Take Me Out Of The Ball Game!

I’ve never been very fond of nostalgia. As I said in an earlier post, I eschew regret, and nostalgia seems to me a longing for an event or emotion which never really occurred. That said . . .

I went to the Twins-Giants baseball game last evening with my friend, Mitchell. The last baseball game I attended was in 1969, the year the New York Mets won the World Series. I had been a Met fan from their first season—1962—and had suffered mightily through a great deal of silliness in their early years. It was a great year all around for New York teams—1969 was also the year the Knicks and the Jets won their respective championships.

I loved going to baseball games, but I didn’t at all enjoy the experience last evening. Oh, I think Mitchell and I had a wonderful time, and for a baseball game, there was quite a lot of action. Twenty hits in five innings, twelve or thirteen runs total. Several home runs and a lot of long ball hits! But there was something essentially missing in my mind. And this is it:

When I went to the stadiums up through 1969, I would enter the front gates from the streets or the vast parking lots. To Shea or Yankee Stadium, I sometimes would walk from the subway or the Long Island Railroad cars. I would move from the every day world of concrete and asphalt and noise and smells and dirt and confusion, hand the attendant my ticket, buy a program and a pencil to keep score, and walk up the concrete ramps to the assigned level where I might find my seats. Everything was a bit dark in the corridors of the stadium, and definitely composed of cold, hard concrete. The circular levels echoed, and people walked about toward their seats, some carrying team banners, hot dogs, and beers. There were always souvenir stands at which stood children hungry for a material remembrance of the game. At regular intervals, a square concrete entranceway led toward the field. I would walk through it, as if walking through a time warp on any one of a number of Star Trek episodes. And when I walked through that gate, I stepped into the magical world of the baseball field with its beautifully manicured grass, and carefully groomed dirt infields, and pearly white bases and straight chalk baselines. Players in home-team white and visitor gray uniforms were warming up, taking batting and pitching practice. And the sky (here comes the nostalgia!!) was always clear, blue, and cloudless, and the air, even in the Bronx and Flushing, Queens, was fresh. And there I would stand, before a field of dreams, and I was very, very happy. I felt the baseball stadium, and the fields before me, and the skies above me, and the fans about me, and the players before me. I took deep and contented breaths. I experienced an intense bodily experience.

Last evening, however, when I stepped through the entranceway—a simple doorway and not at all the great concrete portals of the concrete stadiums of earlier days—and I looked out towards the field, the grass (it was not really grass) was a horrible green color—like a badly worn carpet in an old run-down house. And above me there was no blue sky, but underneath the big white metal dome hung a white parachute type material looking more like stationary ghosts than clouds. The stadium was air conditioned, and I soon grew cold. Because it was enclosed, the smell of mustard permeated the air. And I heard no one scream, “Beer here,” and no one wondered, “Peanuts, popcorn, Cracker Jacks?”

No freshness here, no fresh at all. It was a bodily absence. It was a failure of body and spirit.

And at the Metrodome all the excitement derived from external sources. There were mascots, and giveaways, and big screen television, and promotions, and loud music prods over huge speakers hanging above just underneath the ghosts. I wondered what were the ground rules if a ball became stuck in a speaker and did not descend. Was it counted a double, a triple, or a foul ball? I had no opportunity to settle myself to the game, to move in and out of the experience, and to offer to it what I could and would. The game was programmed from the outset. Only the final score remained in any doubt. There was no place in that vast arena for me.

Mitchell tells me the Giants finally won, 14-7. We were already gone, but then, I’m not sure I was ever there.

There should be a law against building roofs where there is no need for them.