The Voices of Fans: Fathers Playing Catch with Sons and The Neighborhood of Baseball

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume III (1988).

 

This past February, the city of Chicago finally yielded to massive pressure from the Commissioner’s office and the Tribune company and decided to put lights in Wrigley Field. The City Council tried to mask the significance of the move by claiming that there would be a minimum number of games played at night, thereby completely missing the point of the issue. And although I would be the first to admit that Wrigley Field with lights is better than no Wrigley Field at all, I can’t help but feel something akin to a burning pain in my gut every time I contemplate the defacement of Wrigley, for such a defacement illustrates once again a certain lack of respect on the part of the men who run Major League Baseball for the voices of fans

Actually, the most immediate result of the announcement to light Wrigley was that I went running for my copy of Barry Gifford’s The Neighborhood of Baseball, a wonderfully personal account of what it was like to grow up as a Cub fan in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. As I read through it again my appreciation grew, for now that Wrigley is to be forced so indelicately into the 1980’s, Gifford’s book has become more than a memoir, but a little piece of history as well. And it is a book that is well suited to such a challenge. For those of us who have seen Wrigley in her unlit glory, The Neighborhood of Baseball will bring back memories; for those who missed it, this book may become all that’s left of that great and longstanding Chicago tradition of weekday baseball. In either case, as a personal account of a boy’s love affair with a baseball team, it is unmatched in the annals of baseball literature

Gifford opens The Neighborhood of Baseball with a measurement: “l was born in 1946, one year after the Chicago Cubs last won the National League pennant.” It is significant that in the period the book covers (it was first published in 1981), the Cubs did nothing substantial to bring another pennant home to Chicago. Particularly during the seasons from 1952 to 1964 that Gifford attended “approximately fifty. . .games a year,” the Cubs set a standard of futility and mediocrity challenged only by such teams as the old St. Louis Browns. But it is also significant that the measurement Gifford presents is one of his own life against the history of the team to which he is allied. In that statement, we understand right off the voice with which this story will be told, a voice that will find itself in its connection to some larger other, the voice of the fan.

Gifford himself refers to this early in the book, when he describes his first experience at Wrigley Field: “The Cubs won, I remember that, they looked good…It was a proper beginning for a young fan…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.” For Gifford, that secret is the overwhelming mediocrity of the team that would come to occupy his child’s life.

But a case can be made that it is precisely this mediocrity, and the ensuing frustration of the fan, that forges so strong a bond between boy and team. Certainly the rite of fanhood is an important part of many American childhoods, and most of us grow up rooting for less than worldbeaters. Yet somewhere in there with the mediocrity and the frustration must be a strong dose of acceptance, or no one would continue to follow their team year and year. The failures of our heroes on the field prepare us for the constant battle of later life, the temporary victories and partial setbacks, the ebb and flow of events that progress much like the long but finite run of games in a season.

Baseball, it has been said, is a lot like life precisely because there is so much failure built into both. And although some teams seem to wear futility like a c brown, every fan should relate on some personal level to the tribulations Gifford describes, for all of our bonds have survived great frustrations.

The Cubs, however, are something else again, a team whose consistent lack of success has involved fans of all ages in “as unrequited a relationship [as] anyone could have with a ball club.” To convey both the child’s hopeful resignation and the adult’s sense of tragic loyalty, Gifford divides The Neighborhood of Baseball into two formally and contextually distinct sections that work alone but only achieve full meaning together.

Part 1, “The Past Recaptured,” ties together the strands of his season-by-season devotion to the Cubs. In a sense, this is Gifford’s autobiography in baseball. He begins with the team, then shifts focus to his life as a child, introducing his grandfather, Ezra, “who had a candy stand under the Addison Street elevated tracks near Wrigley Field,” and his parents, and the city of Chicago, so that we already identify with him by the time baseball returns to define the story. Gifford’s command of timing and detail fosters these connections, and once he has us, he brings us into his relationship with his team

Indeed, the beauty of “The Past Recaptured” is in its loving recollections of a boy’s baseball obsessions. Gifford is quick to develop the kind of gallows humor a Cub fan needs, and although he writes with the benefit of many years of hindsight, there is the strong sense that, in this situation, hindsight and foresight are not so far removed.

Witness what he has to say about seeing then-Cub Lou Brock record his first major league hit in September 1961: “[In] his first at bat…he bounced a single up the middle. I…could hardly have guessed that before [he] was through he’d have added better than 3000 more…What I might have predicted, however, was that he’d get most of them for a team other than the Cubs.”

