Baseball Fans’ Notes
This article was written by Luke Salisbury
This article was published in The SABR Review of Books
This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume V (1990).
In his wonderfully compact and brilliant Take Time For Paradise, the late Bart Giamatti says, “If baseball is a narrative, an epic of exile and return, a vast, communal poem about separation, loss and the hope for reunion — if baseball is a romantic Epic — it is finally told by the audience.” The 1980s saw a change in baseball writing as dramatic as the lively ball Babe Ruth and others found themselves hitting in 1920. We have finished a decade marked by baseball books written for and by adults, and I don’t mean sportswriters, many of whom, like many athletes, think like adolescents. Much good writing about the game is now done by the audience.
With the arrival of adults come adult concerns — philosophical soundings into the depths of the game, attempts to put baseball in a cultural context, and a desire to relate our lives to baseball we have seen. This is new territory, and when it’s done well, nothing is better, though I suspect if Bartlett Giamatti, Howard Senzel, Stanley Cohen, and others hadn’t written so eloquently about why we root, most of us wouldn’t abandon the game for grand opera.
With the audience writing, it naturally is going to write about itself. This has produced a new genre, spectators’ spiritual autobiographies, or as Mr. Frederick Edey succinctly put it: Fans’ Notes. These books may be the easiest to write, but are not necessarily the easiest to read. The story of how a man became a baseball fan, whom he rooted for, what old Yankee Stadium looked like, how the hot dogs tasted at Ebbets Field and so on, unless skillfully done, can be an adventure in narcissism. The first, and by far the best of these spiritual autobiographies, is Exley’s A Fan’s Notes. It is not about baseball, but Exley’s addiction to football. The book purports to be about the New York Giants but is really about madness, alcoholism and writing.
A Fan’s Notes is the story of a brilliant but addictive personality’s struggle with itself. Sports are secondary. Exley used the Giants as a vehicle while writing in the ancient mode of confession.
Others who make us privy to their inner history by telling us about their teams should take note. George V. Higgins’ The Progress of the Seasons doesn’t say anything about the Red Sox that the average, let alone sophisticated fan, doesn’t know, nor does Higgins say anything insightful about himself or his times.
If one is going to write in this new genre (as with the older one), it helps to have something to say. Howard Senzel’s quirky but wonderful, Baseball and the Cold War, says a lot. First of all, Senzel rooted for a minor league club, the Rochester Red Wings, and this is one of the few books about rooting in the minors. He also rooted in the 1950s. “Back in those days, which now seem part of another century, there was the game itself. … In the minor leagues, the game was played mostly by grown men who would never be famous and who would never be rich, men who would always travel by rented school bus. … These were grown men playing baseball who had to sacrifice money and comfort in order to play. And that is a kind of heroism that is larger and more noble than any superhuman athletic dexterity. That is a kind of heroism that is as foreign to our times as it was common is those middle years of the postwar years.” Another subtlety of minor league rooting was that favorite players had to be chosen carefully — if they were too good, they got called up.
The spiritual side of Senzel’s story is his immersion in radical politics, a not uncommon tale for the 1960s, but Senzel neither pats himself on the back for his politics nor has an agenda. Perhaps there is a parallel between a grown man working for a revolution in America and those bus-riding, money-sacrificing Rochester Red Wings. But if there is, Senzel doesn’t dwell on it. He is a man examining his life, times, and the baseball he saw. As Senzel says, “The glories of one’s own past cannot be rekindled just by examining them. The dreams of youth remain … but we want different things from our dreams now that we’re older.”
This, unfortunately, is lacking in Barry Gifford’s The Neighborhood of Baseball. One chapter tells us about the Cubs of the early fifties, and the next describes riding a horse at summer camp or treats us to the author’s Little League batting average. The writing about the Cubs is marvelous; in fact, Gifford writes so well every so often that one wonders why he didn’t write the whole book this way. It’s like seeing a pitcher show a magnificent fastball for a few innings and then take it easy the rest of the afternoon. Early on, Gifford says, “I’d been exposed to the Chicago Cubs. I see it now as being a bit like the lure and dilemma of the South Seas for Gauguin, all that overwhelming beauty with nary an early sign of the insidious secret to be one day suddenly revealed in all its irrevocable and horrible truth.” This is the best line about rooting for a loser I’ve ever read. And I live in Boston.
