daily churn of news and gossip in Red Sox Nation. Life teaches you, in small ways, that if you look away for a minute, something’s likely to change.

The Baseball-Reference blog tracked Nomar’s early potential, pointing out that through his age 29 year, the shortstop was among the best of all time. I am 29-years-old. Probably unrelated, but these things come to mind when an inconic player moves on. One’s own movings on. From some place to another place, for some reason or another, with varying levels of success and failure. Ballplayers start to mark off the autobiographical eras. Of the recent retirements, Frank Thomas marks my middle school days, and Nomar college.

Good on Nomar for making it to the top, even if his stay was shorter than some baseball romantics would have liked. The romantics want more than they should, and when they get it, they rarely know what, even, to do with it. Some even think that Nomar should make it to the hall. Not I, though. Some climbers don’t make it to the top, no matter how fast they make it to base camp one.

Memoir, 0 Comments

Frickin’ A-Rod or: How I Learned to Stop Wallowing and Grudingly Support the Yankees

Eric, October 26, 2009, 16 Comments

Rooting for the bad guy always sounds so good in theory; there is a sexy excitement to the whole thing, a contrarian pride, and a Clint Eastwood danger. But in practice, it never works. At the movies, you find yourself unable to shake the momentum of the action, somehow hinged to the values of the hero, reasonably off put by the villainous secrecy, shady Russian accents, and grandiose threats of the bad guys. Somehow, you always come home to the good guy.

But this is baseball. And the lines aren’t so clear. And the winners aren’t scripted. So when I tell you that in this World Series I am rooting for the Yankees, I don’t expect that to change. No doubt the Yankees are the bad guys: George Steinbrenner as a grumpier Auric Goldfinger and Ryan Howard as James Bond. The Yankees represent everything evil about baseball – the monolithic corporate model, the financial gluttony, the designated hitter rule – and yet I find myself, thrust by the violent and unexpected winds of time into their corner.

Maybe thrust is the wrong word. This has been a slow process. My hatred for the Yankees has certainly faded in recent years. It’s a well documented fact; it confounds my friends and absolutely infuriates my girlfriend. But how did a cooling of hatreds morph into an unabashed rooting interest? What chain of cosmic calamities could have made a Yankees fan of me?

1. Childhood fascination with old Yankee legends

I spent a great deal of my childhood reading baseball books, especially biographies. Many of these books documented Yankee stars: Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and especially Mantle were pillars of my childhood. And as much as I hated the 90s Yankees of that childhood (and names like O’Neill, Boggs, and Brosius still send a shiver down my spine) there was always a disconnect between those Yankees and the Yankees. I did not realize this until quite recently, but because of the books, because of the history, my loathing for the Yankees never went beyond those specific teams and the culture surrounding them. It never extended to the franchise in its entirety.

2. Living in New York City

Before I moved to Brooklyn, I had this image of Yankee fans as self-righteous, greedy, and pompous. But even at the Yankee game I went to, I didn’t see this. Sure, Yankee fans are brash. But people in New York City are brash. That’s just the way it is. I had also always associated the Yankees with a more upper crust fan base. Intrinsically, I figured the Yankees to be the wealthy man’s team and the Mets to be the working-class team. This may be true to a point, but I don’t know that. I didn’t see it. Small sample size example: the dudes on my softball team, who were mostly tow truck drivers, were split down the middle: half Yankees and half Mets.

3. The rise of the Red Sox and awful Boston sports fans.

Along those same lines, Boston fans have really emerged has the epitome of the self-satisfied, bragging, obnoxious sports fans. Part of this has to do with winning a lot, and you can’t really begrudge them that. But it’s still annoying. The Red Sox, in many ways, have come to represent the same thing as those 90s Yankees teams. Bill Simmons and co. have made me, at the very least, more sympathetic to the Yankee cause.

4. My weird Alex Rodriguez fascination.

In the early months of this blog, I wrote a three-piece series wondering if Alex Rodriguez was a tragic hero in the Shakespearian sense. It was a bloated, meandering, and borderline pretentious essay. But the sentiment from whence it came remains valid. Excerpt:

I’ve lived in New York for two months. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about this city it’s that people here absolutely despise Alex Rodriguez. It’s more than steroids hatred, or sucking in the postseason hatred, or trying to usurp heartthrob Jeter’s iconic place status. No, this is a kind of weird personal fetishistic hatred. I’m not sure if it starts in the media and spreads to the man on the street or vice versa, but listening for A-Rod banter in the Subway and reading the tabloid headlines off newsstands has become a hobby of mine. The A-Rod chatter has sunk to the point where people are merely disagreeing over how much and why they dislike the guy.

