Day Game
Note: This story contains some language and themes that may not be suitable for younger readers.
I love day game baseball.
Now, I’m not talking about the traditional lunchtime start scheduled somewhere near opening day when baseball is popular again and 21st century people pretend it’s 1947. No, during those day games the stands are packed, claustrophobic, and loud. Those day games I do not love.
I love the 1:10p.m. first pitch in September.
By that time my home team has as much chance of making the playoffs as I do of seducing the starting pitcher’s wife. By that time people have seen a little preseason football and remember what their true sporting addictions are. By that time the serrated edge of the summer’s heat has worn down and I can recline in my seat, throw my legs over the empty chair-back in front of me, and feel the sun and breeze combine to revive my spirit.
I love the September day game because of the strange reality it creates. As I take my seat, I’m becoming a part of a major cultural event. The event I am about to witness will be on all the sports shows and take up space on my city paper’s front page. (Yes, I still read the actual paper paper.)
The game is public, important, and yet solitary – or damn close, at least. At the day game I become a little medieval monarch holding court above his own private jousting match. As I chew my peanuts and keep score I have this titillating sense that the millionaires who frolic on the lined field below me do so for my enjoyment and mine alone.
There are other people in attendance, of course. A few thousand souls sprinkled about the park like distant, neighboring stars slung into the void of deep space, rattling around in the great bubble that is the universe. Like the stars in the firmament there are a lot of us (I suppose), but what’s even more mind-bending than our multitudinous presence are the vast gaps between us that make us seem so rare.
All of this is so compelling to me that over the last six years I’ve found I crave it to such a degree that in July I root for my team to suck so that come September poor attendance will be guaranteed.
I cherish the late season day game for memories like this one from a few seasons ago.
The legendary clean-up hitter for the visiting Cleveland team was awaiting his at bat. There he stood, just four feet from the front row’s railing, sweeping his bat back and forth across the grass and no doubt imagining he was somewhere else swinging a golf club. With each swing, I could see the player’s heavy back muscles pinch, bunch, and release, and it was not hard to imagine why 43 times this season this two hundred and forty pound man in an Indians jersey had hit a pitch over a far distant fence and transformed a baseball into a stranger’s souvenir.
Just on the other side of the railing from him was one of our proud fans. The fan’s body was only slightly wider than the bat the player swung aimlessly at the grass, and clearly our fan’s skinny body was filled to its pointy Adam’s apple with beer. The drunk fan was young, a full decade and a half younger than the player before him, but he did not respect his elder.
The fan leaned over the rail and further shrank the distance by craning his neck toward the clean up hitter. There must have just been a foot or so remaining between them. It felt wrong, improper, too intimate, like the fan was preparing to ask the player for his ATM pin code or perhaps about to whisper a secret question into the player’s ear: “Tell me, Legendary Opposing Player, who will give your induction speech at the Hall of Fame?”
But the fan wasn’t whispering; he was yelling at the top of his lungs. He was yelling a creative and profane monologue that had nothing to do with Cooperstown. He was yelling about how old the hitter was and how by now he must have a bushel of gray pubes because he was Just So Damn Old.
Our fan was yelling about steroids and how this must have shrunk the opposing player’s penis and rendered it unsatisfying to others and, quite possibly, entirely inoperable, even to the player himself. But, fear not, our fan yelled, the opposing player should not worry because our fan was quite happy to insert a number of his different – and fully functioning – body parts into the player’s wife to compensate for the clean up hitter's unfortunate deficit.
We all heard all of it. Further, other than our fan’s passionate speech all we heard was space, silence, and the occasional snap of a pitch hitting a catcher’s mitt. I felt words like “bushel” and “penis” and “big-toe” echo off the hard plastic of the empty stadium seats and magnify in volume and force. I looked about in disbelief and caught the eye of my closest neighbor, a man nine rows in front of me. We frowned and shrugged at one another as we continued to listen.