Later, in describing the heroes of Clair Bee, John R. Tunis and the rest of the pantheon of fictional athletes we grew up with, Gifford says they came from “the ’30s tradition, men walked with hands in their pockets, whistling as Jack Kerouac fondly recalled; and they held onto their honor, no matter what, or else consigned themselves to the gutter and ultimately, the devil.”
It would be unfair to say of The Neighborhood of Baseball what Nabokov said of reading Borges: he thought he was on the portico of a great mansion, only to discover there was no mansion. Gifford’s book is good — the writing about the Cubs is always good — but what did the author learn while rooting for those hapless Cubs? If the book is about the Cubs, not a man rooting for the Cubs, why wasn’t it only about the Cubs?
Stanley Cohen set himself the near impossible task of writing a sympathetic book about being a Yankee fan. We start with reminiscences of ’78, get the obligatory wet dream about Joe DiMaggio, and finish with the author’s son crowing about the late ’70s Yankees.
It is hard to imagine a writer attempting a more difficult task, but Mr. Cohen has done it. The Man in the Crowd is superb. Like Barry Gifford, Cohen came from a working class neighborhood of a big city. Unlike Gifford, whose prose becomes hard-guy as he describes neighborhood fights (I’m as skeptical of God-how-tough-my-friends-were stories as of my family’s God-how-much-money-we-used-to-have tales), Cohen tells us what it felt like to become a fan. One day in 1944, Stanley couldn’t get into a choose-up game where each participant had to have a major league equivalent. The only player he could name was Joe DiMaggio, who was in the Army, and didn’t count. Young Cohen obtained and virtually memorized a Who’s Who in twenty-four hours.
Mr. Cohen describes what the Yankees meant to a neighborhood of immigrants and their children. “Not infrequently, initiation into the temper of this strange new world came by way of professional sports.” The boxer Rocky Graziano “informed us it was possible to scale the heights … even a peasant could come to wear the crown and reside in the palace. … I could admire DiMaggio, but I identified with Graziano …who had come nose to nose with authority and had not backed off, and we were always and ever forgiving of defiance. But dumping was another matter entirely, for that would place him in legion with the structure of power, the very forces he was presumed to oppose, and worse, it would be a betrayal of those who believed in him.”
Cohen gambles and learned the dark side of that passion with the blessed and corrupt City College basketball team of 1949-50 of which he says: “Perhaps it was not so much betrayal that we felt … but a subtle sense of implication … for which among us would be the first to disclaim the deeds of those who shared our roots?” Cohen describes the rise of pro basketball after the college scandals, and then how pro football helped fill the void left by the departure of the National League from New York. All this is told so well, so directly from the heart of a well-tempered sensibility, that the reader feels he is getting the sports history of a generation. The Man in the Crowd is what fans’ notes should be — so well thought out, so deeply felt, that they transcend the author’s life, the Little League batting average, and become part of the history of the sensibility of our games.
The most successful attempt to place baseball in the largest context is Bartlett Giamatti’s magnificent and dense Take Time for Paradise, whose only false step is its title, which sounds like a Miltonic advertisement for a new brand of cigarette, and must have been an editor’s idea of marketing. The text is only 85 pages and I confess to thinking the Commissioner died before finishing it, and Summit Books took advantage of our grief by packaging a single essay for $16.95. This is not so. Take Time for Paradise is impressively complete.
The book is divided into three parts: “Self-Knowledge,” “Community,” and “Baseball as Narrative.” The first section postulates the radical, and I think absolutely correct, hypothesis, that “humankind’s highest aspiration … is to be taken out of the self.” This may not say much for what we are, but it explains culture and entertainment. Athletes’ phenomenal salaries are now in line with entertainers, and every freezing night World Series game reminds us that baseball is part of that industry.
I think it is important to understand that baseball is not entertainment, that it is culture, and this requires knowing what culture is, and why culture is a basic human need. Entertainment is diversion and sentiment. Culture is neither diversion nor work, which according to Giamatti, being necessary for survival, is a “negotiation with death.” Culture is the product of leisure, and like play, offers moments, “when pure energy and pure order create an instant of complete coherence.” Sport, which is ordered play, permits the spectator to “feel what we saw, become what we perceived.” Sport is a public demonstration of freedom. By playing or watching, and most of all, by understanding play and sport offer transcendence.