The act of writing those posts got me invested in A-Rod. I wanted to see him succeed just for the sake of tracking his image, his legacy. The hatred from New Yorkers just didn’t seem just. So I began to root for him, not in the interest of redemption, but in the interest of a break. The guy just needed a little space, a little room to breathe, little time to just be.

So yeah, I like A-Rod. I want him to do well.

5. The Dodgers lose to the Phillies consecutive years in the NLCS.

Okay fine. This post could have been three sentences long. It may be petty, but at this point I wish to inflict all human misery on Shane Victorino, Jayson Werth, Chase Utley, Ryan Madson, and pretty much every resident of Philadelphia. Never underestimate the power of bitter frustration.

Ted and I have talked a lot lately about what a free-floating fan is supposed to do during the playoffs. These are strange times for the non-Yankee non-Philly fans among us.  While we haven’t reached any profound conclusions as to how to behave in these end days, we can at least consider what makes us tick, what factors dig us in, get us invested. For me it is a combination of geography, childhood experience, and player intrigue (which really amounts to cheering for the narrative). But above all that, it is a savage desire to see the team who wounded me feel a similar, burning pain.  And maybe that’s the real allure of the bad guy. Honor be damned. Maybe deep down in all of us there’s an unquenchable thirst for revenge.

What do you guys think? Everybody’s gotta root for somebody. So what biases played into your decision. Is it friends? Is it revenge?

[awesome Greenpoint photo via flickr user svar]

Memoir and Thinking, 16 Comments

Shoeless Joe

Eric, September 9, 2009, 1 Comment

When we asked young Phil Bencomo, chronicler of all things baseball if he would like to write a Situational Essay, we were unsure of what to expect. His Baseball Chronicle is in many ways a kindred spirit in this massive, lonely, internet world.  Both sites value the narrative over the calculated, and both tend to tread dangerous water when it comes to nostalgia. The following essay is many things. It is America. It sure as hell ain’t nostalgia:

At 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning in August, I sat in the back of a broken-down van, stopped on the highway shoulder 10 miles outside of Rolla, Missouri. Much too close for my liking, cars and 18-wheelers barreled past on the left, blurs of light and sound. The trucks left the van lurching from side to side.

I felt small and powerless, protected only by a thin-walled metal box just feet from the road. Perhaps that’s why, as I waited for the tow truck, I turned my mind elsewhere, flicking on a reading light and pulling “Shoeless Joe” from my bag.

* * * *

My parents, four siblings and I had left our home in the Chicago suburbs seven hours earlier. It was an unplanned trip, prompted by the news that my grandmother, widowed less than six months before and fading fast, would likely last no more than a month. By 2 p.m. on Saturday we’d resolved to leave. Six hours of frenetic packing and preparations later, our aging, seven-seat conversion van pulled away from the house, and we began our 1,700-mile, cross-country journey to Phoenix.

These trips have become standard fare over my 20 years, though there’s usually more than six hours of preparation to them. We’ve driven through every state west of Illinois, save a few, and a handful more to the east.

On our trips west, we usually leave by noon and drive through the night, ultimately spending over 24 hours in the van before stopping — collapsing, really — for a night in Albuquerque, New Mexico. But on this trip, it was not to be.

* * * *

My Mom had been driving for a few hours, with the rest of us sleeping quietly, when the noise started. She’d been awake thanks to coffee and an evening nap, but the loud flapping sound, a puttering perhaps, that came from beneath the hood made both unnecessary. I woke immediately, reached for my glasses and found everyone else wide awake, too.

“Is there a bird?” asked my sister nervously. She’s been terrified of them since one found its way into our house through a vent years before. “It sounds like there’s a bird in there.”

Dad suspected a broken fan belt but, after we’d pulled over, could find nothing wrong. Still, the noise persisted. The call went out to AAA, and I began to read.

* * * *

“Shoeless Joe” is a wonderful book that oozes sentimentality like few other novels. The characters are genuinely good in the deepest sense, and the few villains need only a nudge from the realm beyond to change their ways. Even facing bankruptcy and scorn, Ray Kinsella dances merrily to baseball’s magical tune. It’s nearly impossible to read “Shoeless Joe” and not yearn for the simple pleasures of bat, ball and a lush expanse of the greenest grass.

