A few days ago, while writing about Ed Randall, the host of "Ed Randall's Talking Baseball," for an upcoming work assignment, I rhetorically asked on my Facebook page for another word for baseball. A friend, in book publishing, mind you, responded: "Boring." Her reply made me think of the following extended passage from David James Duncan's glorious book
The Brothers K, which, if not the best book I've ever read, is at least one of the most resonate. If you haven't read it, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy. It's big and fun and honest, and it's about, basically, baseball and family, two of life's most satisfying and infinitely complicated subjects. My buddy
John turned me on it, and for that I will always be grateful. For John's excellent take on David James Duncan's masterpiece, take a look over
here. It's worth the read, both the book and John's review. Enjoy the long weekend and the excerpt, a powerful novena for the national pastime and beaten-down fathers who continue to shape us, fairly or not, one way or another.
the hedge hideout/winter/1964
There are, as far as I can tell, just two types of people who can bear to watch baseball without talking: total non-baseball fans and hard-core players. The hard-core player can watch in silence because his immersion is so complete that he feels no need to speak, while the persona non baseball can do it because his ignorance is so vast that he sees nothing worthy of comment. For the rest of us, watching any sort of baseball-like proceeding without discussing what we're seeing is about as much fun as drinking nonalcoholic beer while fishing without a hook.
That's why, if it weren't for the new freeway just a block and a half south of our house, Papa would have heard Everett and me jabbering in our hedge hideout the first night we crawled into it. As baseball aficionados and mediocre players both, it was doubly impossible for us not to converse loudly and at length about the intricacies of the one-man ball game being played in our backyard, and thanks to the freeway's riverine roar we could do it without getting caught. It was odd to have something to thank a freeway for.
We snuck out to check on Papa's shedball progress once a week on the average, and as time passed on both his pitching and Everett's hedge-bound analysis of it became far more skillful than I'd first thought possible. Despite the dead thumb, Papa gradually developed four distinct pitches. And despite our laurel-leaf and shed-obstructed view of the proceedings, Everett was able--by pointing out the various spins, speeds and trajectories--to teach me how to identify all four. He dubbed them 'the Heater,' 'the Hangman,' 'the Knucklebrain' and 'the Kamikaze.'
The Heater was a fastball, and Everett said that Papa's was more effective than ever in that it was still lightning fast, but was also so wild now that it would scare the living guano out of anybody on earth except maybe our Uncle Marv. The Hangman was basically just a hanging curve--the sorry remnant, Everett guessed, of the darting slider that had once been Papa's money pitch and earned him the nickname Hook. The Knucklebrain was a no-spin no-dance no-account knuckler that any .250-hitting Single A musclebrain could have kabonged into the bleachers of his choice. But the Kamikaze was our favorite: it was a high-speed sinking fastball that dove so violently and late as any Zero-flying pilot who ever bought the farm for Tojo. More often than not the thing went up in flames ten feet in front of the plate, or missed the mattress altogether and blammed the garage siding. But when it managed to hit the strike zone, the Kamikaze looked so actionable and unhittable that it really did seem like something piloted, something more flown than thrown.
For all its perspicacity, Everett's shedball analysis was, for him, a melancholy business. Hunching in a damp niche in a dirty hedge watching pitches being flung into a wall by a crapped-out millworker was, after all, a far and farcical cry from his boyhood dream of catching Smoke Chance in a major league, or minor league, or at least a sandlot game. Hooked as he was on the idea that Papa's new hobby was a surreptitious comeback, and haunted as he was by memories of Papa's glory days, Everett couldn't help but be depressed by most of the pitches that limped out into the light.
But to my mind, hunching in that hedge stands out as the best thing I did that year, and one of the best things I've ever done, period. The dank laurel, the darkness and the need for low-voiced secrecy created an atmosphere that made our talk more considered than the ebullient, hormone-garbled yammering we were prone to elsewhere. And with an eight-piece family crammed in a house the size of ours, it was a balm to discover a place, however squalid, where intimacy with one of my brothers was not a necessity but a choice. But it was that maimed little remnant of what had once been Papa's great art form that has really stayed with me. There is a part of me that wants to state flat out that I learned more in the hedge about the defiance of dullness and career death, about the glory hidden in defeat, about the amazing inner capacities of a straightforward, no-frills man--even a man stripped of hope--than I've learned anywhere since. But such grandiose claims and language clash with the swaddling clothes my hedge insights came wrapped in. All I remember feeling at first was the sad satisfaction of knowing that, whatever he was doing in that shed, he was doing it partly for me, and that watching even his most brain-damaged Knucklers and hungest Hangmen beat watching him chain-smoke himself to death in front of the TV. But as the weeks passed and he kept slamming bucketful after bucketfull of baseballs against that padded wall, a wall in me began to give way: I began to sense a new realm of athletic possibility, or a different sort of scale upon which to weigh a life...
Believe it or not, in about two weeks, New York City will host a 16-team world soccer tournament. Copa N.Y.C., a sort of mini-World Cup, is made up of national teams drawn from the Metropolitan area's diverse cultural and ethnic communities. Each team, according to Copa N.Y.C.'s website, consists of a team president, coaches, and 25 players who can at least claim some heritage to their country they're representing. 
