Baseball

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.
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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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My Baseball Back Pages

Hank Garfield

Fans of my transportation pieces and followers of my Bulgarian sojourn will have to forgive me for writing about baseball again so soon. And I will have to forgive myself for being overseas during the most compelling World Series of my lifetime.

Red Sox-Dodgers: it doesn’t get any better than this.

My earliest memories of baseball fandom are of being a severely left-handed little kid, in an elementary school with many Jewish classmates, at a time when Sandy Koufax was the best pitcher on the planet. I didn’t see much baseball on TV, but I did watch the last game he ever pitched, when the Dodgers made six errors behind him and lost in the World Series to the Baltimore Orioles.

Koufax was to Jews what Muhammad Ali was to black Americans. He is also one of only two ballplayers (Babe Ruth is the other) whose name has become an adjective. When a pitcher is particularly unhittable, we say that he is “Koufaxian.” More than fifty years after his sudden and premature retirement, he remains the gold standard by which pitchers are measured.

The next year we moved to Maine, just in time for the Impossible Dream, the wild, multi-team pennant race won by the Red Sox on the last day of the season. I’ve been a Red Sox fan ever since.

For the first forty-two years of my life, the Dodgers had exactly two managers: Walter Alston and Tommy Lasorda. They were, of course, the first team to integrate (the Red Sox were the last). And they always had great starting pitching, from Koufax and Drysdale to Valenzuela and Hershiser, and now, Clayton Kershaw. They won 1-0 games with an infield hit, a stolen base, a bunt and a sacrifice fly, backed by a complete-game shutout from their ace of the moment.

Dave Roberts, the current Dodger manager, will deservedly get a lot of love from the Fenway crowd for The Stolen Base Heard ‘Round the World in 2004. It’s the single most important baseball moment in the new millennium. For, like the first piece of concrete chiseled from the Berlin Wall, it was the first blow in bringing down an evil empire.

But Roberts lost me as a manager when he pulled a rookie pitcher from his first game with a no-hitter in progress. It’s never been done before: a no-hitter in a major league pitcher’s first game. In 1967, a Red Sox lefty named Billy Rohr came within one strike. Dick Williams, his manager, not only left him in the game until he gave up a hit with two out in the ninth, he let him retire the next batter to complete the shutout. I can’t even remember the name of the kid whom Roberts denied a shot at history. It’s a shame and a travesty.
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If Roberts had been managing the Yankees in 1956, he would have pulled Don Larsen after six perfect innings, and cobbled together the last nine outs with four relievers.

So it will be poetic justice if Kershaw pitches six or seven brilliant innings, and then the Red Sox jump all over the bullpen.

Then again, the Red Sox have looked like the best team in baseball all year long. Unlike the Yankees, who lived and died by the long ball, the Red Sox hit singles and doubles and triples, ran the bases, and got production from the whole lineup. Their worst hitter in April and May, Jackie Bradley Jr., was the star of the American League championship series. Even the substitutes contributed.

The Red Sox have always had great outfields: Yaz, Reggie Smith and Conigliaro; Rice, Lynn and Evans. But the current trio of Andrew Benintendi, Bradley, and Mookie Betts may be the best of them all. This may, in fact, be the best Red Sox team I’ve ever seen. Since blowing the first game of the season, as I watched with increasing disgust in Paddy Murphy’s Pub in Bangor, Maine, some seven months ago, they’ve won 115 times.

Though television has done its best to ruin the World Series, by shoehorning what should be America’s premier sporting event around the college and professional football schedules, I’m still sorry I won’t be able to watch. But I’ll be keeping close tabs on events at Fenway Park, where I saw my first big-league ballgame, and Dodger Stadium, where my two children saw theirs.

When I feel bleak about the world and my country, I’m grateful for the balm of baseball, the made-in-America game that’s still the best team sport ever invented.

And go Sox.

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