The index of self destru.., p.6
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, page 6
There was still half an hour until first pitch, but the kid was already waiting at their seats. He was around Margo’s age, Frank guessed. All these guys were so frighteningly young, and so sure of themselves. How much could they possibly know?
“Mr. Doyle,” the kid said. “Sam Waxworth. It’s good to meet you.”
He stood and offered his hand. They exchanged a few words before turning to the field to watch the lineups being announced. After all the players had been named and caps tipped, a flotilla of military personnel—active duty, veterans, members of every service branch—flooded the field for the national anthem.
“We ask you all now to stand,” the PA announcer intoned, “and honor the sacrifice of those who fight to preserve our freedom.”
An American flag the size of a football field was unfurled on the outfield and set waving. Frank liked these moments, and not just because Eddie was among the people being implicitly honored. There weren’t many places in this city where the words sacrifice and freedom were still used without irony. After the anthem was sung, a fighter jet flew over the park, drowning out the cheers.
“Don’t you think this is all a bit much?” Waxworth asked as the noise faded from the air.
“Not at all,” Frank answered.
“What does it say about a great democracy that it has to insist upon itself in this way? It’s more appropriate for some tiny totalitarian outpost that spends its take from the state-owned mineral mine on parades and uniforms while the public starves.”
“If you ask me, we could stand to do more to honor our warriors. When I was growing up, the players actually served. Pee Wee Reese—the Dodgers’ captain, for godsake—spent two years in the Pacific.”
“Your son was in Iraq,” Waxworth said.
“Is that a question?”
Eddie’s military record was just the kind of thing Frank should have wanted to discuss for a rehabilitative profile. Critics loved to point out that he’d never served in Vietnam. This wasn’t his fault—though he’d been against the war at the time, he’d been too old to be at risk of getting called up, and he hadn’t taken any steps to avoid it—but that distinction hardly mattered to his opponents, who’d treated him like just another run-of-the-mill chicken hawk. When Eddie went over, they’d been forced to acknowledge that he had a real stake in things, even if they didn’t agree with his stance.
“It must affect how you respond to this performance.”
“I’ve got news for you,” Frank said. “What you see as just extraneous bits of jingoism are secretly the purpose of the entire event. The game exists to be a ritual in the nation’s civic religion.”
When the flyover was through, the crowd stayed standing to applaud as Tom Seaver—The Franchise—emerged from the bullpen. He walked slowly toward the mound, positioned himself just in front of the rubber, and threw the ceremonial first pitch, a strike to Mike Piazza. Probably the two best players to wear the team’s uniform. Frank had gotten to know both over the years, but especially Seaver, who’d led the Mets to their impossible World Series win in ’69, when Frank was working for Mayor Lindsay. Seaver had been the Mets’ color guy in the nineties, the first to ask Frank up to the booth. Those trips had been one of the great thrills in his life for a time, until they brought everything crashing down.
“Can I buy you a beer?” Frank asked the kid, having finished his own. Margo had warned him before the game to moderate himself, but he wasn’t going to let his daughter tell him how to behave, certainly not in the form of absurd euphemisms like “moderate yourself.”
“Why don’t I get this round?” Waxworth said. “It’s on the magazine.”
While the kid bought their beers and Pelfrey threw the last of his warm-ups, Frank flipped through the pages of his program to find the scorecard. He’d kept score at every game he’d attended since he was a teenager, and he’d held on to every program. The one from that last game at Ebbets Field was probably worth a few thousand dollars. Would have been worth ten times that much if he’d put it straight into cellophane instead of filling it in.
The kid handed over Frank’s beer and pulled out his own program.
“You keep score?” Frank asked.
Waxworth nodded.
“For all your hatred of sabermetrics, a scorecard is a form of data entry, a kind of computer. Put differently, a computer is just an extraordinarily powerful scorecard—a way to keep track of what happened.”
“Collecting data is all well and good,” Frank responded. “I’m not opposed to data. What I reject is the idea that it captures everything. When you take what happens on the field and shrink it down to fit on this page, so much gets lost. That’s why I add these notations—an asterisk for a great fielding play, a cross for a bit of solid contact.”
“I use your notations,” Waxworth said. “I have ever since I read your essay about them in The Crack of the Bat. That essay was what made me start keeping score in the first place.”
“So you understand what I mean,” Frank responded, trying not to sound overly pleased.
“But here’s the thing: you’re still compressing the information on to the page. You’ve just invented a different system for doing it.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. The information isn’t on the page. It’s in my head. These notations are a prompt for my memory. That asterisk doesn’t just signify a good fielding play. It calls to mind the fact that Reyes charged in and took the ball on a short hop before throwing to first off his back foot. But it only calls it to mind for someone who was there, someone who already has the image in his head.”
“Which means the notations become meaningless once you’re no longer around to decode them.”
“That’s part of the point. Not everything that happens can be saved in a database. Things are forgotten. People die. That’s just the nature of life. That doesn’t mean they weren’t real while they lasted.”
