So, what do we think the title means? Beyond the obvious, an arm wearing Cubbie blue holding up the baseball found within the familiar lush Boston Ivy, I wonder if there has to be some larger significance here. I'm going to let it roll around for a few days and see what comes up. If it can take on a larger meaning--perhaps a prophesy?--about the Cubs finally coming out of the wilderness with the prize, I'm all for Ulriksen getting it right.
Roger Angell also posted a brief column for the Talk of the Town, entitled "Green"--as in money. It's rather pessimistic and fatalistic in tone, concluding: "Baseball, we’ve discovered once again, is always better as a sample of American business life than as a place for moral lessons. It’s still the national pastime." I think it echoes many of the concerns voiced in this space along the way. Still, whatever he writes, it's nice to see Angell penning commentary about baseball because his cadence smacks of an older era of sportswriter.
His point, at its simplest, is that baseball is in some significant ways different than before, and from his tone, I think it's safe to say "worse" than before. I think he's both right and wrong. He's right that "[b]aseball pressure is much, much higher today—because of the fans’ and the owners’ insistent demand for success, because of the greater competition brought about by the wild card and the inflated postseason and the luxury tax on larger teams, and because of the money." But he never goes on to observe that between the lines, certain truths of the game remain true; and certain hopes will always ring out. Whereas he sees his AAA call-up yelling "Help!" in the face of the veteran's advantages, I see the infielder thinking to himself, "This is my chance. Bring it on."
But I suppose that might just be the Cubs fan in me coming out again. ]]>
I don't have the time to completely dissect the numbers, but looking over a few things on my scorecards, the numbers mainly confirm what I suspected: the Cubs failure to do the little things well from at-bat to at-bat have plagued them yet again.
The play’s premise is rather simple: A superstar named Darren Lemming (patterned after Derek Jeter) for the Empires (patterned after the Yankees) comes out of the closet mid-season. Extreme tension, occasionally comedy, and finally tragedy ensue, fueled by comments to the press by the Empires' racist, homophobic, hillbilly, rookie closer with a tiny IQ. (No word on whether patterned after John Rocker). The script handles all of this drama perfectly, I’d say, a remarkable achievement. (For a great review of the play, read Michael Feingold’s review for the Village Voice).
In particular, a year ago, actor Martin Burke as Mason “Mars” Marzac stole the show, at least for my girlfriend and me. Although, we’re partial to Burke already because for several Christmases he’s performed David Sedaris’s hilarious “The Santaland Diaries,” and has made us laugh to the point that we can barely breathe. Still, as great as Burke is, Greenberg’s character meets him more than halfway.
Through Mason, gay and recently promoted to financial manager for Darren, we see the game of baseball anew, from the vantage point of a man who has been an outsider in every way imaginable his entire life. A man who, until meeting Darren, has never watched an inning. Witnessing Mason discover the joys and graces of the game, it reminds us of why we are so passionate about baseball, and our team.
It’s a reminder worth remembering as a new season begins, I thought, which is the whole point of having a library in the first place, so I read.
From Act Two, as Mason attends his first game, picked up shortly after the leading quote:
Then, with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, the miracle happened.
We got a hit.
Then another.
Then another.
And another and another and—
Think: Mets versus Braves June thirtieth, 2000—where the Mets went into the eighth losing eight to one and scored ten runs in a single inning to take the game eleven-eight.
And we took this game.
And when the winning run crossed home plate, the fans who had stayed rose in this single surge and let out a shout like the “Hallelujah Chorus.”
And it was the first crowd I had ever agreed with.
It settles more directly on the tensions between winning and profiting. It’s complicated further by the pressures from respecting and accommodating tradition, and the will of the fans. It’s even more complicated when you distinguish winning between winning in the sense of in the short term, and in the sense of establishing a baseball team that is run the right way, and therefore has a good chance of being a winning club every season. The same can go for profiting, for that matter.
When it appears that something is necessary to improve profits, but this does nothing to (proportionately) improve your chances to win, what does a team do? To add another level of complication, if this decision in fact goes against the will of your fans and their sense of tradition, what does a team do? Or in another scenario, when it appears that something is necessary to improve your chances to win, but that will cut into profits, what does a team do? And so on, because you can tease out all sorts of situations in which these four interests align and combat in different variations.
It’s not always simple—that’s for sure. But for the most part, I think the tension between profits and winning will always be primary. Either one of these goals always has the potential to trump all of the others.
The real question, then, is this: How do we achieve the proper balance between the competing interests facing baseball teams, and the sport as a whole?
That’s a question that it would take a book—and maybe a long book—to answer.
I have one idea, though: what if we bar certain conglomerate or publicly-traded parent corporations from owning professional baseball teams? It’s a radical idea, but not as radical as it may seem at first. I think, on balance, it’s an idea whose benefits far outweigh its drawbacks. And it certainly speaks to the question of naming rights to Wrigley Field, both as explanation of how we got here in the first place, and for how we might avoid at least a certain kind of unsolvable question in the future.
On the other hand, is it an idea that would ever gain traction with the powers that be? Probably not, but maybe. (And maybe it already has.) Still, it's worth thinking about, at least insofar as it helps us understand the competing tensions facing baseball, and where the scales may tip in the coming years.
At the least, it’s helped me avoid the temptation of just not thinking about it at all because it’s all just so fouled up. It is, all of it, very very fouled up. Every time there’s new news, like the Mitchell Report or the Tejada investigation or the Clemens case, part of me wants to put on my headphones and listen to the new Iron & Wine album because at least in the steel guitar pickup there’s undeniable purity of quality.
Still, we—those of us who love baseball—have to talk about it because the issue isn’t going anywhere any time soon. A problem in most of these conversations is that there are so many faces to the issue that it’s easy to get confused, and hard to consider them analytically. Ultimately, we all look back at a stain on our pastime and see the colors of guilt from just about everyone involved, including perhaps ourselves, the fans.
It’s a mess that will probably prove impossible to completely unpack. In part, that’s because there are some things that will remain secret; some skeletons will remain hidden. But I think it’s worth thinking about the mess anyway, even from my armchair, thinking about where we all might go from here to fix it, and in the course of doing so, how we got here in the first place. If you agree, read on.