I Like Apple Pie, Too

So I've finished Roger Angell's Game Time: A Baseball Companion which is, predictably, brilliant. Angell is basically the alpha and omega of baseball writing (sorry, Michael Lewis), even though people try to damn him with the faint praise of being E. B. White's stepson, and other, possibly more reasonable people, point out that writing about sports for the New Yorker isn't exactly playing fanfares for the common man. The thing about this collection that I kind of didn't like, though, is that the essays are arranged in chronological order by subject matter: we start with stories about spring training and end with pieces on final games of the World Series. But the selected essays span Angell's entire career, 1960s to 2000s, and so there's a fairly jarring temporal disconnect from piece to piece. I can only surmise that this is because if you lined up all his work in a regular order, it would be uncomfortably clear how bitter he is with baseball as it is played in the modern era. Angell is one of those classic fans who's all Polo Grounds-this, Negro Leagues-that, and the idea that players are now paid considerably more money but act considerably less graciously rankles him endlessly. He loves the game for memory's sake: for what it once was and for what he once was as well. But that's not why I like baseball.

In fact I'm probably the opposite of Angell as a fan. (Though I also do like to keep score, when OlderKid and YoungerKid let me, at least). I didn't start liking the game until I was an adult, and then the park I started liking was a cement monstrosity, the players frequently performed with chemical assistance, and, worst of all, the team reliably choked in the first round of the play-offs. I don't even really care that players make as much as they do; if some kid from the D.R. can earn millions for hitting a ball, well, good on him. What I like about baseball is the game itself, the way it takes all these immigrants, and egomaniacs, and goofballs, and over-the-hill greats, and folds them all together, and forces them all to play by its bizarre, pointless rules.

With apologies to the other 2/3 of this book club, this is what makes basketball, soccer, hockey, and football boring to me. In these games, the players run back and forth, trying to achieve the same thing over and over again as many times as they can before time runs out. Baseball, on the other hand, is a game of contingencies that goes on as long as it damn well wants to. Who knows what the best play in a given situation might be? It could work equally well to hit a home run or to tap the lamest, barely-fair dribbler. It all depends, and experience trumps brute strength often enough to keep things interesting.

This isn't a particularly new observation about baseball, I know. But recently I've started thinking that life post-30 is basically a prolonged realization of what older people always seem so disappointed about. I can't retreat from this into idyllic memories of childhood baseball games attended and played, because, well, I don't have any. What I do have, now, is the knowledge that spring training starts in a few short weeks, and, after that the regular season. Yeah, it's just a game, and yeah, it doesn't matter, but as for me: I want to believe.