Apparently I don’t remember my first MLB game.
I realized this recently, chatting with my dad about a particularly American ritual: the first baseball game shared by father and son.
June 18, 2000, a Sunday, is the date we deduced to be the day. I said sorry for not remembering. I was only seven years old. And what could initiate a lifetime of frustration with Boston if not a buried memory of trying to find parking at Fenway?
I must admit: the largest portion of my familiarity with baseball comes from baseball cards. As an artist and critic, it makes sense that aesthetics would introduce closeness. And trading cards offer the utmost tactility. They are intimately understood and felt strongest via one center of our world: the palms of our own hands.
A well-handled card provides evidence of paid attention. Whenever I sit at my desk, I shuffle through cards. I enjoy their pictures. Plan my next move, my next sentence, my next route of attack. Among the stacks: shortstops, monsters, chrome surfaces and changing fonts. Athleticism and fantasy: You might say these are some movers of my thought. I believe in being nimble and, when necessary, unreal.
There are advantages to being a specter. To illustrate, here’s an old secret let loose: I ghostwrote the first story I ever published. I was 13 years old. I waxed poetic on baseball cards. The byline’s colleague raised an eyebrow: Huh. Kind of a different style…
So the subject matter does run deep. And yet I can’t remember what that article even really said. And I definitely can’t remember the contents of that June 18, 2000 game. My dad read the draft of this piece and wondered if there weren’t more sensory details to include about that Fenway trip. People love that stuff, he says. You know: hot dog vendors and the noise of the crowd.
Too bad I can’t remember anything sufficiently juicy. Fenway was a long ride for my tiny child brain, and, on long car rides as a kid, I’d often be absorbed in a book or toy. So I probably imagined getting out of the car as an interruption to whatever I was doing. Inside the park, there was nothing especially bombastic of note. Raúl Mondesí hit two home runs for the Blue Jays. The game ran just a minute shy of three hours, with Toronto lightly whomping Boston 5-1.
A game more ordinary than historic, sure, and indicative of my relationship to baseball, which always been at a remove. Compare that to my dad’s first post on this blog—the most poetic thing I’ve ever read from him. So succinct, pure and real! It moved me. So I cannot exceed that here. My age itself is restraint; impish confidence twinkles with myopia. Nearsightedness has a certain magical quality, after all, like when faraway lights appear as stars.
Of course there’s no magic to writing, or, similarly, to recovery. Both are subjects of time. So I’ll be writing a guest post here and there as this blog’s usual author convalesces. “Everything but the show” is a thematic conceit in which I’m happy to operate. I offer some words on baseball I hope are true to my dad’s stated framework of culture, history and journalism. These are all important guides for my own thinking. They revolve around something my father writes intuitively and suggestively: memory, and its simple justice of recognition.
A beat-up card records the story of its owner. Creases, tears and rips can speak. Dugouts, parking lots, bleachers, home plate—these things have voices, too. There are many objects and places in this world which want their plea heard: I was here.
My first baseball game almost retreated beyond this acknowledgment. But reading my father’s words about his own father, I realize the game was important, even if I don’t remember it.
A ritual is enacted and a child can take it or leave it when they build their personal mythos. I am not an athlete like my dad. But I do love, as he does, speed. Speed, I’d say, is the circulation of things. Sometimes it’s in an atmosphere—the charged signal of a big crowd. Sometimes it’s more personal. Sometime it’s the turn of a plastic knob that activates everything unexpectedly.
I can close my eyes and imagine the quiet of my dad listening to baseball on his car radio. Remembering sweetly his own father. I listen from the backseat.
A radio crackles, and confirms: history erupts through love.
Wow Awesome Alex there is nothing better and more Americana then baseball w Dad in my opinion . And yes baseball cards were my toys as a child always had them close by !!!! Great Stuff so enjoyed that piece
One does not have to be an athlete to enjoy this true game. The best lines for that came from the Movie "The Natural" when Max Mercy was talking to Roy Hobbs before the last game. You can still make this game fun. An Excellent write up. My Dad did not take me to my First Game. My Mom did. I was 13. I took my son in 1983 to a Red Sox- Oriole DH at the Old Memorial Stadium. He had a ball. and has become a life long Oriole fan.