But as potent as this material may be, it requires an additional connective fiber to give it meaning in the context of Gifford’s present life. And it is Part II, “The Past Sustained,” that provides this fiber and uncovers the true story of The Neighborhood of Baseball. In so doing, it gives the book a greater depth.

For “The Past Sustained” is about what Gifford calls “a kind of religious reprise.” It describes a trip he took to Chicago in August 1980 to sit in the bleachers for a week or two and reconnect with the ghosts of his past, “those…fabled men and boys I’d never met yet knew so intimately…[men of] yesterday, a day that for me and Big Steve and countless others had never ended.”

In attempting this, Gifford validates the past in a way that less self-conscious methods cannot achieve. After all, if the past is physically gone, it continues to exist inside each of us, altered to fit our own specifications but alive nonetheless. Yet without connection to the present, it can only atrophy. For those who respect the past, therefore, it is a constant battle to maintain its relevance

And that is the battle that Gifford engages in here. Much of “The Past Sustained” is caught up in the details of those 1980 Cubs and of Gifford’s brief but intense firsthand exposure to them. But Gifford takes those details and turns them into something else. A particularly testy response by the Wrigley regulars to Dave Kingman T-shirt day becomes a chance for Gifford to ruminate on the reasons for such animosity, reasons that date back to his own childhood.

The 1985 edition of The Neighborhood of Baseball features a preface written over the course of the 1984 season, and in just a couple of pages, we see the author go from elation to complete dejection. It is even worse, Gifford seems to be saying, to come away with nothing after being as close as the Cubs were in 1984. But even in this darkest of moments, the dream of fanhood goes on. Gifford mentions that his daughter Phoebe watched Game Five of the 1984 Playoffs with him and that she was confident until the end that the Cubs would pull it out. Unstated is the premise that the team’s failure to do so represents another rite of passage for both father and child in the neighborhood of baseball. For Gifford, the Cubs’ ignominious defeat lifts his own ingrained patterns of frustration and resignation to a higher level. For his daughter, it is an introduction to the true nature of fanhood in general and Cub fanhood in particular. But for both of them, in a way, it is an affirmation, for the worst has happened, and although tested, their loyalties remain strong and in place

And yet loyalties continue to be tested. The Cubs are a last place team again in 1988, a position to which their fans have grown accustomed over the years. Now, however, the old ballpark, Wrigley Field, is to be modernized in an act of sacrilege that Gifford could not have anticipated seven years ago. To me, that ballpark has always been the neighborhood of baseball, for “neighborhood” carries with it associations of children playing ball in the street on a long summer day, associations of innocence and timelessness that are the greater part of Wrigley Field. At midsummer home games, the stands fill up with school children on vacation and businessmen reaching back into their youth to play hooky once again. This will not happen at night. The game at night is less magical; it is for adults. And although it remains to be seen to what extent night baseball will take over on the North Side of Chicago, its presence at all will make the game more of an entertainment and less a part of life.

In any case, there will always be Gifford’s book. Taken as either memoir or history, it is an excellent entry into the life and mind of a fan, a man who defines his life in some very real sense by measuring it again the team that he loves. In Gifford’s view, the act of fanhood begins in a relationship with a specific team; his book is a celebration of this belief and of all the attendant emotions and attachments that accompany it. In the neighborhood of baseball, he is telling us, it is enough simply to belong.

But what of another type of fan, he or she who is more involved with the sport as a whole than with any particular team? These fans, by and large, are older, and have moved through the years from specificity to generality in their rooting. For them, it seems less important to belong than to appreciate. Even so, their connection to the game takes its form in an attachment to a number of teams rather than to the whole of baseball itself. It is as if the totality of the sport is too much for any one heart to encompass, leaving even those who love the game for itself to find anchor in some degree of specific expression.

One such fan is the poet Donald Hall, and his particular brand of appreciation is collected in Fathers Playing Catch with Sons, a diverse and thoughtful volume of essays that focus mainly on baseball. Hall’s own tenuous loyalties belong to the Red Sox, the Pirates, the Tigers, and the Brooklyn Dodgers, whose move west set him on the path to baseball pantheism. Now, as he says in his introduction, “I do not need particular teams: the game’s the thing.” The body of his book goes on to celebrate the many different levels and areas of the game, and, indeed, to celebrate the act of celebrating itself

