Truth, Life and Baseball - Welcome Back to Normal

I've got a couple of posts in mind today, so we'll start with the pleasanter one and see how I'm feeling when we get to the bottom.

I was born an Athletics fan. A photo from my sister's birth (Me, 3 yo) shows me wearing a Chicago Bears beanie while my older brother sports an A's cap. One of my early memories is of the earthquake that disrupted the A's-Dodgers World Series in 1989, but I did not care especially much to remember the outcome.

We were already living in the near west Chicago suburbs by then, a municipality called Oak Park that has since been incorporated into the metro government. My subsequent memories of baseball, therefore, are from Little League, Wrigley Field and (exclusively on Youth Player Appreciation Day, when all the little league teams from across the city go to a White Sox game) first old, then New Comiskey Ballpark (presently sponsored as Guaranteed Rate Field). I remember getting off the El Train (an elevated-track light-rail system) at Addison, freezing my a** off at an April game along the third-base (shaded) side.

In college, I joined my brother and a childhood friend, road tripping from Washington, DC through State College to attend one of the last League Championship Series games of the cursed era, whereat I spent $300 on a standing room ticket, used my brother's seat ticket instead (he'd gone 'home' to Oak Park to grab something and was two innings late getting back) and thence spent the remainder of the game out on Waveland Ave., hoping for a home run ball or one of the young women sitting on their boyfriends' shoulders to flash the crowd again. My brother's friend noted afterwards that I'd had a night roughly equivalent in cost and entertainment to one spent at a strip club, with two innings of championship baseball sprinkled on top.

When we moved to California, my brother was a shortstop on the high school varsity team and I was playing third for the freshman 'B' team, which is to say that I attended a school in Chicago that was sufficiently good at baseball (in fact, the varsity went to the State Tournament every year for fifty years) that they actually had enough talented players to field a second, full team of freshmen. As a starter on this team I would have rated a 'probable' for at least a bench spot on the JV.

My father, however, made the (so silly!) city slicker mistake of asking the Varsity coach to evaluate Max before we moved to Ojai, CA, about 90 minutes north of Los Angeles. He wanted to be sure that the coach would have a place for Max on the varsity team if we moved. In the end, Max stayed in Oak Park, lived with the aforementioned childhood friend's parents for his senior year and never really moved to Ojai at all. Little Georgie Porgie, was left to the consequences of Bob's laying an ultimatum against a small town high school head coach.

To be clear, Bob is not to blame. The gods certainly know that I'd have loved, until quite recently, to have found a way to hold my father at fault for this, but the reality is that he might have known, but I cannot honestly say that he should have known, because who on Earth could predict that a baseball coach would prioritize his relationships with inferior players' parents over, you know, winning baseball games. I am under no illusions that rural American values or traditions represent America writ large in any fashion, I have, after all, just told you the All-American story about a College Boy from suburban Chicago and the outskirts of Oakland.

Salinas, as it turns, is very much a farm town, and outside the ring of mountains that delimits the proper urban area referred to as The Bay, but my folks are both doctors, they bring the city where they go with them, and their friends from Salinas are all the literati of town. One is now a Federal Judge, another was speaker of the California Assembly for a session.

I'm pressing up against the other topic I meant to explore today, so we will see if I pop that bubble or leave it intact for another post...

Time passed, I finished two undergraduate degrees, worked a couple of years, then went back to school to collect a terminal master's degree as a first step toward a PhD. That path was blocked to me under circumstances I've outlined before and will no doubt do again, but suffice it to say on this occasion that the circumstance exemplified institutional racism at a textbook quality. During this time, I had lived for various (always too short) periods in Los Angeles.

I. fucking. love. LA. If the ending of the Broadway production and subsequent movie Angels in America demonstrated to me that the 'time' of New York City as the central Metropole of the human mental universe was over, and the new 'land of hopes and dreams' was 'out west,' in California, it was actually living in the Bay Area that showed me the character from the tale who abandons their staid, straitjacketing life in New York for San Francisco has actually bought their ticket, not for the next New York City, but for the next Philadelphia, or Boston.