The opposing player just swung his bat with an invariable rhythm, its tip caressing the grass from left to right and then right to left, over and over again. Then the player walked up to the plate and singled the second pitch to right field. Our fan shrugged his shoulders and returned to his beer. The game went on.
I was transfixed. I had seen something ugly and wrong, but also sublime. It was as if a passion play had been performed, and it had been performed just for me.
Day games in September are magical.
That’s why, and I apologize for grousing here, I was straight-up miffed when the cute couple came in during the second inning and sat directly in front of me. They were blonde and perky and no more than three years removed from their high school graduation ceremony.
The girl wore cut-off shorts that all but demanded I imagine her naked backside pressing against me. With the shorts she wore an over-priced, brand new home team t-shirt that had been intentionally distressed to appear old.
The boy, in his tan slacks and polo shirt, looked mildly over-dressed by comparison. His face wore one of those bristly cool-boy beards usually connected to lips usually connected to an overpriced beer someone had brewed in a basement.
But none of that matters.
What matters is that there was a ghost town of empty seats in front of them that they could have chosen, but did not. There were whole sections of vacant seating to their left and to their right that they could have chosen, but did not.
Instead they had chosen to invade my kingdom, to settle their asses in the seats in front of me, their heads now a mere two feet from my own. It was pointless. It ruined my solitude. I could hear their breathing and their amorous chatter about whether they should include an accent wall in their apartment’s living room. It made no sense, but there it was, and I refused to move. On principle.
I turned my attention from the game to them. All was very well with them, but a slight shift in mood entered the boy during the top of the fifth inning.
He started patting down his hair every minute or so. He started fiddling with his front right pants pocket, not in the way a man surreptitiously scratches a crotch itch, but in the manner I sometimes use to check for my keys in a sudden, irrational panic. The boy started biting his nails, tapping his toes, and squeezing his girl’s left hand with an affectionate desperation. He ordered a massive beer from the strolling vendor. He consumed it in two minutes.
Then with one out in the bottom of the fifth my eyes wandered up to the concourse at the top of our seating section, and the reason for his discomfort became clear. I looked and knew what the nervous boy also knew, but his girl did not yet know. I knew what was soon to come, and I thought, “Sweet Jesus, no.”
The first thing (or was it person?) I spotted at the top of the aisle was Billy the Baseball. In reality Billy is, of course, an underpaid performer in a gigantic, suffocating costume who cavorts and fails to entertain.
However, “on stage” Billy is our team’s beloved but unfortunate mascot. Billy is a gigantic baseball replete with bright red stitching, arms, legs, and googly eyes. Yet to those with eyes to see, Billy actually calls to mind a giant’s surgically-repaired testicle, a post-op gonad touched by dark magic and made to dance.
Beside Billy was a cameraman, and seeing the camera was what made everything dreadfully clear.
As the last out of the fifth was recorded, the testicle and the cameraman both began to descend toward us. The boy gave them a quick nod, rose from his seat, yanked his girl from hers, and retrieved a ring box from his pocket.
The girl looked confused for a moment, but as the cameraman brought them into frame and Billy jiggled nearby, she started to put it together. As the boy descended to one knee before her, she looked around nervously and started to suck at her bottom lip. As the boy uttered his proposal, she looked from him to her sandals and back to him again. Then she nodded, brushed her hair from her face, and embraced him.
During the scene unfolding before me, I looked beyond the girl to the massive screen across the stadium from our seats, and I saw the three of us shimmering upon it. There was no one else in the picture. I looked like the girl’s father who’d just blessed their union with kind words and mixed emotions. A throaty cheer came up from the fans. I clapped a bit and smiled out of the right side of my mouth. I died inside.
The image of the three of us left the jumbotron, we all sat down, and the sixth inning began. The boy and girl cuddled, but in the bottom of the inning the boy told her he needed to use the restroom. He asked her if she would be all right. She smiled and told him that she was a fully-functioning adult and could hold it together for a few minutes while he took a leak. The boy winked, left his seat, and moved up the stairs to the concourse, taking them two at a time.
I followed him to the bathroom.
