I have no trouble filling my days.
I write, go to the garage and use the weights and the stretch bands, take the dogs on a walk, write some more. I boil some ramen and eat it on the porch. I practice my guitar. I write. I go for a bike ride, shower, read, sweep and dust the house.
And I miss baseball.
I have a box of balls in my office, four or five scuffed horsehide missiles. I take one of them out and grip it from time to time, fitting my fingers across the seams.
My dad knew Hank Aaron and Mickey Mantle, and I wanted to be Willie Mays until I understood that I was no longer (like I ever was) the swiftest kid in my class. Like Philip Roth, I wanted to be a center fielder, but my skills were ultimately deemed better suited for the right side of the infield. The throws were shorter.
Somewhere, though I haven't seen it since we moved, I have a first baseman's mitt too. The best lesson sports can teach us is humility, that there is always somebody faster, stronger, better at a given thing than we are. And if there's not, just wait a while. There will be.
It's been 20 years since I've played catch, but my Rawlings Heart of the Hide Pro-200 glove from 1975, the one with the hole worn in the pocket, still fits. I slip it on and it feels natural, my hand still forms to it. I imagine I can still play, but remember how my last at-bat ended, with me hobbling into second base with a ruptured hamstring. At least I retired on a high note.
They are replaying old games on ESPN and the MLB Network, but I haven't watched any. Maybe if someone would replay the Baltimore Orioles' 1970 season game by game, I might get into that, even though I know the outcome. I prefer the slow drip of a full season to being parachuted into a "classic" game. What I want is the languid rhythm, the nonchalance of an April day game, the sheer ordinariness of the grind. Baseball is an accretionary sport; no individual game is a meaningful sample.
Baseball was for me as much church as gym. The numbers and the names mean something; I have strong opinions about players I never saw play. Before I was old enough to play Little League, I read about John McGraw, Connie Mack and Frankie Frisch's Gashouse Gang; I collected the old Spalding Guides and kept The Baseball Encyclopedia (2,337 pages of statistics!), sets of the annual Sporting News Registers and Guides, and a copy of Daguerreotypes of Great Stars of Baseball, a book published by The Sporting News, that featured the complete major and minor league stats and brief biographies of retired players who had reached certain milestones, such as 2,000 hits or 200 home runs.
Around the turn of the '70s, I was more than a baseball fan. I could tell you the starting lineups and pitching rotations for every major league team and was conversant with Duck Medwick's 1937 Triple Crown season. I knew all about Tony Lazzeri and Arky Vaughan. It might be too much to say that I learned math because of baseball, but I was figuring batting averages and slugging percentages for fun.
I invented a dice-based game that was a lot like the Strat-O-Matic Baseball which I always wanted but was never allowed to order and so have never played. It involved dice and sheets of player cards in five-subject college-ruled spiral notebooks. My simulation wasn't too far off what reality delivered, though some of the power numbers got away from me.
When I replayed the Yankee's 1961 season, I remember Mickey Mantle ended up with more than 80 home runs, and the team with more than 300. In real life, the team hit 240, which stood as the major league record until 1996, when the Baltimore Orioles hit 256. They were led by their lead-off hitter, Brady Anderson, who hit 50 home runs that season despite never hitting more than 21 in his previous eight years in the majors.
(While it's not my job to be Brady Anderson's defense attorney, let me say that although most baseball fans attribute Anderson's anomalous year to steroid use, I'm not sure that's the case. Aside from the spike in his home-run production, there has never been any evidence that Anderson used PEDs in 1996; he wasn't named in the Mitchell Report, none of his teammates or opponents ever alleged he was juicing, and he has vehemently denied it. The fact is, 1996 was one of the few relatively injury-free seasons he played, and he was 32, an age at which the power numbers for a lot of players peak before precipitously declining. More than that, in the American League, 1996 was the most prolific home-run year of what we now call the steroid era. In 1995, AL hitters homered on average every 36.45 at bats. In 1997, it was once every 35.59 at bats. In 1996, it was once every 28.84 at bats. So it probably wasn't just steroids that contributed to the homer surge of 1996.)
In my fantasy simulation, Mantle's 1961 season represented no more a variation from the mean than Anderson's 1996 season, so maybe we could call that a feature, not a bug. But I couldn't conceive of any way to evaluate, much less factor in, the effects of defense or fatigue, so in my game I was able to install defensive liability Johnny Blanchard as the Yankees' full-time catcher while platooning Elston Howard and Yogi Berra in left field. I believe Blanchard, whose real-life OPS (On Base plus Slugging percentage) was slightly higher than that of Roger Maris, ended up hitting 50 home runs in my simulation.
If I needed another diversion, I might order a board game from the still-extant Strat-O-Matic company. It makes a digital version too, unfortunately it's PC only, and also a daily online where they simulate the games. That might satisfy a certain kind of fan--the nerdy sort who craves compiled numbers more than the highlights of diving catches and deep balls.
But I have no trouble filling my days. As luck would have it, a few weeks before entering house arrest, Jim Yeager, of the Kell-Robinson Chapter of the Society for America Baseball Research, sent me a copy of his 2018 book Backroads and Ballplayers: A Collection of Stories about Famous (and Not so Famous) Professional Baseball Players from Rural Arkansas: Smead Jolley and Preacher Roe and others of whom I had never heard.
When things get quiet, I can slide down this wormhole. Or maybe it's a foxhole.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 03/31/2020