I realize this now, of course, but at 3:45 a.m., as I read in the back of a Rolla-bound, smoke-filled AAA taxi driven by a lithe, mustachioed man whose slow, drawling words whistled through a missing tooth, Ray’s adventures couldn’t have pained me more. Ray drives from Iowa to Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Boston and even to northern Minnesota, with only a few blank lines representing the hundreds of miles driven from city to city. There are no stops for gas followed five minutes later by a wail for a restroom; no greasy meals from roadside fast food restaurants; no thermoses filled with coffee, to be emptied and filled again; and, most salient to me, no middle-of-the-night breakdowns. The realities of long road trips are unacknowledged in “Shoeless Joe,” but I could think of nothing else.

With every repair shop in town closed on Sunday, we were left stranded in our hotel room, waiting for Monday. We could only hope for a swift repair. “Shoeless Joe” was to be an escape from our troubles, not a mockery of them, but while Ray walked with Moonlight Graham, I ate cold scrambled eggs at a Waffle House and listened to my younger siblings bicker out of boredom. The book’s endless optimism gnawed at me. I didn’t want green grass and sunshine — I wanted someone else to suffer, too. But there is little suffering in “Shoeless Joe,” a book in which all troubles are washed away by time and a little faith.

* * * *

The repair shop, only a mile from the hotel, opened at 8:30 Monday morning. The tow truck driver had the night before told us that the van would make it that far, and he wasn’t wrong. Dad drove to the shop fearing the problem would delay us another day, but, for a change, Lady Luck was with us. The repair took 20 minutes, and we were back on the road by 10 a.m.

Still, I could muster no optimism, even with the aid of “Shoeless Joe,” and I felt old despite my youth. We won’t make many more family trips, not all together. The van’s too old for it, and so are we. I’ll soon finish college, with my sister close behind, and the schedules and lives will grow too complicated. The simple days, with all seven of us under the same roof, will soon pass.

As I read in the van, I wanted more than anything else to love “Shoeless Joe,” to embrace and revel in all the hope and goodwill it represents, to leave all my angst behind with a blown spark plug in Rolla, Missouri. But I thought of my dying grandmother, the reason for the trip, and reality crept in again. I closed the book and watched the trees fly by.

(flickr courtesy of cc:rutlo)

America, Books, Memoir and Situational Essay, 1 Comment

Grains of Loyalty: Staying True to Your Team in Traveling Times

Ted, August 12, 2009, 7 Comments

Transience might be the defining characteristic of my generation, those in the ballpark of their twenties right now. It starts with college a thousand miles from home, then a junior year abroad, then post-college city-hopping to chase down entry-level jobs, and then post-post college grad school hopping to chase down normal-type jobs. My own pursuits and mispursuits recently brought me–as of a week ago–to Seattle, Washington. I’ve arrived, in other words, at the latest geographical challenge to that dusty term, loyalty.

Loyalty

I was born in and have spent a considerable portion of my life in Houston, Texas, and I’m an Astros fan. My high school days were a golden time for the home team, as me and my buddy Mike skipped out on afternoon classes to spend hours in the Astrodome, under the fluorescent lights, watching Biggio and Bagwell. But since those geographically stable, unambiguously Astro-faithful days, I’ve lived in six cities or towns in six states. By my tally, that would stake each of the Red Sox, the Braves, the Cubs, the White Sox, the Reds, and now the Mariners with a decent claim for my attentions (for what they’re worth). The draw of some have been greater than others, driven by media outlets (I was a Braves fan in the early nineties only because they were on TV every night) and friendships. But usually there is the ever-moving convivial current, the urge to float along downstream with those around you, in spite of the quiet, wooded pond waiting back home.

At 17, I left for college in New England, and in the days before mlbTV, it was nearly impossible to pass as an engaged Astros fan from so far away. All I had were the Houston Chronicle’s game recaps to work with. I couldn’t see the new rookie play, I couldn’t watch the fading veteran struggle to replicate his past glory. I could read about it, and that’s not the worst, but it gives little sense of satisfaction. To others, you sound like an absentee father talking half-proudly about the children he doesn’t know.

Naturally, therefore, as a Robinson Crusoe figure stranded on an island barren of any Astros awareness whatsoever, I was drawn into the narrative structures that unfolded around me. The Red Sox fans dominated the narrative game, this before the decade of their abundance. Back then they were hypnotically loud, obnoxious, sour, despised and despising, especially by and of the loud, obnoxious, hubristic Yankees fans, whose narrative at the time was that of the wealthy hypochondriac (whose illness, it turned out, was all too real). There were other cadres–some Mets fans, a few Phillies fans–but the Sox and the Yanks banter filled up the TV rooms; it was their bemoaning and disbelief and jubilation that steered the baseball conversations up that way. The Sox fans with their ill-fated futility, the overlooked attic inventors to the Yankees fans’ canny corporate taste makers. Of course these stories were infectious.

