The Redemption of an Over-aged Baseball Fan

          I'm embarrassed to be a baseball fan.

          It would be all right if I were just a casual fan who sees an occasional game, a guy who secretly finds the whole thing boring.  It is.  I realize that.  For one thing, baseball games are way too long.  Managers teach their hitters to go "deep in the count," which in baseball lingo means 3 and 2 counts and lots of foul balls.  Make the pitcher work.  Get his pitch count up and up until the opposing manager has to take him out, which is good because you want to get into the other team's bullpen.  That's when our guys might be able to put a couple of runs on the board.  Slow the game down.  Get those pitchers tired.

          Pitchers slow the game down too, especially when they have to work out of trouble.  With runners on base, pitchers often go into slow-motion--rub the ball down, walk around the mound, reach for the rosin bag, shake off the catcher's signals, throw over to first to keep the runner close, call the third baseman over for a chat about who should cover a bunt.  Lord, a half inning can run half an hour.

          But I love every minute of it.  It's high drama.  And my emotional life hangs in the balance--absolute, pure elation on the one hand, total, heart-breaking depression on the other.  And of course, that's why I'm embarrassed to be a baseball fan, especially now that I'm 72.  Shouldn't such feelings have passed by now?  Gone the way of all youthful passions?  But there I am at the TV most nights with the sound turned off so I can read some book or do some lap work.  I care.  Damn it all to Hell.  I care.

          Today, however, I feel a little better about all this.  My good friend Jim Kozelsky gave me his copy of Sports Illustrated, which has an article by Tom Verducci on "The Passion of Roger Angell," one of those magnificent New Yorker writers I've been reading for years.  If you know baseball at all, you know Angell's essays on the national pastime.  I won't heap superfluous praise on one of the great writers of our age, but note please that he is to be enshrined, at age 93, into baseball's Hall of Fame today, July 26, 2014.  He'll be receiving the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, the "highest honor given by the Baseball Writers Association of America," according to Verducci.  And it's worth saying that Roger Angell is not a member of BBWAA because he isn't a major league beat writer.  He's way better than that.

          And here's why I'm posting this entry:  Roger Angell loves baseball the same way I do--and he too knows that it's embarrassing, but  he also sees our redemption.  Verducci quotes Angell:  "It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look--I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable.  Almost.  What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring--caring deeply and passionately, really caring--which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.  And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved.  Naivete--the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball--seems a small price to pay for such a gift."
 
          I couldn't have said it better myself--of course.  Few could.  I'm just happy, thrilled even, that this grand old man of baseball has said if for me.  Bravo.  And thank you.

Thoughts on Joseph Smith's "American Crucifixion"

Today's New York Times Book Review has a review by Benjamin Moser of Alex Beam's book American Crucifixion:  The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church (published by something called PublicAffairs and selling for $26.99).

I doubt I'll ever read the book, but I was taken with a few facts I hadn't known about crazy Joseph Smith and the spiritual phenomenon known as Mormonism, which he invented.  First, Mormonism is a religion “whose followers believe that the Earth was created somewhere in the neighborhood of the planet Kolob, and that the Garden of Eden was created somewhere in the neighborhood of Kansas City."  That sort of thing has made Mormonism such an inviting target for mockery that “there's no sport in scorning it," according to the review—and attacking Smith himself is so easy that it amounts to "a distasteful piling on."

But the reviewer piles on anyway:  Smith in the 1820s "began to 'translate' from tablets he kept wrapped in a tablecloth, a series of visions that became the Book of Mormon, a turgid sci-fi novel that nonetheless managed to sway a nucleus of converts."  But so many people hated Smith that he was murdered by a lynch mob when he was 38 in 1844.  

 His “crucifixion” changed everything.  Silly and infuriating as Smith may have been in life, in death he was elevated beyond sainthood into godhood itself.  He became "a flamboyant frontier L. Ron Hubbard."  That is, for his followers Smith was much greater in death than he had ever been in life, for in death he joined all the other "miracle"-making saviors throughout history.  And it’s also true that by any logical standard, it is no more difficult to believe in him and Mormonism than "than it is to believe that Moses parted the Red Sea, or that Muhammad ascended to heaven on a winged horse, or that Jesus was born of a virgin."

Take it all together, and you have a story worth retelling, as  Alex Beam has done by taking familiar materials and refashioning them into an irreverent new book.  That sort of work gets my attention and applause--which is as far as I'll go in the way of a secular genuflection—to Beam, that is, not Smith.  I might even read the damn book.

Addendum:  According to a front-page story in the New York Times on November 10, 2014, Smith had a “loyal partner” in his “loving spouse Emma,” but nevertheless “took as many as 40 wives,” including one who was only 14.  He even married women already married, sometimes to his friends and followers.  Polygamy, in Smith's self-serving theology, was the restoration of a practice "commanded by God" and followed by Abraham and other Old Testament patriarchs—which thus enabled him to claim full biblical immunity for a super-charged sex life.  American Crucifixion is now officially elevated to “on my nightstand” status.  I’ve got to know more about this guy.