7.14.02 TORONTO BLUE JAYS vs BOSTON RED SOX

I’ve had a beautiful vision. Unbeknownst to me, it’d been brewing and steeping and coalescing in my head for weeks now, and this evening as I left my friend Liz’s house and made my way toward the expressway that would return me to the United States it at last revealed itself, fully-formed, elegant and wondrous.

A couple of realizations, gradual ones, led up to this vision, laid the groundwork for it. While I still follow major league baseball intently, and do indeed still live and die with the Los Angeles Dodgers—who for several glorious days back there were possessed of the best record in all of baseball, don’t you know—I must say that, on the whole, I have come to find the experience of attending minor league ballgames consistently more enjoyable and gratifying than going to see what a few years back I might have chauvinistically termed “real” baseball. Small-town ball is just better: more fun, less predictable; more interesting, less generic; more personal, less corporate. Put two portals in front of me, one a magical hatch to an all-expenses-paid major league ballgame in a random city, the other a similar doorway to any given New York–Penn League affair, and nine days out of ten I’ll take curtain number two, thank you very much.

This awareness was brought into stark relief in recent weeks by the ridiculous media posturing of major league executives and the players’ union in preparation for the coming labor showdown, one which would seem, to just about anyone with a brain and some knowledge of recent baseball history, to guarantee a work stoppage at some point this season. The owners would have us believe that baseball’s current economic system is an untenable mess that needs fixing, and they’re right, of course. The players would have us believe that the owners are completely full of shit when they produce accounting numbers showing heroic losses, and they’re right too. It’s the kind of gap in perception that a strong leader, an adept politician, a visionary commissioner or negotiator might be able to bridge. Unfortunately, baseball is stuck with Bud Selig, the inherently conflicted (not to say hapless, bumbling, incompetent) commissioner/owner, and Donald Fehr, whose past successes have convinced the union of its own invincibility. And the result is a situation that, four months after I first made the comparison back in March, looks more like Sharon v. Arafat than ever. Each side arrogant, obstinate, and short-sighted enough to fight an unwinnable war until there’s nothing left to fight over.

It’s a train of thought with which most folks who follow the game have spent some time grappling of late, and one which invariably ends in a sort of mental gnashing of teeth, an internal dialogue interrupted by a string of pre-verbal arrgggh’s, and a silent prayer for all sorts of unhappy, untoward things to befall our villains that we’d of course feel really badly about were any of them actually ever to come to pass (well, maybe). I was enjoying a peculiar serenity today, though, after an afternoon of baseball in the company of friends and a quiet hour or two passed in Liz’s tranquil garden, an afternoon set against the larger background of a summer that’s been thrilling and invigorating in ways that have nothing whatsoever to do with baseball and everything to do with the simple pleasures of discovering new friends and old passions and finding in them the love of life that is the reason summer was ever invented, for Christ’s sake.

And in this untroubled state I found myself again weighing what a baseball strike might mean for the remainder of my summer plans, and this time I made it past where the arrgggh’s and foul wishes usually derail such considerations, and, to my mild astonishment, out the other end, to a conclusion that seemed to me ineluctably beautiful. I thought of Joe Frank, and of Joe Frank appropriating Jack Kornfield, and of Jack Kornfield reminding his students that the first rule of the universe is change, and the one thing in the universe we most steadfastly resist is … change, and I thought of Jack Kornfield’s students laughing in recognition. I found myself floating now, above the teeming hoards, the petty, arguing, pissed off baseball masses. No longer did I dread the strike: now, I welcomed it.

That’s right. Bring on the strike. Cancel the World Series. Cancel the next one too. Nothing you jokers could do would please me more.

I’ve had a vision, you see. A vision of magnificent new ballparks slowly going to seed, of empty PNCs and PacBells and Enrons and Comericas and Millers and Safecos and BankOnes all gradually decaying in the sun, of leaky retractable domes stuck half-way open and giant video screens gone grainy and dim and stadium sound systems that would sputter and crackle and strain to be heard, if only there were anyone around to hear them. A vision of disgruntled billionaires abandoning their investments as though they were condemned buildings, and media conglomerates quietly letting broadcasting contracts expire as if they’d belonged to the XFL. A vision of the best ballplayers in the country competing for spots on the Hanshin Tigers roster, and of families rediscovering the joy of amateur baseball in their own towns, and of college kids planning summer road trips covering all eighteen Northern League cities. A vision of, after a time—preferably a good goddamned long time: five years, ten years, decades even, generations—people gradually returning to those now decrepit old major league ballparks, curious at first, drawn in by free parking, five-dollar general admission seats across the board, luxury suites that have been trashed, looted, and turned into rumpus rooms. A vision of ballplayers who make what a competent state-appointed attorney or public schoolteacher or social worker or cop might expect to make in a year, playing for clubs now wholly owned by the communities they play in, in ballparks returned to the taxpayers who built them. A vision of, soon, ordinary people flocking in droves to experience something that had existed only as a gnawing absence, an ache recollected from deep within their collective memory: the experience of baseball as something seemingly, plausibly, authentically, unmediatedly, anachronistically real.

A vision of baseball, healed.

So, Bud, Don, it is from deepest part of my heart, from the very core of my desperate, baseball-loving soul that I say this to you now: Bring on the strike, motherfuckers! Bring it on!

FINAL SCORE: BLUE JAYS 6, RED SOX 5

LIFE DURING WARTIME: I don’t know what’s worse: “God Bless America” in the seventh or the unbelievably insipid faux-reggae “Let’s Play Ball” song they subject people to here. This would be where your air of moral superiority gets a little thin, Canada.

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