The bathroom was almost vacant except for the boy and me. I took the urinal beside his. I spoke to him.
I said, “She was not into that at all. Not at all. You know that, right?”
He looked at me over his right shoulder with what appeared to be vacant, intoxicated eyes. He wore what I could best describe as an ambient smile – he was not smiling per se, but his whole face seemed suffused with the same vibe a contented smile tends to create.
“Huh?” he said. “You’re that guy sitting by himself right behind us, right? Huh?”
I nodded. “Your girlfriend, your fiancé, your whatever she’s called now, was totally not into that jumbotron proposal you pulled out there. I mean, when you asked a woman to spend the rest of her life with you, you had William the Fucking Giant Testicle as your faithful wingman. Really? Think about that. Just for a moment at least. Think.”
The boy’s covert smile became overt, and it took hold of his lips as he spoke. “But she said, ‘Yes’.” Then he pulled the flush handle with gusto, spun on his left heel, and moved toward the bank of stainless steel sinks. I followed him. We began to wash our hands side by side.
I had more to say. “I was reading online that all sorts of polls have indicated that women find that kind of thing really off-putting, hyper-macho, and egocentric. I mean, a marriage proposal is such a personal thing, and – without consulting her – you put it on a big screen in front of a bunch of strangers. And your fiancé probably can’t even name five players off our team. In other words, she doesn’t care about baseball. It’s all about you, buddy, and this kind of thing – proposals, marriages, families – should never be just about you.”
The boy looked at me again, this time over his left shoulder. He wasn’t smiling anymore, but he didn’t look angry either. He had the sort of face I imagine I have when I come home from work and notice that my cat, displeased with the condition of her litter box, decided to take a statement shit on the bathroom floor.
“She said, ‘Yes,” he repeated. This time he said it with deliberate slowness. Then he wiped his hands on his hair and left the bathroom.
I followed him back onto the concourse. The boy was moving quickly back to our aisle, but I skip-stepped to catch up with him before he reached the stairs. I tapped him on the shoulder, he spun to face me, and spoke first.
“Damn! What the hell is eating you, old man!”
“I’m only forty-eight,” I said.
“Whatever. I get it. You don’t approve of the way I asked Rachel to marry me. Like I care. You’re not her daddy. Or mine.” Then he cocked his head to the right, sort of like he suddenly decided to change gears in the conversation. “OK,” he said. “I’ll bite, old man. I see the ring on your finger. Tell me how you proposed.”
My eyes dropped from his face to the concrete floor and locked onto a spent cigarette butt. The butt shouldn’t have been there. People hadn’t been allowed to smoke in the stadium for years, but there it was, and I stared at it.
“It was an Italian restaurant. Her favorite. I rented out the whole special events room for the night. Just for the two of us. A huge table with multiple courses laid out just for the two of us. Her favorite dishes. We showed up at the restaurant in jeans and sweaters, but I’d stashed a tux for me and a gown for her. Her dress was kind of modelled on Belle’s ball gown from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Silly, I know, but it was her favorite movie. I had the restaurant move their piano into the room, and I played her a song. It all worked in the end, I suppose.”
“Wow. Nicely played,” the boy said, and then he switched gears again. “But, I don’t see her here with you today at the game. You all still together? Or are y’all on the outs, but you can’t bring yourself to take the ring off yet? Old man, you got in my face, in my stuff for no reason, so I’m getting in yours. Where’s the woman?”
I continued to stare at the crushed cigarette. “She’s dead. Six years ago.” I couldn’t bring myself to say how it had happened. The ten seconds that I should have filled with that part of the story simply ticked by empty and unoccupied.
Then I felt myself surrounded by strong, thin arms. I felt the cactus spikes of a short, hipster beard brush my cheek and poke into my neck. I felt the vibration of the boy’s deep voice against my shoulders and my chest. He said, “Death will be no more. And he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Mourning will cease because, he says, ‘I am making all things new.’”
I stared at the cigarette butt as I listened. I stared and wondered about all the things that shouldn’t be but are. And the scattered souls around us emitted a weak cheer as a run crossed the plate.
