The piece
about the Springfield Redbirds that appeared in the paper on March 23,
2017, was shortened by rain, so to speak. Readers interested in the complete
version will find it here, as it appeared in our paper of Sept. 1, 1978.
Unusually, it was not published as part of my Prejudice series but as a
stand-alone piece.The Redbirds left Springfield in 1981 for Louisville,
Kentucky, after only four years, leaving Springfield with a broken contract and an empty stadium.
Until this summer, when someone
tuned in a baseball game on the tube, she left the room. “I hate
baseball,” she insisted, a prejudice her baseball-loving friends ascribed to an
ignorance that was as pitiable as it was stubborn. Given her predilections, it
was no surprise that the news last October of Springfield landing a Triple A
baseball club excited in her only indifference. The anticipatory talk among
local fans about what kind of team Ray Smith might bring to town, the spring
ritual by which the baseball fan repopulates his dreams, were as involving to
her as township election returns — important to some people, sure, but of no
interest to her.
That first outing to the north side, then, was not to watch
baseball so much as to go to a baseball game. It was midway into what looked
like a disastrous season both on the field and at the gate, an introduction
fraught with ill omens. She had much to learn. That first game, for example,
she wanted to know why every time a man hit the ball it was not a hit, or why a
man could go to bat and leave having never been there, officially at any rate.
Baseball surrenders its secrets reluctantly, but gradually
confusion gave way to curiosity. Soon she was not asking what was going on as
often as she asked why. She learned that a good pitcher doesn’t throw exactly
the same way, twice in a row, that a ball thrown on a count of 2 and 0 does not
signify the same thing as a ball thrown at 1 and 2, that it sometimes makes
sense to put a man on base deliberately, that the game, like all of the best
games, makes sense only in its own terms.
By May players were shuffling in and out of Springfield like
conventioneers, partly because the parent Cardinals were ailing and in constant
need of transfusion. The moves put budding fan loyalties to the test — one
could never be sure that the pitcher you liked so much on Wednesday would be
back on Monday — but the moves paid off on the field. Beginning in mid-June the
club’s lineup had assumed some quasi-permanent shape, and the team was winning
four games for every three it lost.
As her grasp of the rules grew surer, the other aspects of
the game became clearer. The esthetic satisfaction of the swelling double arc of
a long curving fly sailing over the fence. The ballet of a double play
choreographed by the shortstop, second and first basemen to the tune of a hard
grounder. The tactical improvisations of a pitcher. The comedy of errors. She
began to find it not quite so dull.
But the human aspects of baseball exerted the strongest pull
against her crumbling prejudices. Esthetics, after all, enhance the sport, but
it is emotion that ties one to it. Players who never stayed around long enough
to become more than numbers were replaced by players who in time acquired names
and faces and, eventually, personalities.
In July she sampled the rewards of attending the two-way
traffic through a minor league town. On a Saturday night she had watched
Aurelio Lopez (known affectionately among some fans as Taco Gringo) pitch two
strong innings in relief against Wichita. It was her first look at a major
league fastballer; he’s good, she was told. Two nights later Lopez was called
up by the Cards, and that night could be seen in St. Louis against the
then-first place Giants, right there on national TV. To the 16,651 paid in
Busch Stadium and the millions more at home who were watching Lopez throw for
the first time he was an unknown quantity. Not to our fan. “That’s our
Aurelio,” she announced when he hummed one by Jack Clark. Our Aurelio? One
lesson that a fan in this circumstance is granted the right to gloat a little,
she’d learned without prompting. The rest of the country, she knew, had only on
that day been allowed in on a secret that up to then only she and a few others
shared.
And, although many baseball fanatics love to pretend
otherwise, the pleasures of the ballpark don’t all lie in the elevated
contemplation of Sport. Summer evenings have charms of their own that even a
no-hitter cannot overshadow, and for those whose tastes run in that direction
there are’ also organ music, cheerleaders, chilli dogs and beer. There is even
sex, as is revealed by the appreciative stares garnered by such players as Dane
Iorg, whose virtues, according to several female fans, extended beyond his
economical and (at .378) highly productive swing.
By mid-August the transformation was nearly complete. It was
still unclear whether she was a baseball fan or a Redbird fan, but the effects
were largely indistinguishable. She found herself, against all her instincts,
turning to the sports pages on the day after a game. By the last home stand she
was allowing that she was a little sad that the season was nearing a close, and
was told that that, too, was part of the game and that end-of-season blues
provides its own curative in speculation about next year’s prospects.
The last time she watched the Redbirds was at their last
home game against Iowa. Behind her were a trio of teenaged boys. “They got
rid of their good catcher,” one said, which indeed they had, having traded
John Tamargo to the Giants earlier in the year. But that was weeks ago, another
team, another season almost. The big new kid named Kennedy who replaced Tamargo
was being touted as something really worth watching. When Kennedy — who was
batting .308 with ten homers and forty RBIs in only fifty-eight games — first
came to bat the kid said, “This guy doesn’t look very good.”
Our fan rolled her eyes upward in exasperation.
“Rookies,” she muttered, then bent back down to her scorecard.
This article appears in Mar 23-29, 2017.