“On the other hand, the fact that you remember something a certain way doesn’t mean it was ever real in the first place. You can put an asterisk next to the kind of play that makes people think Reyes is a great fielder, but I can quantify how many runs he saves over replacement in a season, and I know that he’s below average, no matter how spectacular he is in your memory.”
Runs saved over replacement. Even the words were ugly.
“You’re taking all the beauty out of the game.”
“Why do we need to tell lies about the world in order to make it beautiful? What an impoverishing idea. The sky is beautiful as the sky. We don’t need to pretend there’s a God in His heaven up there. Babe Ruth did some astonishing things on the field—actually did them. We don’t need to tell fanciful stories about the time he called his shot.”
Frank had been waiting for this, and he’d prepared an answer, but when he went to retrieve it, the words were just out of reach. Had the kid flustered him? He’d always commanded a kind of natural eloquence, if anything he risked the glibness that came from such fluency, but lately he’d found himself prone to bouts of inarticulateness. He was almost relieved for the distraction when Jody Gerut sent Pelfry’s third pitch into the left field bleachers.
“They’re starting this season off just the way they ended the last one,” Waxworth said.
To Frank there seemed to be something leading in the remark.
“If you want to hear about it, you should just ask.”
Waxworth was quiet, as though working up the courage to press on.
“Do you regret what you said in the booth that day?”
“Of course I regret it. They ruined me over it.”
“I didn’t ask whether you regret the consequences. Do you see why it was so offensive?”
“Everyone lives to take offense these days. Causing offense is the biggest favor you can do them. People ought to thank me for it.”
He wasn’t supposed to say such things, but they were true.
“Can’t you see the danger when a man in your position spouts racist crap?”
“Don’t get started on racism. I made a joke. When I was growing up—in a mixed neighborhood, by the way, unlike a lot of the progressive thought enforcers with their one black friend from the finals club—you were allowed to joke about people’s differences. That was part of what made it possible for so many different people to live in the same place and get along.”
“It’s a different time now.”
“We just elected a black president. You’d think that would be precisely the time when people could take a joke.”
Waxworth seemed unsatisfied, though any real writer would be thrilled with this kind of copy. Was he expecting Frank to recant while he took dictation?
There was a break in the action on the field as the pitching coach made a trip to the mound. As always during such moments, cameras roved about the stands, training themselves on excitable fans and projecting their faces onto the jumbotron. The spectator briefly became the event. What followed was something Frank had watched with puzzlement ever since these enormous electronic scoreboards had started to appear in every arena and stadium. For most of the fans caught on camera, the thirty, forty, fifty thousand others looking up at the screen were the biggest audience they’d ever have. This incited a strange dilemma: if you looked into the lens and properly played the part of screaming celebrant, the camera would linger on the performance, but you would never see it; alternatively, if you looked up at the screen to witness your public moment, you saw only a face looking distractedly up at the screen until the camera hurried on to someone who would better inhabit the role. Most fans attempted to split the difference, shifting back and forth between the two, working themselves into a kind of frenzy as they attempted to turn quickly enough to catch themselves on the screen still looking at the camera.
Any thought at all could tell you that this was impossible, but it happened not once a season or once a game but a dozen times an inning. It was the rare human who was not, at heart, a spectator. Contrariwise the particular genius of the best ballplayers was the sense they gave that they hardly knew you were there. Without the crowd, the game had no meaning—as Wittgenstein said, The sense of the world must lie outside the world—but the game must proceed as though the crowd weren’t there. What was needed was some recording angel, taking it all down in a book somewhere, making it all comprehensible, and you could not be both the actor and the recorder.
Over the course of his long life, Frank had mostly been a spectator but, he’d flattered himself, he’d managed sometimes to be part of the action on the field. When the camera found its way to him, as it always did, he never looked up, never needed to. He looked straight into the lens. He listened to the cheers, sometimes doffed his cap, as though he were used to being watched, which indeed he was. It was an odd irony that men like Frank—men who knew how to accept the world’s attention—were called narcissists, for their talent lay precisely in not needing to look at themselves.
Of course, the camera wouldn’t find him tonight, since he wasn’t seated in his usual season-ticket seats. Probably it wouldn’t have gone looking for him anyway. Just as well. In recent seasons, there had been a smattering of boos along with the cheers, and after what had happened, someone would probably throw a beer at him. He wanted to talk about it now, to justify himself, but the kid refused to ask. Wasn’t that the whole point? Why were they there, if not to discuss what had happened last fall?
There’d been a lot riding on that game. For the second summer in a row, the Mets had faded down the stretch after building a healthy lead in the division, but they’d still had a chance at survival. If they simply won their regular season finale against the Marlins, they would make the playoffs, where their slide of the past few weeks might come to seem a test on the way to ultimate victory rather than an embarrassing collapse. This was how baseball, how sports—how life—worked: a single action could change everything that had come before it. The present couldn’t actually change the past, but it could change the meaning of the past, which amounted to the same thing. That the Mets had ended the previous season with a loss at home against the very same Marlins that had eliminated them from the playoffs was the kind of symmetry that made baseball so compelling. Rarely in life were the chances for redemption so obvious and shapely. Of course, if they lost, this same symmetry would make the result that much crueler. Either way, Frank had planned to dedicate his next column to the result.
