The farthest forward edge of the second deck hangs about five meters (baseball is a game of centimeters) southwest of my seats; the row at that edge is almost always, somehow, occupied by children. They don’t seem to be the same children from game to game – maybe they’re season tickets for a charity or an orphanage or something (I don’t know if there are still orphanages in the United States, but if there are, I hope they get season tickets to baseball games). Tonight’s passel of kids were hollering at the top of their lungs for a lot of the game; they didn’t have the sophomoric ingenuity of the guy in the 415 who kept up a hoarse monologue about the Mets’ practice catcher’s squatting position and its implications for his (the catcher’s) sexuality, but they had a great deal of enthusiasm, which reached its zenith for me when one of them shouted, in the third inning “We got an out!” We had indeed gotten an out. It was a fairly routine one, as outs go, but this kid sounded like he had never seen one before; I feel you, kid. The Giants have gotten the regulation number of outs so far in the season – you need twenty-seven of them in every game – but given a 6-12 record so far, sometimes it does seem miraculous when we get one (we get all 27 today, but no runs, for a final score of 7-0 Mets).
I forgot to take a picture of Erin tonight, but I did take a picture of a picture at her house after the game. It’s an aerial photo in five sections of the Oakland Coliseum in its baseball configuration. We talked about the Coliseum a lot tonight; Erin is an Athletics fan, or was. Her heart is broken and she is, although mostly happy to be at the game today, a seething mass of rage and sorrow. She is like a fan of the Cubs or Red Sox before either of those teams broke their decades-long streaks of misery in the new millennium – full of a self-flagellating pride in the dismal mess of hope and resentment that surrounds long-time fans of franchises that spend a long time not quite making the grade. The facilities, the park, the food, the management, the team – all of it is fodder for that cherished suffering, and I can relate, in a way. She says – and she says it’s a joke, but you don’t joke about these things – that she is going to move back to Oklahoma and become a Dodger fan, because the Dodgers have a double-A team there.
I may be guilty of mansplaining. She said “The music here is really different,” and I said “Oh, the players get to pick their own music when they come up tp bat,” and she looked at me like I was an idiot and said “I know what walk-on music is.” In my defense, I only ever come to this park, and she had just spent two hours complaining about how terrible the Coliseum was. I don’t think it was unreasonable for me to surmise that the As don’t get to pick their own music.
“There’s something about baseball that moves my primitive spirit,” she says at one point, and there’s a profundity there that appeals to me. I don’t think it’s my primitive spirit that gets moved, but I know what she means. I think what gets moved is whatever part of me that cherishes simplicity, purity, elegance, when I compare it to the kind of chaotic complexity that obtains nearly everywhere else. It might be naïve of me to think I’m finding it in baseball, but I guess you take your peace where you find it.
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