The Two Worst Teams In Baseball

If you haven’t been paying attention to the Chicago Cubs’ season this year and are wondering how they’ve been doing, consider this: You can get tickets to their final home series against the Houston Astros for 74¢ for Monday night’s game, 97¢ for Tuesday night’s game, and for Wednesday afternoon’s final game of the season, 50¢. Of course, there is a $5.45 delivery fee and a $5 “convenience” fee, making the final cost of the ticket itself about 5/1000^th of the total cost. And yes these are upper deck and obstructed-view seats, but since there will be more empty seats than sold seats you can pretty well sit wherever you want. This is what happens when you have the worst two teams in Major League Baseball – Cubs at 60-100 and Astros at 54-106 – playing each other the final week of the season. There are other series this week where out-of-it teams might be able to play a spoiler roll and knock another team out of the playoffs, or log an end-of-the-season moral victory over a team headed to the playoffs. But here you have two teams that are at best battling for the worst record in baseball. I guess that’s worth about 50¢ (plus convenience fee).

The (Third) First Sign of Spring

I’m watching the first televised game of the Chicago Cubs on WGN (a preseason game with the White Sox) as is my custom. Also as is my custom I’m drinking beer and eating a bag of salted-in-the-shell peanuts. I’ll drink some more beer and eat another bag of peanuts in three weeks on opening day of the regular season. I’m not sure when or how this custom began, but it’s been going on for at least a dozen years. When I was teaching full-time I generally was finished in class by early afternoon, so was able to come home and watch the games. I recall at least on one occasion letting my class go half an hour early so I could make the start of a first game telecast.

I’m not necessarily a Cubs fan, not necessarily a fan of any particular club. My baseball allegiances have always been determined by proximity. When I was in my early teens, I was a fan of the Milwaukee Braves because the Wichita Braves were a minor league franchise of the Milwaukee team, and my little team was also the Braves and our uniforms were facsimiles of the major and minor league clubs’ uniforms. So I was a Braves fan. There was only one baseball game on TV each week (The Game of the Week) and it was only occasionally a Braves game, so most of my following was done via the box scores in the newspaper. When I was in college I was only 30 miles from Kansas City, we got Kansas City TV and radio stations, so I was able to follow the Royals, and for five or six years in the ‘70s became a Royals fan. For one season I lived in Minneapolis, just 10 minutes from the old Twins’ park in Bloomington, so for that year I was a Twins fan. When I got to Iowa City in the late ‘70s I could get all of the Cubs games on WGN TV or radio (back when Harry Caray was in his prime drunkenness) and so became a Cubs fan. But again, not a fan in the usual sense of the term, more of a casual fan, a proximate fan, a tele-fan. A fan that needs some reason to bide away an afternoon drinking beer and eating a bag of peanuts.

The (First) First Sign of Spring

It’s still low-20s overnight and upper-30s to low-40s for highs. And there is still snow in the forecast, and probably will be for another month or so. But this weekend saw the first sign of spring (or at least the first first sign of spring) – pitchers and catchers (and any other players who want to join them) report to MLB Spring Training this weekend in Florida (Citrus League) and Arizona (Cactus League). In two weeks, the spring games begin. And in less than six weeks, the regular season – 162 games plus post-season – begins. For some it’s the blooming of the crocuses and daffodils, for others it’s the return of the robins. For me it’s the arrival of Spring Training and the promise of a long and lazy summer of daily following box scores.

Doubleheaders

There are no more doubleheaders in Major League Baseball. For the past several years, there have been “day-night doubleheaders” or “split doubleheaders” or some other linguistic concoction to indicate that there will be two games on one day, but that they will be several hours apart and require two separate admission fees, as well as usually two parking fees, programs, and any other costs the team might be able to extract from the gullible. According to the rules of Major League Baseball:

4.13 (c) The second game of a doubleheader shall start 20 minutes after the first game is completed, unless a longer interval (not to exceed 30 minutes) is declared by the umpire-in-chief and announced to the opposing managers at the end of the first game.

But for the past 20 years or so, MLB has done all it can – from these non-doubleheaders to $100+ tickets to merchandizing of multiple uniforms (two or three caps at $30 each, three or four jerseys at $90 each) per team (collect them all!) to $8 beers to $40 parking to I don’t know what else because I’ve been priced out of MLB for at least the past decade – to turn baseball into a TV program with a live audience of those willing and able to be seduced into paying over $100 per person per game to serve as props for the cameras.

Base Baseball

When I play that old college game of If-you-had-a-time-machine-when-and-where-in-time-would-you-go-back-to?, I vacillate depending on mood and the alignment of stars between the assassination of Caesar (did he really say, “Et tu, Brute”?), the original performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest at the Globe (did he really write all those plays, and did he gather with all the players at a pub after the performance for a night of ribaldry?), and the night of December 31, 1906, when Mark Twain (or his Siamese twin) delivered a lecture on temperance while drunk (or pretending to be drunk) (classic Twain that doesn’t show up in Hal Holbrook impersonations).

But when I read today the following in John Thorn’s Baseball in the Garden of Eden, I’ve added going back to attend a baseball game with the 1897 Baltimore Orioles:

They [the Orioles] matched skill, daring, and inventiveness with extraordinary dirty play, vile language, and relentless umpire baiting.

There was no doubt alcohol was involved as well, tying it in with the themes in my examples above — ability, violence, debauchery, and excess. The way baseball should be. The way baseball was even still back in the 1950s, when my grandfather would take me to watch the Wichita Braves games at Lawrence-Dumont Stadium, the cigar smoke and the stench of stale beer, the cursing at and by players and umpires and fans, the occasional fight, either on the field or in the stands, the bridging of generations in an initiation of maturation, of play the way it really is.