What I found so compelling was that term I mentioned above: the loyalty. Never before or since have I met fans whose teams were so much a part of their personal fabric. They oozed allegiance, not from some choice, but by a sort of birthright. If it wasn’t an actual birthright, it became so through sheer force of will, through a repetition so relentless the Catholics would be jealous. Red Sox fans and Yankees fans believed it–they believed that they were inseparable from their teams–and it was so. Loyalty was not a choice of geography, it was a certainty. Not being a religious person, and being an Astros fan, I’d never seen that before.

dan duquette.jpg

Anyhow, I’ve diverged, but that was my first sense of the tenuousness of loyalty, that feeling I’d get listening to Red Sox talk on sports radio, and imagining myself for a couple of ticks to be a Red Sox fan, to be as engaged in those tedious, melancholy debates as the Irish kid from Newton, Mass. I felt a little guilty, but I also felt that, like an adulterer, my desire was overwhelming my reason and my loyalty. In the end I overcame temptation, and watched the Astros when they showed up every several months on ESPN’s national broadcast. But the same thing happened again in Chicago, with America’s second great–and now its only–bastion of despair, the Cubs. Fortunately, I got to see the Astros play locally a few times, and it helped that they were in the same division, so the sense of isolation wasn’t as great. But I didn’t, I’m ashamed to say, discourage my wife from getting a Cubs hoodie. (It looks great on her.)

So what is it about this loyalty? Why should I feel bad about switching allegiances, if that’s what my id demands? The word itself derives from the term leal, which is in some way related to the term fealty, which means fidelity, which means faithful. So there is an implicit sort of religious drive behind it, of faith over choice. One doesn’t think of choosing a religion (though it happens all the time, I suppose), as much as one is born into it, and I think there’s the perception that baseball fans should work in the same manner. Fathers playing catch with sons, and that sort of hereditary legacy. That is, after all, how I was drawn into the appeal of the New England fans, with the jealousy of a day guest at the country club. And the guilt creeps in too, the way the day guest feels bad about his friends back home and all of those after all pretty pleasant bike rides through the boring old neighborhood at sunset.

So its an internal process, this loyalty business, a way of calibrating one’s own compass to sustain a sense of continuity and a connection with the homeland in the midst of the transience that I mentioned in the first paragraph. Guilt comes into play, and temptation lurks around every corner of the continent. I could’ve become a Red Sox fan whole hog, yes, but would I have enjoyed their 2004 and 2007 World Series victories as much as I would have an Astros win, in 2005 for example? The answer is too easy, and so an Astros fan I remain.

The good news, or at least the news, is that for all of this existential wrangling, there are vastly more tools available today to nurture the uprooted adherent. With mlbTV and radio, media coverage is always available everywhere, and the monopoly of content is wrested away from the ESPN scheduling gestapo with all of their New England-centrism, into the hands of the MLB. And you don’t even need a TV. The same flexibility holds for all of life too, obviously, which probably means that college freshmen, instead of abandoning their high school friends until next summer, get to hear all about how shitty a team each other is having year round.

The residual effects of this ease of access suggests to me that today’s baseball-loving college freshmen a) spend a lot more time than they already do huddled in a shadowy corner of their ten foot, double occupancy dorm room watching their home team play meaningless September games b) find even fewer reasons to interact with their peers who are all out having more fun than them anyway (see item a) c) be out 120 bucks of WoW budget money d) fail to detach themselves completely from their vastly romanticized high school days, thereby spending the next four years devising ways to get back to Cincinnati or Cleveland or Milwaukee instead of just getting on with it already.

I kid, of course. It’s possible to closely follow your home town team on a daily basis, as if you were there, and bring it up regularly in conversation, even though you’re thousands of miles from where your team does it’s business, in a city with its own far more successful team, without sounding overbearing or brutally out of touch. Right?

Media and Memoir, 7 Comments

Fountains Of Greinke

Eric, July 17, 2009, 0 Comments

Our first ever Situational Essay comes today from Reeves Wiedeman. Reeves has written about hot dogs for SI.com, a Pi savant for The Boston Globe, and the Recently Insufferable Roger Federer at his blog, Meanderings, which he would be honored to have you skim after you get through Pitchers & Poets each day. An aspiring journalist and storyteller, whatever that means, he also likes the Kansas Jayhawks and barbecue.