Now, I’m not talking about the traditional lunchtime start scheduled somewhere near opening day when baseball is popular again and 21st century people pretend it’s 1947. No, during those day games the stands are packed, claustrophobic, and loud. Those day games I do not love.
I love the 1:10p.m. first pitch in September.
By that time my home team has as much chance of making the playoffs as I do of seducing the starting pitcher’s wife. By that time people have seen a little preseason football and remember what their true sporting addictions are. By that time the serrated edge of the summer’s heat has worn down and I can recline in my seat, throw my legs over the empty chair-back in front of me, and feel the sun and breeze combine to revive my spirit.
I love the September day game because of the strange reality it creates. As I take my seat, I’m becoming a part of a major cultural event. The event I am about to witness will be on all the sports shows and take up space on my city paper’s front page. (Yes, I still read the actual paper paper.)
The game is public, important, and yet solitary – or damn close, at least. At the day game I become a little medieval monarch holding court above his own private jousting match. As I chew my peanuts and keep score I have this titillating sense that the millionaires who frolic on the lined field below me do so for my enjoyment and mine alone.
There are other people in attendance, of course. A few thousand souls sprinkled about the park like distant, neighboring stars slung into the void of deep space, rattling around in the great bubble that is the universe. Like the stars in the firmament there are a lot of us (I suppose), but what’s even more mind-bending than our multitudinous presence are the vast gaps between us that make us seem so rare.
All of this is so compelling to me that over the last six years I’ve found I crave it to such a degree that in July I root for my team to suck so that come September poor attendance will be guaranteed.
I cherish the late season day game for memories like this one from a few seasons ago.
The legendary clean-up hitter for the visiting Cleveland team was awaiting his at bat. There he stood, just four feet from the front row’s railing, sweeping his bat back and forth across the grass and no doubt imagining he was somewhere else swinging a golf club. With each swing, I could see the player’s heavy back muscles pinch, bunch, and release, and it was not hard to imagine why 43 times this season this two hundred and forty pound man in an Indians jersey had hit a pitch over a far distant fence and transformed a baseball into a stranger’s souvenir.
Just on the other side of the railing from him was one of our proud fans. The fan’s body was only slightly wider than the bat the player swung aimlessly at the grass, and clearly our fan’s skinny body was filled to its pointy Adam’s apple with beer. The drunk fan was young, a full decade and a half younger than the player before him, but he did not respect his elder.
The fan leaned over the rail and further shrank the distance by craning his neck toward the clean up hitter. There must have just been a foot or so remaining between them. It felt wrong, improper, too intimate, like the fan was preparing to ask the player for his ATM pin code or perhaps about to whisper a secret question into the player’s ear: “Tell me, Legendary Opposing Player, who will give your induction speech at the Hall of Fame?”
But the fan wasn’t whispering; he was yelling at the top of his lungs. He was yelling a creative and profane monologue that had nothing to do with Cooperstown. He was yelling about how old the hitter was and how by now he must have a bushel of gray pubes because he was Just So Damn Old.
Our fan was yelling about steroids and how this must have shrunk the opposing player’s penis and rendered it unsatisfying to others and, quite possibly, entirely inoperable, even to the player himself. But, fear not, our fan yelled, the opposing player should not worry because our fan was quite happy to insert a number of his different – and fully functioning – body parts into the player’s wife to compensate for the clean up hitter's unfortunate deficit.
We all heard all of it. Further, other than our fan’s passionate speech all we heard was space, silence, and the occasional snap of a pitch hitting a catcher’s mitt. I felt words like “bushel” and “penis” and “big-toe” echo off the hard plastic of the empty stadium seats and magnify in volume and force. I looked about in disbelief and caught the eye of my closest neighbor, a man nine rows in front of me. We frowned and shrugged at one another as we continued to listen.
The opposing player just swung his bat with an invariable rhythm, its tip caressing the grass from left to right and then right to left, over and over again. Then the player walked up to the plate and singled the second pitch to right field. Our fan shrugged his shoulders and returned to his beer. The game went on.