Los Angeles is the new center of the human universe, and the least little unimportant life lived within its confines matters more than the most important man in all of Rome, living today. LA is the next New York; SF (no one (ever!) calls it *SaN fRaN*) is Philly and auditions are still open for a next Boston, DC and Baltimore, with Vegas, Seattle and (my favorite for the spot) Honolulu vying for position. Don't see your important American city on this list? The Chicago-Dallas-...? triad will have its day (there is no truth in the myth that it always marches west), but only if America continues to win the global war of capitalism versus oligarchy. Yes, that is the same thing as Democracy vs. Tyranny. No, whoever told you capitalism was undemocratic doesn't understand capitalism. Or democracy. Or more likely both.

Baseball.

So during those periods when I lived in the City proper, I was usually living close enough to Dodger Stadium to go to games pretty regularly. One period, when I lived in a room in my cousins' house in Mt. Washington, just north of Chavez Ravine and Downtown, the Stadium Way freeway exit off the 110 was just two-stops before my own on my homeward commute. On evenings when the traffic suddenly cleared ten minutes early and I had a quick trip the rest of the way home I'd know that a game was just starting. I'd drop the car off, jump on the Yellow Line light rail ($5.75 'all day' iirc, about a fifth the price of parking), I'd get off at the Chinatown exit, buy takeout and hike the mile or so up the hill to Chavez arriving by the second inning, most nights.

Stadium security checks bags for weapons, but team ownership appreciates that the stadium is a picnic destination, and picnic food does not cost $35 a head. Further, while they allow liquids in, they limit those to 1 liter per person, which does not fully satisfy a grown man who has just eaten, meaning that in addition to having sold a ticket to that budget-minded bleacher bum, they've also sold at least one of their quadruple-priced beers. If you want $35 food, Dodger Stadium, like many baseball parks these days, has it, but for the real baseball experience, its pretty hard to beat Chinese takeout and a one-liter Coca-Cola with a $10 day-of ticket price. All told, the whole evening would cost me about $35, which, in LA, is an amazing price on four hours of entertainment.

After the MA, I decided to try working as a small business administration professional, in hopes of climbing a corporate promotion-chart and earning a real living the common way. Again, we are pressing against the other topic, but the fact is simply that I am a difficult person to employ, for reasons that have little and nothing to do with the quality, quantity or any other objective measure of my work.

This is the period when I moved to and lived in the Bay Area, which I never really enjoyed (had never wanted to move there in the first place) and where I certainly did not want to build a future. I was working for less than $15 as a Medical Records Clerk in a long term care and skilled nursing facility, living in a godawful situation so bad I had to drive five minutes away to stop the car by a park so I could have a safe place to just cry on what was becoming a regular basis. I don't remember exactly what it was, I think I was recommended for hire in a different position, not technically an advancement, but with a clear path to it, and it was denied by a shitbag new hospital admin who took one look at me and didn't even try to hide his obvious impression that I could not possibly be as competent and hard-working as everyone else in the building thought I was (IDK if he had that reputation of me already, or if he never even heard it because he was so obvious about thinking the opposite).

At any rate, employers do those things where they make it clear that they are only looking for the next opportunity to fire you. Yes; I remember. I was denied the transfer, moved out of the records room and assigned irrelevant work, with my previous duties assigned to a colleague who was widely known to certify all of his work without actually checking anything, then standing around all day chatting up the nursing staff. Which I'm sure must have seemed like a great efficiency right up until people started dying of COVID in much greater numbers at their facility than at others in the area.