“Our job is to inject as much joy into people’s lives as we can.” – Royals manager Trey Hillman.

I was born in Kansas City, Missouri on May 1, 1986, six months and four days after Darryl Motley caught the final out of the 1985 World Series (and for Cardinals fans, six months and five days after Don Denkinger astutely called Jorge Orta safe at first). In the subsequent 23 ½ seaons, the Kansas City Royals have yet to return to the playoffs, lost 2,039 games, run through nine managers, and traded away an outfield that would have included Carlos Beltran, Johnny Damon, and Jermaine Dye for Angel Berroa, Mark Teahan, and Neifi Perez (only Teahan is still with the team).

In short, it’s been a rough 23 years. But it’s been a rough two decades for Pirates, Rangers, and Brewers fans too, with the D.C. area set to join us. What’s unique about the Royals’ struggles is that people like you – Dodgers and Sox and Yanks fans – seem, strangely, to care about the Royals.

It’s often hard to recall that the Royals were once at the front of the national baseball consciousness. George Brett flirted with .400 and Dan Quisenberry made the submarine fashionable. They won – a lot. And perhaps most importantly, they were the little team from the fly-over town who had become arch-rivals with the New York Yankees. And of course, if you were the Yankees’ enemy, you were America’s friend. But then, bad things started happening. Mostly, they lost – a lot. A franchise going on 30 years old, they suffered through an affair with a rich benefactor, the loss of bowel control, and impulse buys: the baseball equivalent of a mid-life crisis.

If I may stretch to draw a different metaphor, the Royals are baseball’s much whiter, much less violent version of The Wire’s Stringer Bell. (Your assignment: identify your team with a fictional character). They came from the wrong side of the baseball tracks, challenged the Powers That Be with good old fashioned hard work and occasionally illicit behavior, and against all odds, won the hearts of viewers everywhere.  (Ed. Note: Spoilers Incoming Of course, Stringer ended up dead: for their part, the Royals had been relegated to the last five minutes of SportsCenter with a Wikipedia entry for the era titled, simply, “Rock bottom.”

But you won’t find a fan of The Wire who wouldn’t give up Marlo and Wee-Bay to have Stringer back for one more episode. Though we still live in a world where it is possible to publish a fictional account of Willie Wilson questioning Sonia Sotomayor, the Royals are now defined not by losses but by a 25-year old right hander and a sense of, well, hope (forget for a moment that they are 14 games under .500). Zach Grienke may be the best pitcher in baseball. And for once, with a long-term contract in hand, he is a Royal that opposing fans can admire for his talent rather than dreaming what he would look like in their team’s uniform. Grienke has, quite suddenly, put the Royals back on the map.

But what’s odd about Greinke is just how much attention he’s gotten. Last season, Tim Lincecum was two years younger and started 10-1 with a 2.49 ERA, but had to wait until July for his SI cover. Greinke started with slightly better numbers, but got his cover by late April. To be fair, we primarily have Joe Posnanski to thank. One of America’s three (give or take) greatest local sports columnists was hired by SI last year, where he has been able to do nearly impossible feats like put the Royals in high places and work Tony Pena Jr. into a column about Andy Roddick. People in high places do wonders.

But I would contend that there is something else going on here: a national affection for everything the Royals embody and, occasionally, actually are. They are from the heartland. They have regal blue uniforms. They have a giant, kitschy crown scoreboard, and fountains that dance between innings. They have a recession-proof team salary. They are baseball in its purest, most uncompetitive, most enjoyable form, and because of that, people who have never stepped foot in Arthur Bryant’s BBQ are able to look at the Royals the same way they look at a toddler, longing for younger more innocent days and hoping the kid grows to do something great.

Which brings us back to Hillman. I cannot name the Royals starting lineup (Note: I just tried and got five of nine). I haven’t seen the Royals play in person in two years, and can’t remember the last time I sat through a whole game on TV. No matter how much you like a team, it’s hard to sit through all that losing.

But it’s not about the losing. It’s about the fountains and the uniforms and Buck O’Neill’s seat in the stands and crying when the team trades your two favorite players – David Cone and Brian McRae – on back to back days. It’s about relaxing in a row of empty bleacher seats, with a beer and a hot dog and a 3-2 game in the 6th. It’s about the joy at team gives you, that a 25-year old baby-faced pitcher gives you. It’s about the quaint hopefulness of a small-market team at spring training each year. And every once in a while, it’s about sitting in right field in a sold out Kauffman Stadium as Ken Harvey blasts a walk-off home run in the 11th on April 18th, 2003 to boost the Royals to 12-3, best in the majors – never mind that they would finish 3rd in the division, seven wins short.

