Baseball

Hopeful

Hank Garfield

This year Spring arrived all at once, over a weekend that rolled Good Friday and Easter, the Kenduskeag Canoe Race, four day games at Fenway Park, and the Boston Marathon all into one four-day package. The Red Sox are playing as I write this, and it’s not even noon. My bicycle has a new chain and fresh air in the tires. The sun is shining. Today is Try Transit Day in Bangor, and the already low fares for the Community Connector buses are halved, in an effort to attract new riders.

I’m having trouble finding the necessary focus to write about all this, so please forgive me if this entry seems to be about a lot of things. I usually write a baseball piece around Opening Day, but I’m sad that the inevitable has finally happened and the designated hitter will now be standard across both leagues. This follows the election of David Ortiz, the greatest DH the pro game has yet seen, into the Hall of Fame. Never mind that he was half a player – if you’re going to have a DH, it might as well be someone with an outsized personality who repeatedly rose to the occasion, and happened to play for your favorite team.

But if pitchers (except Shohei Ohtani) aren’t going to hit anymore, they should at least be allowed to pitch. Someone needs to tell this to Dave Roberts, manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I’ll always love Roberts the player for The Stolen Base Heard ‘Round the World. But Roberts the manager has pulled a rookie from a no-hitter in progress in his first major league start, and earlier this month he removed Clayton Kershaw from a perfect game. Insanity.

Baseball is no longer America’s game. We prefer the belligerence of our brand of football and its obvious military underpinnings. Television buries the World Series at night to accommodate the fall football schedule. The Super Bowl is our big annual sporting event, and it happens in February, the bleakest month of the year.

I’m old enough now to let most of this stuff go. Easter is a time to celebrate, not to whine. Baseball will survive. In the first inning I caught on TV this year, the Red Sox started a six-run rally with a walk, a single, a sacrifice bunt, and a sacrifice fly. Three straight doubles followed, but small ball opened the door. It put a smile on my face when I went to pick up the bicycle from the shop, in preparation for cycling along the course of the Kenduskeag Canoe Race two days later.

This year I had friends in both the canoe race and the Boston Marathon. I’ll never run a marathon, but I’d like to do the canoe race before I run out of “one of these years.” I suppose what I like best about the canoe race is that it’s first time all year I see a bunch of boats on a body of water. My own boat has a mast and two sails, and requires a bit of preparation before it floats in the spring. But the canoe race tells me that it won’t be long.

Maine is the best place to live in the United States. Having lived in several other places, I’m convinced of this. Sure, our winters are long, but they’re not that stressful if you don’t have to drive in them. Spring, summer, and fall are magical. And Maine is mostly filled with friendly, reasonable people who care about their community and quality of life.

Try Transit Day is an example of this, as public transportation slowly bounces back from the pandemic. The skeleton of the new bus terminal is rising in Bangor’s Pickering Square. When it is completed later this year, it will be a centerpiece of the downtown. Everyone who visits Bangor for an event will see it, and will know that Bangor is committed to a future in which public transportation is a fixture, and not something to be “tried.” We did that, fellow Bangorians, and we should be proud.

More challenges lie ahead, as we navigate the Late Automobile Age in our mostly rural corner of the country. But after an Easter weekend filled with buses, bicycles, boats, and baseball, it’s hard not to be just a little hopeful.

What does Baseball have to do with Slower Traffic (other than slowness)?

Hank Garfield

I might pay more attention to baseball this year.

Last year I paid no attention at all. We had bigger fish to fry in 2020. I missed swaths of the previous two seasons when I was overseas. I feel like I’ve been away from the game a long time.

But the start of baseball season seems particularly propitious this year. It is a season of new hope, slow to unfold but glorious in its undiscovered potential. And though baseball is indeed slow, as its critics are quick to point out, it is also the most optimistic of sports. A team has a chance to win until the final out. A second-string shortstop can be the hero of the World Series. In spring training, every player’s a star, every team a contender. This year, we all could use an extra helping of hope. 

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Star Billing and Symbolism

Hank Garfield

The World Series starts this week, in which the Houston Astros will face the Washington Nationals, formerly the Montreal Expos.

Neither team existed in the year I was born, though Washington had a team in the American League, the Senators, whose single World Series victory occurred in the 1920s. Two incarnations of the Senators abandoned the capital city to become the Minnesota Twins (in 1961) and the Texas Rangers (in 1972). No more major league baseball was played in Washington until the Expos immigrated in 2005.

Baseball, like no other sport, marks our national history. It provides, in my editor’s words, “a lot to chew on.” In a week where Downeast Transportation launched regular weekday bus service between Bar Harbor and Bangor, and Downeaster passenger rail officials floated the idea of commuter service between Maine and Boston, you will perhaps forgive me for writing about it.

I celebrated Yankee Elimination Day for the tenth time in the last ten years. It came late, in a ridiculous parade of relief pitchers I refused to watch, but the World Series will once again be enjoyably Yankee-free. I find it hard to watch a game in which the Yankees are involved, because I just want them to be annihilated. You might think that after four Red Sox championships this century I’d be able to let go of my hatred for the Yankees, and it’s probably a personality flaw that I can’t. But I have suffered too much at their hands. I don’t hate the individual players, mind you, but I don’t want to see them in the Series, either.

Justin Verlander, the Astros’ co-ace, bears a passing resemblance to the actor George Clooney, which is nice, because starting pitchers are the leading men of sports. In no other team sport does an individual player get his name in the next day’s schedule. But the opening game of the Series will be listed as: Washington (Scherzer 11-7) at Houston (Cole 20-5). No one in football (world or American version), hockey, or basketball gets that kind of star billing.

Thus it was especially pleasing to see the Yankees, a team built around its bullpen, lose to the Astros and their marquee starting pitchers. Baseball marginalizes starting pitching at its peril. A good starting pitcher is a painter or an author, and the best part of being a fan is to watch the composition of a masterpiece. (To further belabor this metaphor, some games devolve into collage or pop art, and that’s okay, too – but it is the masterpieces that become memorable.)

Detroit Tigers fans may watch this World Series with a sense of ennui. Their former pitchers continue to enjoy success with other teams. This season, Verlander pitched his third career no-hitter; his first two came with the Tigers. The 2014 Detroit team also featured David Price and Rick Porcello, who won with the Red Sox in last year’s Series, and Max Scherzer and Anibal Sanchez, who led the Nationals to this one. The Tigers lost 114 games this season. Perhaps there is some poetic justice that a city built on cars should be abandoned by the baseball gods in the Late Automobile Age.

Or perhaps this sort of symbolism is just so much crap, made up by romantic writers who couldn’t hit a curveball to save their lives. Maybe the inability of the Atlanta Braves to beat any team but the Cleveland Indians in the Series had nothing to do with karma related to the teams’ offensive cheers and mascots. It could have been pure coincidence that the deadliest earthquake to hit the Bay Area since 1906 occurred during the only World Series played between San Francisco and Oakland. Not since 1958 have the Yankees won a World Series with a Republican president in office – is that a panacea or a punishment? We can only hope that the long-awaited Cubs victory in 2016 did not mark the end of 108 years of American prosperity and respect in the world – though the jury is still out on that one.

The games are too long, too slow, and too late at night. Television has done its best to kill interest in the sublime sport of baseball, with the help of bullpen-besotted managers and number crunchers addicted to strikeouts and home runs. But the World Series still merits my attention. The Bacchanalian celebration of violence and marketing that is the Super Bowl is forgotten the next day. Baseball endures.

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