Anyways, I called my Dad, sobbing, and asked if, should I quit the job, I could come back and live some months in their house in Ojai while I found a job down there. He agreed, I resigned and was in Ojai a week later with what, technically, was the most appealing resume I've ever been in a position to circulate. I found one job quickly, but this is Ventura County and, let's face it, people are backward AF out here, excepting Ojai, which lacks the industry to supply a steady job market. I imagine it is when they found out that I smoke pot that they decided their one last effort to keep a second office open in the area couldn't possibly work, they let me go, closed operations and moved all their admin back to Rancho Cucamonga, where they'd first opened.

This had nothing to do with me. As desperately as they may have tried to stuff all of their fiscal problems into the box of 'pothead outreach coordinator,' the fact that my not securing any new business in my first week was enough to cause them to close up shop and go home is ample proof of that. Their preconceived notions as to my ability to learn to win business stoned (which are, anyways, wholly imagined, derived from an entirely fictive conception of what marijuana actually does) are not sufficient to cause them to pack up the store and abandon business. The business has to have been failing to catch wind long before I started, and if I only had one week to prove myself as a stoner, I wouldn't have had much more if I were the perfect, square little nerd (which I am, except for those serrated pot-leaf edges).

Anyways, I lamented to my parents, later that week, how they and I and everyone I've ever met can be perfectly confident that I am able to successfully run a business, if only I controlled the means. As I put it, it would just be nice if I were the one who could turn the income tap on and off. Turn it on, work hard, earn. Turn it off, don't effing worry about it until its time to turn it on again.

There is a great deal to the story that I do not wish to get into, but the business plan we agreed I should put together went unused, there was acrimony and I did not speak to my parents for slightly more than six years, a period that ended...less than a month before I started this blog. During that period, the Cubs won a world series, my brother had two kids and now, the Dodgers have won a trophy. I went from wanting the Cubs to take all three games when they came to town, to hoping for a split, to maybe being okay with it if the Dodgers take three of four.

Baseball, sports in general, but especially baseball, gave me something to hope for during this time, something normal. Everybody is a baseball fan. Every type of person, that is. In the bleachers, on twitter, chatting with co-workers while I work a high-school-diploma-job at less-than-a-living-wage while trying desperately not to stand out, because standing out leads to expectations which leads to 'pothead' which leads to no-work-you-do-can-possibly-be-hard-work-because-potheads-MUST-be-lazy, but baseball makes me feel like a real boy. Baseball reminds me the rules matter, that successive events will regress to a mean, and results can weigh more than personality. In winning systems.

Funny thing though. That Chinatown routine doesn't work nearly as well in a group, with kids in tow, complaining through every foot of elevation even though its like a 200-yard incline. Just another breath of normalcy in a crazy world. (Heh. Some people call the kids the dose of insanity...)

Baseball is back today. Not pandemic baseball. Baseball. The kind of baseball where one bloop hit falls in and you don't have to think "well, maybe it just won't happen this year," because one play, one game doesn't mean nearly as much as sustained excellence. And while you really don't hear anyone, anywhere saying that the 2020 World Series doesn't mean as much as a championship won against a 162-game backdrop, because baseball is played in series, and the better team reliably wins the series, but not always, there is still a qualitative difference to what was needed for success, an asterisk that does not tarnish, but does say 'do not compare.'

With football, particularly pandemic football, the one game you play against any opponent most certainly does not establish who would win ninety-nine out of a hundred games (no matter what hater types like Rodger Goodell or Jerry Jones would prefer you to believe), whereas the three or four wins in a basketball series are, in fact, highly determined by talent (I said it! Basketball is garbage.).

In baseball, life matters. Trouble with the mother-in-law? Hard to concentrate on seeing that fastball. Cold, cloudy weather? Nearly impossible to get a good break on the curve. Playing a mile above sea-level? Get ready to climb those outfield fences.

But in the end, everything goes down on those two little lines in pencil, and when you tot them all up at season's end, the best players will always have the best numbers and the most mediocre will be where they've earned. Baseball is not pure, but it is true.