INCHOATE
THOUGHTS
June 4, 2010
Hi,
To celebrate Leo’s graduation from
high school, we recently went to a baseball game together. Most of our
father-son bonding, such as it is, takes place on sailboats, so this made a
welcome change. It was less fraught. There was no course to steer, no heavy
weather in the ballpark that afternoon. Our sole responsibility was to cheer on
the home team led by pitcher Tim Wakefield, whose career with the Red Sox I have
followed with admiration since his arrival in 1995.
Wakefield is that relative rarity in
the major leagues, a knuckleball pitcher. The ball leaves his fingertips
seemingly effortlessly, dancing towards home plate at no more than a mere 65
miles per hour. The unpredictability of its flight confounds the batter, who
swings haplessly into the void for a strike—or onto the ball for a home run.
Both happened that afternoon more than once. Indeed, Wakefield was knocked
about quite a bit, especially in the fourth inning in which he gave up four
runs. He departed after six innings, not too dispirited, I hope. In spite of
some heavy hitting, the Red Sox eventually lost the game by a run.
We had not been to Fenway Park for
some time. The four corporate tickets that an extremely generous friend and
baseball aficionado gave Leo for his birthday each year were victims of
cost-cutting measures in the recession. We loved those outings to marvel at the
creatures from a higher sphere from unaffordable box seats on the third base
line. Who wouldn’t adore Fenway Park, the architectural epitome of gritty
glamour? After 98 years of absorbing the dreams, triumphs and agonies of
thousands of fans and players, it resonates with stored emotions. Fenway Park
is no less a condenser of human affect than the field of Gettysburg. To gaze
over that diamond of perfect green grass and raked dirt is to glimpse in the
mind’s eye Babe Ruth on the mound, Roger Williams at the plate, Carlton Fisk in
the bottom of the twelfth in game 6 of the 1975 World Series waiving the ball
fair.
Fenway Park has a place in the
personal mythologies of thousands, my own included. I owe being in America to
the Boston Red Sox. When Harvard was courting and prodding me in the summer of
1991 with a view to recruiting me, one of the cleverest moves—after the
meetings were over and the dinners were eaten—was to take me to a Red Sox game.
Being from England, I had never been to a ball game before. I walked up the
ramp from beneath the grandstand to see the green heart of the ball park for
the first time, angelic forms in vivid white stretching and throwing balls to
one another viewed by choirs of fans from the surrounding tiers. My conversion
was instantaneous, Pauline. My host was a lawyer who explained what was happening
as the game unfolded with such clarity and precision that I began to catch on.
Later I came to learn just why baseball is the game of philosophers. Yes, I
know it’s a cynical business, exploiting the gullibility of its fans to rake in
profits, a small proportion of which go on the absurd monetary rewards received
by a minority of players. I’m taken in, and know it, but somehow I don’t mind.
In this respect, as in others, it’s the American microcosm.
Leo and I were truly initiated when one
year, when Leo was still very young, my graduate research fellows gave us both
baseball gloves at the end of the academic year. Thanks to them, Leo didn’t
suffer the psychic deprivation of not playing catch with his father. Then he
played Little League in our town for several springs, with more enthusiasm than
ability, until the enthusiasm waned on realizing that the skills would likely
never develop. I faithfully attended many of his games, from T-ball through his
stint on Lexington’s Little League version of the Oakland Athletics.
The A’s played the Red Sox in that
first game I saw at Fenway Park in June, 1991; the A’s played the Red Sox in
the game I saw with Leo just recently. But it’s the Red Sox that matter. Like
all other devotees (even part-timers, like me) I remember the moment on October
27, 2004 for which we had all been waiting for 86 years, when Foulke flipped
the ball to Menkiewitz at first base, and it was all over. I was in my hotel
room in Houston, at a philosophy conference. That evening, if only for a while,
the game of philosophers eclipsed philosophy.
Ever,
Ivan