Hall’s best essay is the title piece, “Fathers Playing Catch with Sons,” which opens the book and recounts a week Hall spent in March 1973 as a participant in spring training with the Pittsburgh Pirates. The writing here plays well, illustrating as it does the peculiar irony of an overweight middle-aged poet cavorting like a kid and staring awestruck as the likes of Willie Stargell and Dock Ellis prepare for the long season ahead. In fact, it is Hall’s own appreciation of the absurdity of his position that gives this essay its substance. After all, many baseball fans harbor similar fantasies to those Hall acts out here; most of us, however, are too sensible or too inhibited to act upon them. And yet here is a man attempting to break down that final barrier between fan and athlete and, at the same time, letting us in to witness the process. We readers and fellow fans cannot help but laugh, at the same time shaking our heads in admiration for the sheer unbridled courage of this man. For it is a courage that comes from love of the game, from the fan’s universal desire to see deeper into the layers and textures of baseball and come away with a broader understanding. As such, it is a courage that we may not share but can certainly understand

There is melancholy in “Fathers Playing Catch with Sons,” but it is not the expected melancholy of an older man trying to achieve what never could have been; it is instead represented by Hall’s encounters with Luke Wrenn, an eighteen year-old player with no chance of making the team. As we read Hall’s conversations with Luke, it slowly dawns on us that this, too, is what professional baseball is about: the dreams of a young athlete whose athletic prime will not be enough and the appreciation of a middle-aged man in uniform at last. Yet there is nothing wrong with such melancholy; it is a part of the way things have always been, for the player and for the fan. After all, Hall reminds us, “baseball is continuous…an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.” And there is plenty of room in such a continuity: room for melancholy and for celebration and for all the things that come in between

There is also room for further adventures, and Hall describes these in a second essay, “The Country Of Baseball” which recounts his return to the Pirates in 1974, this time as an observer. It is here that Hall’s true obsessions and appreciations come to the fore and that his own conception of fanhood takes shape and finds expression. And the cornerstone of this conception is his belief in baseball as the substance of myth. “Baseball is a country all to itself,” Hall writes. “lt is an old country…Steam locomotives puff across trestles and through tunnels. It is…miniature with distance and old age. The citizens wear baggy pinstripes, knickers, and caps. Seasons and teams shift, blur into each other…Citizens retire to farms…and all at once they are young players again, lean and intense, running the base paths with filed spikes.”

Myth, however, is only effective in its relation to reality, a fact Hall understands and integrates into his essay. There is the story of the night that Dock Ellis set a major league record by hitting the first (and only) three batters he faced. As Hall records it: “They were the first three batters up, in the first inning. They were Cincinnati Reds batters. Dock’s control was just fine.” To Hall, such an act fits in perfectly with the myth-making apparatus of the game, for it is an act that is larger than life, that goes beyond the participants and the observers to become a part of baseball’s lore. Hall makes sure to phrase it in the proper terms: “In the country of baseball, pitchers are always throwing baseballs at batters.

The other pieces in Fathers Playing Catch with Sons are mostly short pieces, ephemera: an ode to Fenway Park here, a brief and shining image of the Cracker Jack Old Timers Baseball Classic there, and two striking essays about baseball writing that in their humor and appreciation reveal as much about the literature of the sport as anything I have ever seen. But perhaps Hall’s own views are spoken most clearly in the closing paragraph to another essay, “Baseball And The Meaning Of Life.” “Baseball,” he writes, “sets off the meaning of life precisely because it is pure of meaning. As the ripples in the sand (in the Kyoto garden) organize and formalize the dust which is dust, so the diamond and rituals of baseball create an elegant, trivial, enchanted grid on which our suffering, shapeless, sinful day leans for the momentary grid of order.” The same is true of myth, or of anything that we use as an organizing principle in our lives. For Donald Hall, it is baseball that fills this role, baseball in its purest state. His is the mythical game, played in the interior stadium, in the country of baseball that is a part of every fan. 

So what does all this mean? Well, to me it means that baseball is still a fan’s game, no matter what happens to it. And fanhood is as illusory a thing as a good knuckleball or a .300 batting average. Perhaps it is this that is most wonderful about baseball, the fact that so many people can watch the game for so long and still come up with so many ways of appreciating it. Yet for all this, we must still be careful. Baseball is a neighborhood, or it is a country. It is most certainly a thing of great value, a fact that both The Neighborhood of Baseball and Fathers Playing Catch with Sons celebrate. The value, however, resides in its little details as much as in its larger movements, and as we move further along, it is precisely these details that seem to become expendable. The lighting of Wrigley Field is just the latest example. Perhaps Donald Hall is right when he says that “the country remains the same,” but some things, once lost, are not retrievable. It is up to us, the fans, to keep the actual game, the neighborhood game, as like as possible to the mythical game. For in the country of baseball, the game may be all we have, but, by the same token, we are all the game has. It is all connected.

And it is out of this connection that these two books speak to us. In their pages, we hear our own stories, our own myths, our own voices. We hear the voices of fans.