Home to First

Home to First

By Glen Jeffries

Back in the UK, people don’t typically leave their no-longer-wanted belongings on the doorstep for others to freely take. If you’re lucky you might find the odd small furniture item or kitchen accessory but rarely books: we Brits are too concerned about neighbors judging our literary tastes—even those we might be trying to abandon.

Here in Brooklyn, things are different. One weekend morning soon after I arrived, a spread of books appeared on the stoop of the building opposite my apartment. Some of them were leaning upright against the steps and some were face down, presumably having already been moved by curious hands that ultimately decided against taking them. The largest book was a textbook-sized volume: The New Baseball Bible (subtitle: Notes, Nuggets, Lists, and Legends from Our National Pastime). The front cover was filled with baseball players from across the ages and, aside from a single rip in the bottom-center, the book seemed to be in perfect condition. The rip went right up through the logo on the shirt of a Yankees player.

I decided I’d take it.

The Bible is an updated, re-designed version of The Baseball Catalog, which was first published in 1980 and went through many subsequent editions. The chapters are organized by theme—ballparks, famous faces, big moments, and so on—and the pages are a blend of headed paragraphs, fact boxes, charts and photographs. One can therefore read it through continuously or fact-gather by random page-flicking. Author Dan Schlossberg calls it a ”book of memories…pretty enough to reside on a coffee table…also practical enough to leave in a bathroom.” To date, I’ve never come across a bible residing in either of these places.

Before I arrived in New York to live, I already knew a little about baseball. During my travels over the years I’ve managed to take in games at Camden Yards, Yankee Stadium, Kauffman Stadium, Guaranteed Rate Field, and MCU Park. A giveaway cap from the Cyclones—a moustached, smiling hotdog brandishing a bat—remained with me for a decade until it blew off my head and into a river one sad Saturday. I had enjoyed the experience of watching those games in-person, sitting and then wandering the concourse areas either alone or with friends to find different perspectives, floating away a gloriously sunny afternoon only semi-comprehending what was going on around me, while beyond the boundaries of that minor sector of a circle, everything I needed to return to in a few hours went on as it was, in its everyday course, without me. 

None of that made me anything approaching what could be called a fan, of course. I just knew some things.

If I hadn’t found the Bible in those first few days of arriving here perhaps my decision to take it would have been different. I knew when I picked up that book that reading it wouldn’t be the most efficient way to improve my understanding of the sport and the knowledge I gathered would become broad, yes, but patchy and superficial. But I was very much open to the labor of study as a way to comprehend more about my new home. I wanted a type of knowledge-gathering that was slow, haphazard, almost aimless but not quite—like wandering around a garden picking up leaves by hand and caching them on a windy day. I planned to read a few pages over coffee in the morning; to grab ten minutes while I took a break from computer work. Just collecting those leaves. Baseball seemed perfect for this: it being so intertwined with America it was a natural lens through which to learn more about this place. 

I was rewarded quickly. In the first chapter, titled “History,” I read about the Elysian Fields. I checked on Google Maps and saw an image of the Elysian Fields as they are today—gone, now a road junction—and recalled that I’d already been there. It was a few years ago when a friend who lived in that neighborhood happened to show it to me as we traversed a crosswalk. It meant nothing back then, not because it shocked me that such a pivotal site for a national pastime was now a road junction. No, it meant nothing because I had no context, no thread to anything I understood, as even a dead-end would. But now, with my reading, I felt keen to see it again. Not in the sense that I was about to drop everything, run to the subway and catch the train over to Jersey. More in the sense that I would be disappointed if I never saw it. Disappointed if I were not to make some effort to see it if I was near-ish by. 

That’s really all I’m after: a little more understanding as a reward for my efforts. So that when I sit in a bar and see on the screen all those black, stationary statistics amidst the bright green of the field and the action of the players I won’t need to look past them. Or when I go to a game and look down and understand the meaning of this pitch at this junction of proceedings, or look up at the scoreboard and see some giant face or highlight reel that is familiar. Those moments of acknowledgment that I’m understanding more. That the pay-off is there. That this was the right move: coming here, getting stuck in like this. That I have time to understand things like baseball in this way. That home to first is only the start of a journey that, all being well, brings you right back home again.

Glen Jeffries was born and raised in the northwest corner of England in a village that endlessly boasts a tenuous connection to the first President of the U.S. He is now based in New York. His writing has appeared in The Millions, Smithsonian Magazine, Arctic Deeply and The Stinging Fly among others. His website shows his full portfolio of work.

Sam Williams is a cartoonist, comics publisher and baseball enthusiast based in Bournemouth, UK.

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