“It is a moment when something not modern but ancient, primitive — primordial — takes over. It is a sensation not merely of winning, for the lesson of life is that you cannot win, no matter how hard you work, but of fully playing as the gods must play. … I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of each other and through moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know.” And as if Giamatti hadn’t given us enough food for thought, “If sport is akin to another human activity, it is akin to making art.”
This is a long way from Little League averages and George Steinbrenner’s Yankees. This is the heart of the matter.
We root to escape self and death and find moments when all is “complete, coherent, freely fulfilling the anticipated fullness of freedom. … In that moment … everyone — participant and spectator — is centered.” This is why we root? Good God, this is why we live! Playing and rooting are what we know of immortality. And, “The memory of that moment is deep enough to send us all out again and again, to reenact the ceremony … in the hope that the moment will be summoned again and made again palpable.”
Records “have existed since the Greeks. … They are necessary … we have the urge to memorialize but, even more, to seek to recreate the instant of immortality by watching again and again.” Or, one might add, by researching.
“All play,” Mr. Giamatti says, “aspires to the condition of paradise … through play in all its forms. … We hope to achieve a state that our larger Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian culture has always known was lost. Where it exists, we do not know, although we always have envisioned it as a garden … always as removed, as an enclosed, green place. … Paradise is an ancient dream. … It is a dream of ourselves as better than we are, back to what we weere.”
The next part of Mr. Giamatti’s essay is a consideration of the stadium as a city in miniature, the role of the city in our culture, and the fate of leisure in our increasingly computerized video world. He points out that the city, like baseball, is a man-made artifact, and must be treated and cared for as such. The “ultimate purpose of a city” is “to mirror our higher state.” The stadium does this for a few hours on a small scale, which makes it the “people’s paradise,” and consequently should reflect the ancient dream of the mountaintop or island garden, rather than “the popular concept of a spaceship.”
This is an architectural problem and can be corrected. The evolution of leisure from communal celebration of team sports to solitary individuals in front of computer screens may not be so correctable. “For the young the screen in any form is the most familiar piece of furniture in the mind because it is the medium that formed the mind.” In other words, our children and their children may have a new dream of paradise. I suspect it’s unavoidable. When people no longer live solely on the surface of this planet, the ancient dream of the enclosed green garden will metamorphose, but as Mr. Giamatti says, those of us who would preserve baseball in any recognizable form should remember that “there is nothing inherently magical about their [our] games. What is magical is the experience sought by player or spectator though games or sports.” We must understand that baseball could become just another computer game.
Baseball is communal psychic ground — playing, rooting, researching — baseball is culture. If we don’t educate the young about the difference between culture and entertainment, between getting high and transcendence, the leisure of future generations will be electronic masturbation.
The third part, “Baseball as Narrative,” is a meditation on baseball as a manifestation of American freedom. Many writers have said this. Few have said it this well: “Baseball is part of America’s plot, part of America’s mysterious underlying design — the plot in which we all conspire and collude, the plot of the story of our national life. Our national plot is to be free enough to consent to an order that will enhance and compound — as it constrains — our freedom. That is … our national story, the tale America tells the world. Indeed, it is the story we tell ourselves.”
Giamatti provides a structuralist analysis of the field, commenting on that grand design of energy and order, spontaneity and harmony, and the numbers three and four, to demonstrate that, “The game is all counterpoint.” There is a wonderful exegesis of the word home, the idea of home plate, and a discussion of the literary mode of romance, which is a narrative about a hero trying to get home.
With the current glut of baseball books, one wonders how many more fans’ notes will be published. I hope the genre does not decline. Emerson says, “Each new age requires a new confession.” There should always be a place for the writer who can put his experience of the game in the context of his times. The history of rooting is part of the history of baseball. As for meditations on the meaning of the game, seeing this done well is like seeing a .400 hitter. Whatever contribution Bart Giamatti would have made as Commissioner, I doubt it could have been greater than Take Time for Paradise.