I was transfixed. I had seen something ugly and wrong, but also sublime. It was as if a passion play had been performed, and it had been performed just for me.
Day games in September are magical.
That’s why, and I apologize for grousing here, I was straight-up miffed when the cute couple came in during the second inning and sat directly in front of me. They were blonde and perky and no more than three years removed from their high school graduation ceremony.
The girl wore cut-off shorts that all but demanded I imagine her naked backside pressing against me. With the shorts she wore an over-priced, brand new home team t-shirt that had been intentionally distressed to appear old.
The boy, in his tan slacks and polo shirt, looked mildly over-dressed by comparison. His face wore one of those bristly cool-boy beards usually connected to lips usually connected to an overpriced beer someone had brewed in a basement.
But none of that matters.
What matters is that there was a ghost town of empty seats in front of them that they could have chosen, but did not. There were whole sections of vacant seating to their left and to their right that they could have chosen, but did not.
Instead they had chosen to invade my kingdom, to settle their asses in the seats in front of me, their heads now a mere two feet from my own. It was pointless. It ruined my solitude. I could hear their breathing and their amorous chatter about whether they should include an accent wall in their apartment’s living room. It made no sense, but there it was, and I refused to move. On principle.
I turned my attention from the game to them. All was very well with them, but a slight shift in mood entered the boy during the top of the fifth inning.
He started patting down his hair every minute or so. He started fiddling with his front right pants pocket, not in the way a man surreptitiously scratches a crotch itch, but in the manner I sometimes use to check for my keys in a sudden, irrational panic. The boy started biting his nails, tapping his toes, and squeezing his girl’s left hand with an affectionate desperation. He ordered a massive beer from the strolling vendor. He consumed it in two minutes.
Then with one out in the bottom of the fifth my eyes wandered up to the concourse at the top of our seating section, and the reason for his discomfort became clear. I looked and knew what the nervous boy also knew, but his girl did not yet know. I knew what was soon to come, and I thought, “Sweet Jesus, no.”
The first thing (or was it person?) I spotted at the top of the aisle was Billy the Baseball. In reality Billy is, of course, an underpaid performer in a gigantic, suffocating costume who cavorts and fails to entertain.
However, “on stage” Billy is our team’s beloved but unfortunate mascot. Billy is a gigantic baseball replete with bright red stitching, arms, legs, and googly eyes. Yet to those with eyes to see, Billy actually calls to mind a giant’s surgically-repaired testicle, a post-op gonad touched by dark magic and made to dance.
Beside Billy was a cameraman, and seeing the camera was what made everything dreadfully clear.
As the last out of the fifth was recorded, the testicle and the cameraman both began to descend toward us. The boy gave them a quick nod, rose from his seat, yanked his girl from hers, and retrieved a ring box from his pocket.
The girl looked confused for a moment, but as the cameraman brought them into frame and Billy jiggled nearby, she started to put it together. As the boy descended to one knee before her, she looked around nervously and started to suck at her bottom lip. As the boy uttered his proposal, she looked from him to her sandals and back to him again. Then she nodded, brushed her hair from her face, and embraced him.
During the scene unfolding before me, I looked beyond the girl to the massive screen across the stadium from our seats, and I saw the three of us shimmering upon it. There was no one else in the picture. I looked like the girl’s father who’d just blessed their union with kind words and mixed emotions. A throaty cheer came up from the fans. I clapped a bit and smiled out of the right side of my mouth. I died inside.
The image of the three of us left the jumbotron, we all sat down, and the sixth inning began. The boy and girl cuddled, but in the bottom of the inning the boy told her he needed to use the restroom. He asked her if she would be all right. She smiled and told him that she was a fully-functioning adult and could hold it together for a few minutes while he took a leak. The boy winked, left his seat, and moved up the stairs to the concourse, taking them two at a time.
I followed him to the bathroom.
The bathroom was almost vacant except for the boy and me. I took the urinal beside his. I spoke to him.
