September 4, 2007
Cubs 2, Dodgers 6
Last night I kept a scorecard for the very first time. It was only innings six through nine, and I made a couple of mistakes, but that hour’s task managed to change my perspective on baseball yet again.
I don’t have an excuse for not liking baseball. I attended A’s games fairly regularly while in high school, and I followed the team faithfully until I went to Chicago for university. To this day, there’s nothing quite like attending a baseball game on a summer night with a couple of good friends. But speaking as a connoisseur of open-field sports, I find the geometry of the game ominous, the fans’ reliance on statistics boorish, the price of concessions tyrannical, and peanut shells exceedingly hard to crack. The one White Sox game I’ve attended in three years of living on the South Side was a disappointment to fan culture — the people around me seemed more interested in talking on their cell phones than in the game. But old habits die hard, and I’ve been clinging to what I like to call my “baseball moment” — just before the pitcher releases the ball, when everything is set into motion — a clarion half-second that dangles all its possibilites, like hostages, over a bridge, and then lets go.
Let me start at the beginning. My friend Sean is an intern with the Cubs, and he invited me to the Cubs-Dodgers game. We had fantastic seats about fifteen rows back behind home plate. And let me tell you, sitting in the terrace seats may be a cheap thrill, but the wall of noise that hits you when you’re seated at the nucleus of the action is another thing altogether. And Wrigley Field, well, they make a lot of noise over there.
The game itself isn’t worth analyzing for any single reason: There were no home runs, and the pitching, while not woeful, wasn’t exactly inspiring either. But the event will probably always stand out in my memory as a genuine example of baseball culture. Such a prime seat might have been wasted, for instance, if not for Sean’s presence; I was a sightseer, in all senses of the word, but he guided me patiently and deftly through the labyrinthine tunnels of baseball history, bravely leading a murky navigation through this most American of cultures that, for whatever reason, has never attracted me.
The art of scorecard keeping serves as an apt summarization of both the dedication and the insanity of baseball fans. It takes a certain respectable amount of OCD to sit there and notate every single play, every single touch of the ball in the outfield, cheering when you have to but always keeping an eagle watch on the details. I wonder how many diehards collect their monstrous, yellowing anthology of scorecards in a filing cabinet, visible proof of decades of devotion to the sport? How many are struck by a random recollection, which sinks them into a stupor until they can retreat to their holy ground, flip through the seasons — the lean ones and pennant-winning ones — until they get to a special sheet of heavy paper, marred by stains and wrinkles but still pristine? Maybe it was their first game, or their grandson’s first game, or one of any number of games where the beer was cold and the sun was warm and the company was good, but they see the ink, they remember the players and the plays, and then they can finally smile and relax.
That will never be me. I won’t devote years of my life to this sport; I won’t engage in furious, stat-fuelled debates about this player or that team; I won’t lose my voice heckling anybody; and I certainly won’t be able to crack a peanut shell like I was born with it. But now I’ve had a brief glimpse into the souls of people who will, and that facet of the game is something I can learn to love, even if I will never be thrilled by much that happens on the field.
Can you imagine paying $150/game to sit in those seats?
Dying Midseason 
