The Respite Season

So in a few days it will be December, and this is the time of year when baseball is farthest from my mind. After the World Series, it takes a few weeks for me to adjust to the off-season, but humans are habit-forming creatures and we soon settle into a routine absent baseball. I don’t scour the rumor mills all that closely anymore, and there are things like Thanksgiving and Christmas to soak up time and thoughts. For about 6 weeks, starting about now, I miss it the least.

Then will come mid-January, and I will start to feel the itch again. Although, this year might be different, because quite frankly there is simply no dreariness of nature in Austin right now as I know there is in Chicago. It’s warm and sunny as I begin writing, and last night after a huge Thanksgiving meal I sat outside with friends and watched Orion sparkle from a back porch without wearing a coat. Whereas I hear reports from up North that it’s brutally cold and snowy and worse, windy, windy, WINDY.

This being my first Thanksgiving down here after 23 up North (and 1 in England) it’s rather strange, but I am loving the extra 57 minutes of daylight Austin sees today, sitting down by the 30th parallel. It’s the sort of phenomena to a lifelong Midwesterner that helps keep baseball off the mind, except it’s not replaced with gloom as my apartment window is wide open and I am listening to Neil Young -- Harvest, if you’re wondering, because his new album Prairie Wind completes the trilogy (with Harvest Moon) Young started with Harvest, 33 years in the making. Quite frankly, I could not listen to this album up in Chicago this time of year, at least most years, because it opens with “Out on the Weekend,” and the Nashville-tinged pedal steel demands you to at least open a window if not sit outside, and Chicagoans cannot do this while their late autumn evenings slumber in dark and cold, for better or worse. I’m not trying to rub it in; I’m just saying that this year I miss baseball differently as a result of the climate. There are reasons beyond sunshine that make me feel like I am rolling 7’s lately, but the climate is part of why life feels much less bleak to me than it usually does around now. Maybe it affects me more than some people, but inside my head, there is a world of difference.

I spent several Monday evenings last year at the dive bar on my street in Wicker Park, which is the particular scene of bleakness I’m thinking about. It would be dark before I got out of work, and I’d probably stop in at the gym to exercise while traffic cleared before driving home, downtown. I’d get home, heat some frozen food, and stroll down to the bar in time for Monday Night Football. A few people would be watching, but if the Bulls were on I could usually talk the bartender into letting me switch the one corner TV away from football. She always had my beer – MGD, bottle – on its way before I ever sat down.

I would take a couple of notebooks: my organizer -- if you could call it that, since I keep it freehand -- which I update on Mondays for the rest of the week, and also one of my pocket notebooks in case I got any ideas for writing. By the winter solstice, until the thaw several weeks or months later, those ideas usually stopped coming, along with most people at the bar. It was not cheerful, because everyone was mentally fortifying themselves for the brunt of winter. A few guys would walk in, take a shot of Jim Beam, drink a beer, repeat each once or twice more, and then leave for home without saying a word to anyone -- and this was Wicker Park for crying out loud, not a blue collar neighborhood these days.

Those evenings, it was impossible to think about baseball because baseball is summer, and sunlight, and warmth, and life in the air; these evenings were the opposite. Down here, it’s impossible to think about baseball because there is a ton of stuff to do approaching -- tons of music, the new Townes Van Zandt biographical movie opening, and gallery exhibits I want to see now that baseball does not take my time and Chicago’s winter does not take my energy -- and the availability of all this stuff to do in nice weather is still fresh to me in the weeks approaching Christmas.

It vaguely bothers me that if the season began today, the Cubs still have Neifi & Cedeno as their best options at shortstop, and a likely outfield of Murton, Patterson & Hairston, because if we’re honest, there is not one person in that group (half the lineup) who has had one entire or full good year in the big leagues. I like that they signed relief pitchers who will walk many less hitters; the chatterers elsewhere don’t seem to dwell as much as I would on the Cubs problem last season with bullpen walks, but to me, this was a huge problem and I’m glad they addressed it. But there is still the matter of the other half of the lineup.

I won’t get into the money of it, because I kind of suck at analyzing the business side of baseball and I should not pretend otherwise. As far as I’m concerned, if free agency has to exist, I am in favor of signing several-year contracts to avoid the mercenary mentality, even if it ends up making the contracts for relief pitchers like Eyre and Howry seem excessive and expensive. It probably does not make as much sense business-wise, but whatever. I am good at math but bad at finance, besides which all my romantic baseball notions usually get in the way. This is why the stereotype of people prone to write is to end up broke, alone and drunk; it is rare that we are good at business, and it is true that we prefer not to think about it unless absolutely necessary. I exaggerate, but only sort of.

So I’ll let the other people worry about the lack of free agents out there for the time being, while I relax and ponder other things for a few weeks. There is still plenty of time for Hendry to get it right, besides which maybe the pieces the Cubs already have will surprise us. Either way, this is the time of year for a brief respite from analyzing, and then when it comes time to begin thinking about baseball again, if you happen to find yourself in a place that is not cold, dark and depressing after Christmas, in January, even better.

And just in case it gets cold down here, I do have my Cubs afghan handy, and maybe it’s just me, but for the next few weeks a nap will probably make more sense than dithering about relief pitchers.