Not the way it is now. In the past half century, baseball has degenerated into a “family” sport, requiring hundreds of dollars a visit, a Disney Land of insufferable mascots, silly inter-inning games on the field, t-shirt guns shooting into the stands, playgrounds in the outfield concourse, restaurants without any view of the field, advertisements blasting on the Jumbotron. I took a tour of the Arizona Diamondback stadium a couple of years after it opened in Phoenix (now Chase Field), and the guide explained at one point, noting all the extra-baseball goofiness around the concourse (including a swimming pool in center field), that the average “fan” (sic) loses interest in the game after an average of 3 ½ innings, and so they added all the “extra entertainment features” to the experience. Well, if somebody loses interest in the game after 3 ½ innings, they shouldn’t be there in the first place — it’s a baseball game, not a shopping mall. Some courageous club should field a team like the 1897 Orioles. It’s not like anyone other than those of us who actually watch the game would even notice. And maybe it would chase the mall-fans away from the game.

Opening Day

For the past I don’t know how many years, I’ve observed the start of the baseball season by watching the first televised game (which traditionally was the Cincinnati Reds game, but since ESPN has taken over the broadcast, it’s that network’s team of preference, the damn Yankees) while eating a bag of salted-in-the-shell peanuts and drinking a beer (or two or three or . . .). I’ve never been an avid baseball fan, rather a casual fan. And “casual” is the perfect word to describe why I like the game – why so many others apparently don’t like the game – the relaxed pace, determined by play and not the threat of the clock, punctuated by occasional excitement, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes exasperating. You can decide how to watch a baseball game, either following intently the decisions and outcomes of each pitch or allowing the game to run as background to conversation, reading, cleaning, or driving (while listening on the radio, perhaps my favorite way of experiencing the sport). When traveling, I try to find a bar to watch whatever local team is playing, getting as near as one probably can to sampling the native culture.

So opening day 2011 is finally here. The peanut shells are on the floor. The empty beer cans are scattered about. All’s well with the world. (Though the Yankees win – damn!)

Wichita Braves

Each year in March, as Spring Training begins, my mind returns to my early teen years as a sometime pitcher and sometime outfielder and mostly bench-warmer on my Little League team, the Braves. Our team was fashioned on the Milwaukee Braves (Hank Aaron, Warren Spahn, Eddie Matthews) and to a lesser extent on the Wichita Braves, Milwaukee’s single-A affiliate at the time, our uniforms, not our abilities, being the sole hint at any connection. The fact that our coach owned a Dairy Queen where we would go for free ice cream after every game, win or lose, added to our prestige in the league.

I was not by far the best player on the team. That would have been Will Robinson, David Goodpasture, Ronnie Kaiser, or the coach’s son, Mike Lindley. But I wasn’t the worst, either. (That probably would have been my cousin, Allen, who when he was in a game was consigned to right field where he spent most of his time picking either dandelions or his nose. He’s now the Economic Development Director for a medium-sized city in the Midwest, dispelling any idea that performance in Little League is a predictor of future success. Last I heard, Ronnie Kaiser was dealing blackjack in Vegas.)

The only lasting memory I have of playing for the Braves was a game in which I fouled off 12 pitches against Benny Banta of the Yankees before grounding out to second base for the ninth and final out, called because we were behind by more than 10 runs after our bat in the third inning (it’s called the “mercy rule,” sometimes the more accurate “slaughter rule”). This at-bat was actually the highlight of my Little League career. The Yankees were the perennial champions of our league (as the major league Yankees most often were as well back then). They rarely, if ever, lost. And Benny Banta was by far the best pitcher – the best player – in the league, the size of most of the coaches, a power hitter, and a strikeout pitcher with a fastball, curve, and slider, when most of us other pitchers were just glad if we could fling it somewhere near the plate without hitting the batter or throwing it over the backstop (as I once actually did).

Our coach chose me to pitch this particular game, which was why (among other reasons) I was batting ninth. “Fat chance” wasn’t a concept I was familiar with then, but I’m sure our coach was. The game went pretty much as every parent in the stands and player on the benches could have foreseen: The Yankees’ sides of the innings would last perhaps an hour, my tossing up pitches that they would either take for eventual walks or if I somehow got a pitch anywhere near the plate they would smack to one of my teammates for an error or just knock it neatly over the fence. Our sides of the innings were brief affairs, mostly Benny Banta hurling three-pitch strikeouts, occasionally a weak pop-up or maybe an infield groundout. When I came up to bat in the bottom of the third, it was Yankees 10+, Braves 0, there were two outs, Benny Banta was pitching (another) perfect game, and there wasn’t a person in attendance (myself included) who thought I would do anything except strikeout, finally ending the game. But to everyone’s surprise (and I suppose some parents’ annoyance), I began swinging at everything Benny Banta gave me, thinking that he isn’t going throw anything but a strike, and I successfully (today they call it, positively, “extending the at-bat”) was able to foul off 12 pitches. I could hear encouragement coming from my father in the stands and my coach and teammates on the bench, as if somehow fouling off all these pitches was a sign that we were somehow going to make up the 10+ runs that we were behind. But of course that wasn’t to be. I did, however, connect with a pitch, and the ball rolled (in my memory it’s a hot grounder) to second base, and I was thrown out to mercifully end the game (or slaughter).

But I’d fouled off 12 pitches from Benny Banta. And I’d grounded out, not struck out. And not for that game, but at least for that at-bat, I’d been successful. That’s one of the things I like about baseball, and maybe it’s this experience that instilled the idea in me: Success is not just in winning. It can come in small, tiny, inconsequential moments, moments when the context of the game allows for success, even if personal and fleeting