For hours and hours at a time, I'd launch baseballs at the chalk-outlined strike zone on my chimney. I'd mix my pitches - start out with a four seamer away, then go to a curve on the inside black of the dish; I'd waste another heater high, and then get the invisible batsman to chase a devastating forkball that would dive out of the zone at the last second, then richochet off the brick and down the driveway. I'd pump my fist and walk tall off the worn patch of grass on my front yard, a dominant power pitcher for the next generation.
Just like the Rocket.
Roger Clemens signed with the Boston Red Sox when I was eleven days old. He made his first start with the big club less than a year later, and went on to be a fixture in the rotation for the next twelve years - the twelve years I spent playing Little League baseball and dreaming of someday playing for the Sox. Every fifth day through my formative years, Clemens would take the mound and we would watch the "K's" line up along the wall in deep center field.
And for a pudgy pre-adolescent who read every book on baseball that could be found in the libraries of Lynnfield, the husky Rocket provided a much-needed athletic role model. In an era where the aces were often tall and lanky with perfectly fluid pitching motions in the style of Orel Hershiser, Dwight Gooden, and Frank Viola, the Rocket's burly, explosive clenched-jaw style provided a blueprint for the "power pitcher" of the future.
When I would hurl in my front yard and picture striking out twenty batters in a single afternoon, the pitches did not actually move. I tried different grips, but the tailing two-seamers and the sweeping curves were as imaginary as the lineups I faced. My control was abysmal, as evidenced by the two broken windows and the subsequent league-wide equipment change to tennis balls, as enforced by Commissioner Mom. Some kids had imaginary friends; I had imaginary opposing lineups and combative umpires who would squeeze me on both sides of the chalk-lined plate.
In a strange and adolescent way, it was a romantic interpretation of an inherently romantic game. In an era where baseball's even pace and slow-burn drama has been pushed aside for the car-crash violence and pageantry of football or the me-first showmanship of basketball, the inherent poetry of the game as immortalized by the likes of John Updike and Roger Angell can easily go unnoticed by the impatient eye. Individual football plays tend to exist in a vacuum; they are remembered primarily for their feats of athleticism and can be strung together to make easily digestible highlight reels, ideal for the sports segment of the local news or ESPN's Plays of the Week.
Baseball moments, however, exist in the context of an entire series, season, career, or even lifetime. One of my favorite baseball highlights is the final pitch of the 2003 ALDS, which featured Derek Lowe striking out Terrence Long on a devastating two-seam fastball that painted the black on the inside corner. In a vacuum, the pitch isn't that special. A guy throws a pitch, it moves about ten inches at the last second, the guy at bat just stands there, and everybody goes crazy. That's it. That's one of my top-five baseball moments of all time. People who hate the game mock moments like this, referring to tomahawk jams on a fast break, triple dekes in a shootout, or one-handed catches in the back of the endzone as much more exciting experiences. In the context of the series, the season, or Derek Lowe's Boston career, however, this moment transcends any mere athletic achievement.
Sox fans had lived and died with Derek Lowe for six years; we'd watched him grow from a young setup man to a lock-down closer to a basketcase of epic proportions to a Cy Young candidate to the last man out of the bullpen. His 2.58 ERA in 2002 inexplicably ballooned to 4.71 in '03, and few in the Hub thought the local nine could scratch out a win in his Game 3 start. He ended up having to pitch in relief in Game One and taking the loss in the bottom of the 12th inning, then came back on two days rest to start Game Three and throw seven innings of shutout ball. On only one day of rest, Lowe got the call in the bottom of the ninth of Game Five, with the series in the balance and runners on first and second with no outs. The first batter bunted (thanks for the out, Oakland), and Lowe struck out the next batter looking to secure the second out of the inning. Losing a bit of control, Lowe walked the next batter to load the bases; the tying run stood at third, the winning run (and the end of the season) sat at second. Lowe ran the count full, and with the season hanging on a single pitch, he broke off the aforementioned offering and sent the A's packing and the Sox on to face the New York Yankees in their first ever postseason confrontation.
Most people don't have the patience to read the previous paragraph. Diehard Sox fans had been developing the background for that single pitch since 1998.
But that is baseball. It is a game of organic drama that rewards those most who pay most attention. There is more talk of history and tradition in the ballparks of America than any other because this is the only game where that tradition really matters. Football is a short-term fix; baseball is a lifetime addiction. To fully appreciate the 2004 Boston victory over New York in the ALCS, for example, you not only have to consider the win in the context of that series (Sox come back to win the series after being down 3 games to none), but also in the context of the Sox/Yankees confrontations from that entire season (Varitek punches ARod, Jeter's dive into the stands) and the season before (Pedro tosses Zimmer, Boone's homer and the echoes of Bucky Dent), and beyond that the history of the franchises dating back to the sale of George Herman Ruth. The series had over eighty years of history behind it; that's baseball.
With a game so steeped in legend, we constantly seek storybook endings fit for the silver screen. Parables as old as time can play themselves out on the diamond in ways that would be laughable in any other forum: parables such as the prodigal son, exiled by a long-gone regime, returning to where it all began to offer closure to an entire region and find that self-same closure for himself after a ten-year absence; having the opportunity to win a the World Championship that evaded him in his first tour of duty; and finally, to cement his reputation with a gesture that would surely be memorialized on a plaque in Cooperstown.
But baseball is also a business. This is no secret. Maybe in an era of escalating salaries and artificial storylines hyped up to appeal to the football crowd, the romance of a cool summer evening listening to baseball on a scratchy AM radio has become as antiquated as telegrams and drive-in movies. Maybe I shouldn't be so sentimental about watching a 45-year old baseball player pass up his last opportunity to finish his storied career with the flourish it so richly deserves.
Or maybe the next time I go home, I'll see if I can still strike out twenty in my front yard. I'm sure my chimney would appreciate the closure.
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