America, Memoir and Situational Essay, 0 Comments

Alex Rodriguez: Tragic Hero? (Part I)

Eric, March 30, 2009, 0 Comments

When I was younger I wanted to be a baseball player. But I can’t remember whether I loved baseball, or whether I just wanted everyone to love me. A confession, then: I still want everyone to love me—blindly, entirely, without sense or reason.

-Cody Walker


Most of the people I love and respect say they are happy to live out their lives in anonymity. To make some money, have a family or not have a family, pursue their interests, and not be bothered with history or legacy. I love and respect them. I love and respect that about them. But here’s a confession: I’m not like that. I understand that the best I can probably expect is to be remembered for a few generations by my family as something more than a mere historical fact. Many of my ancestors haven’t even gotten that much. But I can’t help wanting more.

Maybe it’s the writer in me, but I have this certain pressing interest in legacy. I wouldn’t call it an obsession; I certainly wouldn’t call it a blind desire to be loved or adored. It’s just a nagging desire to be respected. I want to affect the way somebody reads the world, and I want them to appreciate me for it. I want to write something so good that it makes other writers think for a passing minute about just giving up, the way I have a thousand times. And when I’m dead, I want those slight changes in perceptions I caused, the moments of doubt and inspiration I stirred, to bond as some sort of collective body – a legacy.

I realize the sentiment is totally narcissistic and hollow. I know that ‘success’ as a writer or anything else won’t be the panacea that answers for all my existential insecurities. Plus, the logic is terrible. When I’m dead, I won’t know whether or not somebody is reading me, loving me, hating me. And if dead Eric Nusbaum were able to tell, I doubt he would care much.

So I deal with it. I push my silly glorious fantasies off to the corner and shut them out and try to live in the moment and do the best I can. It’s not terribly hard. We all wrestle with our stupid demons.

I think as children we all want to be loved like that. We want to be astronauts because astronauts pilot space ships, but also because they sit shotgun in open convertibles and wave their way down parade routes. We want to be movie stars because movie stars get to see their faces on billboards and big screens. We want to be President and see our names alongside Washington’s, Lincoln’s, Kennedy’s. And we want to be baseball players. Not merely to hit home runs, but to circle the bases and look up at the lights and out at the crowd. We want to collect our own cards.

But most of us move on. Our interests change, our talents leave us in the wake of people who are soon to come up short themselves. And that’s how life goes for the 99.9% of which you and I are probably a part. We may or may not still want everyone to love us, but regardless we realize they probably won’t. The love of a few people is a lot better than none, and perhaps more meaningful than the love of everybody.

Except that’s only 99.9%. Somebody out there never has to give up on those dreams, never has to settle. It’s just math. Somebody has to walk on the moon, win an Oscar, deliver the State of the Union, greet his team in the dugout with hugs and high fives. What about that guy? Does he ever adjust like the rest of us? Does the adulation merely carry him, like a wave, to oblivious success? Or is it like a drug? Perhaps he comes to need glory and depend on it for nourishment. Perhaps he doesn’t just want to be loved – blindly, entirely, without sense or reason, but his very existence hinges on it.

And what if that guy played third base for the New York Yankees?

This will continue, in much less self-indulgent fashion, over the course of the week.

Baseball the Teacher, Memoir and Thinking, 0 Comments

Rejection Notice: Strunk and White Edition

Eric, March 25, 2009, 1 Comment

Arrived in my inbox this afternoon, courtesy of the Los Angeles Dodgers:

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your interest in the Broadcast Assistant position with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Although your resume’ [stray apostrophe], educational and work experience was quite impressive [this whole clause is severely wounded ... gushing blood], we selected a candidate whose background more closely matched the Department’s needs. We will however, retain your resume’ [stray apostrophe] on file should a future need arise where we may utilize your expertise.

You may want to occasionally peruse our website at www. Dodgers.com [random space in url] for available employment opportunities, [unnecessary coma] and apply again at that time.

On behalf of the Los Angeles Dodgers we wish you success with [should be in] your career pursuits.

Style and grammar errors are marked for your convenience.  At least when I applied to be a receptionist for the Yankees they had the courtesy not to get back to me.

Memoir, 1 Comment

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