I said, “She was not into that at all. Not at all. You know that, right?”
He looked at me over his right shoulder with what appeared to be vacant, intoxicated eyes. He wore what I could best describe as an ambient smile – he was not smiling per se, but his whole face seemed suffused with the same vibe a contented smile tends to create.
“Huh?” he said. “You’re that guy sitting by himself right behind us, right? Huh?”
I nodded. “Your girlfriend, your fiancé, your whatever she’s called now, was totally not into that jumbotron proposal you pulled out there. I mean, when you asked a woman to spend the rest of her life with you, you had William the Fucking Giant Testicle as your faithful wingman. Really? Think about that. Just for a moment at least. Think.”
The boy’s covert smile became overt, and it took hold of his lips as he spoke. “But she said, ‘Yes’.” Then he pulled the flush handle with gusto, spun on his left heel, and moved toward the bank of stainless steel sinks. I followed him. We began to wash our hands side by side.
I had more to say. “I was reading online that all sorts of polls have indicated that women find that kind of thing really off-putting, hyper-macho, and egocentric. I mean, a marriage proposal is such a personal thing, and – without consulting her – you put it on a big screen in front of a bunch of strangers. And your fiancé probably can’t even name five players off our team. In other words, she doesn’t care about baseball. It’s all about you, buddy, and this kind of thing – proposals, marriages, families – should never be just about you.”
The boy looked at me again, this time over his left shoulder. He wasn’t smiling anymore, but he didn’t look angry either. He had the sort of face I imagine I have when I come home from work and notice that my cat, displeased with the condition of her litter box, decided to take a statement shit on the bathroom floor.
“She said, ‘Yes,” he repeated. This time he said it with deliberate slowness. Then he wiped his hands on his hair and left the bathroom.
I followed him back onto the concourse. The boy was moving quickly back to our aisle, but I skip-stepped to catch up with him before he reached the stairs. I tapped him on the shoulder, he spun to face me, and spoke first.
“Damn! What the hell is eating you, old man!”
“I’m only forty-eight,” I said.
“Whatever. I get it. You don’t approve of the way I asked Rachel to marry me. Like I care. You’re not her daddy. Or mine.” Then he cocked his head to the right, sort of like he suddenly decided to change gears in the conversation. “OK,” he said. “I’ll bite, old man. I see the ring on your finger. Tell me how you proposed.”
My eyes dropped from his face to the concrete floor and locked onto a spent cigarette butt. The butt shouldn’t have been there. People hadn’t been allowed to smoke in the stadium for years, but there it was, and I stared at it.
“It was an Italian restaurant. Her favorite. I rented out the whole special events room for the night. Just for the two of us. A huge table with multiple courses laid out just for the two of us. Her favorite dishes. We showed up at the restaurant in jeans and sweaters, but I’d stashed a tux for me and a gown for her. Her dress was kind of modelled on Belle’s ball gown from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Silly, I know, but it was her favorite movie. I had the restaurant move their piano into the room, and I played her a song. It all worked in the end, I suppose.”
“Wow. Nicely played,” the boy said, and then he switched gears again. “But, I don’t see her here with you today at the game. You all still together? Or are y’all on the outs, but you can’t bring yourself to take the ring off yet? Old man, you got in my face, in my stuff for no reason, so I’m getting in yours. Where’s the woman?”
I continued to stare at the crushed cigarette. “She’s dead. Six years ago.” I couldn’t bring myself to say how it had happened. The ten seconds that I should have filled with that part of the story simply ticked by empty and unoccupied.
Then I felt myself surrounded by strong, thin arms. I felt the cactus spikes of a short, hipster beard brush my cheek and poke into my neck. I felt the vibration of the boy’s deep voice against my shoulders and my chest. He said, “Death will be no more. And he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Mourning will cease because, he says, ‘I am making all things new.’”
I stared at the cigarette butt as I listened. I stared and wondered about all the things that shouldn’t be but are. And the scattered souls around us emitted a weak cheer as a run crossed the plate.