It had been a strange time to give so much attention to baseball. UniBank was fighting for its survival. Frank didn’t know how much the collapse would affect them personally, but it would certainly be an emotional blow after Kit’s decision to sell. No doubt it said something about Frank that he viewed these two collapses—of his favorite team on one hand and the entire global financial system on the other—as commensurate. Eddie was in Iraq for his second tour. Frank was worried about his son, but he was glad that his nation had recommitted itself to winning. After a long hard slog, the surge had worked. U.S. troops had handed Anbar Province, where Eddie had been stationed on his first go-round, over to the locals that month, and the two countries were hammering out a lasting security pact. There was a democratic government in charge of Iraq. Most of the people Frank knew and worked with didn’t want to admit it, but this was what victory looked like. He was proud of the part that his family had played in that effort. It was just like the season—it didn’t matter how much struggle it had taken, so long as you won out in the end.
The vendors in his section all knew him well, and they knew to find him with frequency, but on that day he waved everyone but the beer man away. Beside him Margo, his vegetarian daughter, ate a pretzel with mustard.
“Don’t you want something?” she asked. “You haven’t had your usual quota of peanuts and hot dogs.”
“My stomach isn’t sitting right,” he told her, because it sounded better than saying that he was too anxious to eat, because her brother’s life and her mother’s livelihood depended on the Mets scoring a few goddamned runs. He’d been subject to this kind of magical thinking for as long as he could remember, and he’d learned to keep it mostly to himself.
The game was a pitcher’s duel, still scoreless in the middle of the fifth when he was invited up to the booth. He hadn’t expected the invitation—it was a nationally televised game, and most of the national broadcast teams didn’t know Frank that well—but in this case the color man, Tim McCarver, was an old friend who’d done the local games for years before joining the national broadcast. He’d gotten the idea that it would be nice to invite Frank up to say goodbye to Shea, so they’d sent a young production assistant down to his usual seats and found him between half-innings while Margo was in the bathroom. He’d written her a note on a napkin and slipped it into her cupholder.
When he stood, the four beers—perhaps it was five—went quickly to his head, and he briefly lost his balance. The young PA asked him whether he was up for this outing.
“My leg fell asleep,” Frank said. “I’ll be fine in a second.”
Upstairs he asked for a bottle of water and took a minute to collect his thoughts. These things were usually pretty easy. You answered some questions and made a few comments about the game as it unfolded. He’d been watching baseball for sixty years and talking on television for more than thirty, so he knew he could handle both, even after a few beers on an empty stomach.
Three minutes later, Frank was seated between McCarver and his play-by-play man, Joe Buck. After welcoming Frank to the booth, Buck asked what he thought about another Mets collapse. Frank had met Buck a few times before and never liked him much. Something smarmy about him. Frank started reciting the column he’d been composing in his head, about redemption and meaning and cruel symmetries. He’d been proud of these sentences while they remained unspoken, but when they came out they sounded awkward and a bit maudlin. He wasn’t expressing himself well—he could see it in McCarver’s concerned face. Meanwhile, Buck kept that same smug grin on, as if it didn’t matter what Frank said.
“You’ve probably watched more innings of baseball at this stadium that anyone on earth,” McCarver said. “You were here when the place opened. Are you going to miss Shea?”
McCarver was helping Frank out, giving him an opportunity for an easy joke at Shea’s expense. The stadium was widely and openly loathed by players and fans alike.
“It’s an ugly park,” Frank said, more harshly than he’d intended. “I don’t think anyone is going to be sorry when it’s gone.”
He left it there, and Buck interjected with a bit of play-by-play. Something in his tone made Frank think that Buck was enjoying this floundering. Frank imagined the two broadcast partners fighting over whether to invite Frank up, and Buck feeling vindicated now. But it wasn’t too late to salvage this thing. Frank tried to collect his thoughts.
“You’re a real political junkie,” Buck said, as if speaking to an old man who watched cable news all night, instead of someone who appeared on it regularly. “Senator Obama is a big baseball fan, and a Chicagoan. The Cubs are going to be in the playoffs again this year. Any chance this is the year they finally break through and end the longest championship drought in sports? Perhaps we’re on the verge of two historic victories?”
The whole setup was so forced. Buck looked over with that same smug grin, and Frank did his best to return it.
“Is Barack a baseball fan?” Frank asked, feigning surprise. “I didn’t know they followed baseball in Kenya.” That had done the job—taking the smile right off Buck’s face. Frank was so pleased with the effect that he pushed on. “Maybe he learned the game while hitting coconuts out of a tree.” This part didn’t quite make sense, he realized. Were there even coconut trees in Africa? And perhaps it had gone slightly too far, since McCarver seemed completely at a loss as well. The pair made no effort to smooth the thing over, instead ignoring Frank for the rest of the half-inning. They didn’t even thank him on-air for joining them when the last out was made and they segued into commercial. Well, Frank thought as he walked out of the press area, I might not get asked into Buck’s booth again, but it was worth it to see the look on his face.
