The Theater of Baseball

The Theater of Baseball

By Margaret Erhart

I don’t follow baseball anymore, but when I was a kid my favorite four-letter word was Mets. In the summer of 1962, when the Mets were born, I sat on the floor next to my brother, our faces aimed at a small black-and-white television, and together we passed many an afternoon watching the Mets lose another double-header. There was nothing more exciting to me than watching Casey Stengel walk to the pitcher’s mound after a particularly poor inning. He walked slowly, like the old man he was, hands behind his back, head down. The catcher would join him out there and pretty soon the fireworks would start to pop. You couldn’t hear what was said but you sure could see it. Stengel’s body language was like nobody else’s. He’d throw his arms in the air, jut his chin, and start yelling. His mouth worked itself into a lambasting machine, chewing the words and spitting them out with a force you could almost feel. A little more of that and the pitcher, who’d hung his head by then, would start his long walk to the bullpen.

In those days television was not the frantic creature it is today. It was more like going to a play. You had to imagine things because the camera didn’t go right into the faces of its subjects. Instead, it gave you the long shot. Which isn’t to say you didn’t catch the incredibly muscled forearms of Choo-Choo Coleman, or the intensity with which Roger Craig worked his jaw around a piece of gum. But watching things in black and white was more peaceful, more subtle. It was one step removed from life. Even the venom flying from Stengel’s mouth seemed more theatrical than real, and it was this formal quality I loved about baseball. I’ll never forget my shock the first time my dad took us to see a Mets game at the Polo Grounds. I walked into the stadium behind my brother and there in front of me lay a ballfield so blinding green I gasped. I had expected the same gray I saw on television, but this…this made my eyes ache. I didn’t trust it. It seemed trashy. Who needed this distraction of color when the game itself was pure, pleasing geometry?

My brother felt differently. We both grew up in the shadow of baseball, but it wasn’t the formality of the game that spurred him on. It was nothing as abstract as geometry. It was the rush of competition, the high of suspense. Because we were rooting for a solidly losing team, we lived on hope, and that hope enlivened him. It emboldened him. Suddenly he had all the baseball cards and knew every player’s stats. The seventh inning stretch became a required ritual and the Rheingold jingle found its way into our home. He became a participant, donning his Mets uniform to watch the games from our living room, while I slipped into the background, an audience member in row Z, thrilled to watch the wild gesticulations, the muttered curses, the everyday heroism on the stage before me. Content to watch the play. I was an interested observer, while he lived inside the moment. I felt at home in the cooler emotions, and he yearned for the jump of the pulse. The rift between us was slow, a halting slide into second base, but it broke things open. It was surely inevitable. We were children and then we weren’t. It was never just about the theater of baseball, but baseball was where it settled in the end.

Later, when the Mets started winning and my brother did laps around the house, exploding in a frenzy of fist pumps, some of us just couldn’t adjust. We gained the pennant, then the Series, but what we lost was a lot of fine acting. Stengel and Coleman and Craig, they were great performers no matter how they played ball. Stengel retired and that was the end of the great spitting maw at the mound. Then television took a leap of sophistication and everything colored up and the game was no longer something my imagination could tug at and tangle with. It was all right in front of me, close up and overproduced, and the thing I called baseball was gone.

Margaret Erhart’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Best American Spiritual Writing 2005, and many literary magazines. She won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, and The Butterflies of Grand Canyon (Plume), was a finalist for an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona. Margaret welcomes responses and conversations at www.margareterhart.com