STUART, Fla. -- Here in Florida the weather has been wonderful, terrific. For someone from the northeastern U.S., where we have been enduring the snowiest winter on record, ever, a series of sunny, 80-degree days one after another is more than a treat. You soon forget about bad weather and begin acting as if things, weather-wise at least, will always be perfect.Previous Rotisserie reports
Even when the forecast calls for rain, as it did on Saturday, it is hard to shake the certitude that in the morning you'll put on your shorts, drive over to the Met's complex in Port St. Lucie and see Jason Isringhausen showdown with Ramon Martinez.
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Saturday morning, however, it was raining in torrents and while it eventually slowed, it didn't stop until well after the 2:05 start time for the Mets-Dodgers game. So there was no game. Canceled due to rain.
Instead of a trip to Port St. Lucie, I spent a little more time than usual poring through the papers. The Stuart News reported Wonderful Terrific Monds' pro debut was not so wonderful because he struck out his first time up. Monds' is a local talent. He grew up in nearby Fort Pierce, which gave the paper another angle besides his wonderfully terrific name. And I had to disagree about the strikeout. If a K can be called positive Monds' was. He fought off some tough pitches, hung in there with some good cuts, and was called out looking on a marginal pitch. My note on the scoresheet was: "Looks good."
Visit with baseball fans
After my trip to West Palm Beach, on Friday, where I saw the Mets and Braves
play their first exhibition games of the spring season, I'd gone to the
nursing
home and sat with my grandfather Charlie and his roommate Ed while they ate dinner. I described for them
Jason Schmidt's overpowering performance and Paul Wilson's quiet authority. I
got up to demonstrate the first inning play in which Chris Jones snared Rey
Ordonez's high throw and then tagged the base with his bare hand, rather than
his glove hand. The gaffe cost Ordonez an error, though Wilson pitched out of
the trouble by getting Chipper Jones to line into a double play.
My grandfather has always been a big baseball fan. During my lifetime, after the Dodgers left Brooklyn, he has been a big Mets fan. Before he had a stroke it was our most consistently fecund ground for conversation. We were always able to agree on some things (Seaver is good) and disagree on others (who's better, Tommie Agee or Cleon Jones?), and in either case sort things out peaceably. On most every other subject in which we shared an interest tempers could run much more hotly. Baseball was different.
Charlie had been a youth league coach and umpire when my uncles were growing up, and when we were cleaning out my grandparents' house on Long Island this past summer (they're in Florida full time now) I discovered a trove of scoresheets from innumerable sandlot games some 50-odd years ago. I'm sure at least a few of the games detailed within still echo in the memories of some who participated in them. Most particularly for those, I imagine, who starred and those who were humiliated, I hope not equally.
My grandfather seemed to enjoy hearing the Mets may be a pretty good team this year. Ed was more interested in whether the stadium had sold out and where I sat and how hot it was in the sun. I answered his questions and he asked more and then he started coughing. Almost immediately my grandfather started coughing, too. Ed pointed to a laminated card on the table that described the protocol he had to follow while dining. "Eat Tuck Swallow Talk," it said. People who've had strokes often don't have full use of their throat muscles, and if they try to eat and talk at the same time they can aspirate their liquefied food. Ed had gotten out of rhythm and now had to regroup.
"I better be quiet," Ed said.
A song sung with meaning
Ed recovered and started to sing. "Take me out to the ball game, take me out with the crowd." His voice was
strong
and on key, and rang through the quiet dining room.
"Buy me some peanuts and cracker jacks ... Right, Charlie?" My grandfather nodded along in time now, and some other inmates (as Ed calls them) did too.
"I don't care if I ever get back." Ed's tempo slowed on this line, massaging meaning from every word. It was hard not to look at these two men with their hoary hair, proud faces and dribbles of food on their bibs, confined to wheel chairs, and hearing Ed's voice a yearning for liberation.
"For it's root, root, root for the home team. If they don't win it's a shame." The nurse was now clapping along, and Ed's voice rose defiantly. I thought, appropriately enough, of Harry Caray sticking his big head out of the box in Wrigley, exhorting the crowd to sing along, challenging them to join in with a ferocious glee.
"Cause it's one--two--three strikes you're out, at the old ball game."
I applauded, my grandfather beamed, and there was other applause. I'm a little ashamed to admit that it occurred to me that this was a movie moment, a Robin Williams-Jack Nicholson sort of movie moment, but it was. Of course, it was also much, much more. Ed's brief rendering of this simple song, the singing of a man whose body has betrayed most of his passions, was an expression of the joy of life and an acknowledgment of its precariousness from someone who is in the inside of that struggle. It was a glorious moment.
What does this have to do with baseball? Not much, I guess. It was a baseball game that inspired Ed, and a baseball song was the medium for his eloquence. Baseball somehow once let my grandfather and I have decent discussions, when we could not agree or even disagree civilly on anything else. Here at spring training, where there is sometimes the feeling that the whole of America is either here or watching, one can get the impression that this is why we've come.
Baseball isn't much really, just a game, but by common agreement it is also one of the languages we speak, one we can fall back on when others fail. I don't know if Charlie agrees, but to me that feels very, very right.
Peter Kreutzer, a fantasy/Rotisserie game player since 1982, computes the predictions for Peter Golenbock's "How to Win at Rotisserie Baseball." He is also the writer of the ESPN home video, "Let's Play Baseball with Ozzie Smith."
