8.25.01 ELMIRA PIONEERS vs LES CAPITALES DE QUÉBEC
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Okay, I gotta come clean here. You may have noticed that these diary entries typically talk about the games they describe as having happened “today” or “tonight,” as though I were writing immediately following their completion. Well, that’s not always true. More often than not, depending on how busy or lazy I’ve been, I am writing days or even weeks later, and the “today”/“tonight” thing is just a convention I adopted early on in an attempt to impart some sense of immediacy to the proceedings. (The whole conceit is that it’s a diary, after all.) It’s been long enough now that I honestly don’t remember whether it was business or laziness which kept me from my duties during the three weeks that elapsed between this Saturday night in Elmira and The Events (a term I prefer to the now agreed-upon September Eleventh if only for its satisfyingly sinister, DeLillo-esque ring). I do recall, however, that in the days that followed The Events, and the weeks and months that followed them, my interest in baseball faded so dramatically as to disappear altogether, and the Baseball Diaries ended up figuratively stuck at the bottom of a very deep and forbiddingly cluttered drawer.
What can I say? I never claimed my love for the game was any less fickle than anybody’s affection for anything, when it comes down to it. I actually remember musing on this very point one afternoon this summer while sitting on my back porch, maybe after I’d gotten back from California. I was thinking about how surprisingly easy the whole moving-to-Rochester experience turned out to be, what amazingly adaptable creatures human beings are after all, and it made me wonder in turn what it would be like to relocate to the kinds of places I used to imagine living in my impetuous youth. You know, Italy. England. It’s no longer a pipe dream: my wife has what amounts to an open invitation to go work for a company outside London; we could do it tomorrow if we wanted to. I thought about what it would mean, what I’d have to give up. Baseball, of course. And I was filled with an awareness, paradoxical in its duality, both of how hugely important, how endlessly fascinating and compelling this game is to me, and of how laughably easy it would be to simply abandon it, forever if need be. Frightening, in its implications. Monstrous, even. But there it is.
As the initial shock and horror of The Events dissipated, however, and after I resolved to sublimate my wholehearted revulsion at our collective response to them (it was either that or really move to another country, which as it turns out I’m not quite ready to do—yet), baseball gradually worked its way back into my consciousness. In time for the magical playoffs and World Series, happily. In time for me to be sickened and infuriated once more by baseball’s so-called leaders since then, too.
Anyway, I point all this out because it would be disingenuous of me not to, leaving readers to wonder whether I’m not succumbing to the temptation to cast the accounts that follow under a halo of nostalgia for that simpler, more innocent time when we all played in the sun like children, untouched by evil and oblivious to our own vulnerability. At the same time, I will maintain to the death that dammit, I’m really not, and that these final few games really were as wonderful and wondrous as I will doubtless make them out to be, and that these things would have read exactly the same had I written them the very same day, and not, as it turns out, the following January. Really.
Okay, then.
It was a brilliant, impossibly perfect summer day. And the thing is, I remember consciously thinking this as we drove through the countryside, blue skies and puffy clouds above and a soft breeze gently tousling our hair—not too hot, either—the cornfields and roadside stands giving way as we turned south at Seneca Lake to vineyards and wineries during the second hour of the drive to Watkins Glen. It was Ferrari weekend at the legendary racetrack just outside this picturesque little town, the cradle of sports car racing in North America, and we’d brought a picnic.
The blanket spread in the shade of a glorious oak in the meadow that occupies the infield of the back part of the track, the best part, the boot, the diving, double-apex left-hand sweeper, the short, uphill straight to a banked 180-degree right-hander, the long back straight to another right, this one quicker, harder, uphill through the woods, cresting just before a sharp left heading back toward the start-finish line—the part of the track the NASCAR guys skip. Good cheese. California zinfandel. I forgot to pack a corkscrew, dumbass. No matter—we borrowed one from a like-minded couple nearby. Cheers! The magnificent, utterly thrilling, animal wail of vintage V-12s, the unlikely symphonies of Colombo and Lampredi, the rare sight of elusive, graceful beasts in their native habitat. Some guy even brought his Alfa 8C. Fantastic.
We drove further south in the lingering light of late afternoon, the gently winding roads taking us past town after tiny, anonymous town, each one a marvel to us, each one a beguiling mystery. Who lives here? What do they do? What happens in this place, so remote and so lacking any apparent connection to the outside world as to seem a world unto itself, a fictional construct, the perfect setting for someone’s morality play; each town a potential allegory, an unrecorded fable.
Down the end of a leafy neighborhood street there appeared a clearing, a gravel lot already filling with cars, at the center of which rose the grand brick edifice of Dunn Field. It was Saturday night in Elmira, and there was a palpable excitement in the air. That the home-town Pioneers were going for a three-game sweep of their Québec rivals, one that would put them in first place atop the Southern Division of the independent Northern League’s Eastern Conference, might have had something to do with it. That it was fireworks night might have, too. That there’s not a whole lot else going on in Elmira on a Saturday night in late August could have figured in there somewhere as well. Whatever the reason, the line at the gate was fifty deep. The whole town was coming out.
The dads threw down beers. The moms traded gossip. The little kids ran around like spazzes, the teenagers scammed on one another, the grandparents talked about how things used to be, the babies cried, the dogs lapped up dropped ice cream cones, the whole human drama played itself out under a full moon in this old ballpark that replaced the one that burned down in 1939, which replaced the one they built originally on this very spot, all the way back in 1888. How old is Dunn Field? There’s a photograph on the concourse down below of Don Zimmer getting married here. That’s how old.
The Northern League itself seems like something from another age. Player/coaches abound. For every desperate kid hoping to find his way back to the major league farm system there’s a contented baseball lifer, happy to play out his days far from the national spotlight. Elmira manager, assistant general manager and former Dodger Jon Debus has seemingly made it his mission to surround himself with as many former cronies as he can lure here, to his colony, to this faraway outpost in a parallel baseball universe. Once you’ve seen it, I’d imagine it’d be hard to resist.
Local hero (and pitching coach) Greg Keagle turned in seven sometimes shaky innings but managed to hold the Capitales to three runs, and a 3-for-4 performance by third baseman (and former Dodger) Garey Ingram kept the Pioneers in it. Then, in the eighth, shortstop Ron Bush broke up a 3–3 tie with a two-out double, scoring Sandy Vasquez, recently released by the similarly unaffiliated Atlantic League’s Newark Bears, from second. Bush then stole third and brought home the insurance run himself on a single by catcher Mike Wrenn.
FINAL SCORE: PIONEERS 5, CAPITALES 3
FOOD CONSUMED: Two very large and serious hot dogs.