Saturday, October 05, 2002

Baseball is in the air,

Baseball is in the air, bringing the conjoined promises of injury and liability.  A few years ago i went to an A’s game and sat about 10 rows in, just past third base.  Foul balls were blowing past us with unsettling regularity.  Three times the balls sliced the air at the level of my delicate nose, smashed under the seats behind us and caromed like a rabid mole for several moments.  The two gradeschool girls sitting behind us would scream each time this would happen, jumping up on their seats and clutching their ankles and knees and each other.  When the ball stopped they’d reach down and pick it up with dainty unblistered fingers, somewhat fearfully, as if afraid it would start moving of its own accord. They picked up three regulation balls that way.  I had tried to grab one of those balls, a line drive foul off Ricky Henderson.  I had no glove, but felt manly and strong as a consequence of my exposure to professional athletics and fermented refreshments.  The ball was flying straight and true and i put up my left hand to grab it.  I watched my fingers snap back as the ball smote them, uinimpeded by my efforts to catch it or even slow it down.  My fingers just got pushd back perpendicular to the back of my hand, and then they snapped forward again, battered but incredulous.  It didn’t start to sting for about an inning, and didn’t stop for about a week.  Those damn girls took that one home too.

Ballparks often play ‘charge’ on the organ to get the crowd worked up.  Even when the game is exciting, there’s usually not a lot going on.  Brief periods of frantic activity are interspersed among much longer periods of quiescence.  So they play ‘charge’ and the whole crowd, in theory, wakes up and remembers that they’re at a very exciting and important sporting event and they order their team to charge, bellowing it, screaming it, usually thrice, a big noise - and I just realized that it makes no sense at all, no one is charging at anything, everybody is hollering and the players are still just standing there, waiting for play to resume, neither charging nor being charged… why are we telling them to do something they patently won’t ever be doing?  “Charge” is not working for me; it’s time to retire it.  Ideas for replacements?