The Diamond Sutra

At R2C we are under no illusion that the bulk of our readership are sensitive artists and poets. Introspective souls and Europeans to whom Baseball is at best a boring / confusing / misunderstood pursuit played primarily by Dominicans and white guys named “Tanner”. But to Alpha jocks like us here, the red seams that stitch together the ball are dyed naturally with our blood and our tears. It’s our pagan ritual, our Midsommar festival and with this being the first week of Spring Training I thought I’d try in earnest to convey why.

So think of me as the bro-dude who stumbled into your drama club meeting right as you’re all in the midst of your theater exercises, but instead of mocking you, I understand and I find a freedom in your medium. My sensitive soul finds refuge in the sanctuaries of free expression that you all encourage. I become your burly protector with the heart of a romantic. The Henry Rollins to your Belle and Sebastian.

Imagine that once a week the pizza parlor near the college campus puts on an open mic for all the local bohemians and goes through a 1960s, East Village makeover. Candles are lit, black tablecloths cover the red and white checkers and the lights are dimmed. Coltrane plays softly over the radio, the chef trades his flour splashed cap for a black beret while a big pot of Folgers brews behind the counter. I have to lie to my bros and tell em I was visiting my grandma so they don’t know I’m here. We meet outside the club and you roll your eyes at my basic presentation, jeans and a t-shirt. By contrast you’re all decked out in your psychedelic finest. Scarves, necklaces, thrifted, drastically altered clothing, bright colors, political slogans, and performative attitudes. Dragging on a clove behind sunglasses even though the twilight’s set in.

As the night unfolds, the poetry, creaky folk songs and performances of those among us unspool themselves as we listen. Smoking indoors is not permitted so only the dark vapors of vulnerability hang in the air until I want to make you understand like I understand. So I walk to the front of the room, step upon the platform. I stuff a wad of Skoal between my cheek and gum. Then as the hand holding my dip cup shakes, in the voice of Kevin Costner, I begin:

“The Cross is in the ballpark’ Paul Simon famously sung about the ordinary insurgencies of aging. An acknowledgment of the way humanity can trace lines around a space, call it a ball field and flood it with the mystical. That real salvation exists in play. In those hot summer days that move with a sweet viscosity into the layered palette of twilight. Until the darkness calls the day or the bright lights come on. I’m talking about the game at it’s wildest, it’s most non-hierarchical. One minute winning is everything and the next it’s non-existent.

When I fly, I like to sit by the window and spot the ballparks from above. Sometimes they’re designated to single areas in a community in a regimented array; but often they are more random. Diamonds spilled between alleys, behind the churches, across from tenement buildings, schoolyards and vacant spaces. Like the American version of the Nasca lines in Peru, it’s fun to think how the aliens spying on us are interpreting them. To imagine maybe there’s some mystical hand at work, laying them out in an invisible pattern that’s reflecting some astronomical equation. To think of the neighborhoods around them.

If the cross is in the ballpark, then the professional ones can feel like renaissance era churches in Italy. You kind of know what to expect but once you actually enter them the scope and size, can feel all encompassing. It takes the brain a moment to process. You can look at the Sistine Chapel all day in books or on a computer but you stand under that fucker and suddenly the game has changed. It’s almost psychedelic, the mass of people, the green and white shapes and stripes and the night sky, the high walls. Be that as it may, I’m more attracted to the small, rustic, rural, abandoned and organic fields. The contrast of humble, sincere spaces built out of love rather than royal decree. Like overgrown village temples of the jungle; the DIY Quaker meeting house in a snowy forest, the tiny shrines tucked into busy city alleys. Worn base paths in vacant lots or farmer’s fields. Old shoes, pizza boxes or aspects of the landscape used to mark the bases. Parks after all are just the lattice work, it’s the activities of the people in them that are the vines.

Similarly to that point, while I like going to major league games but I dig the lower levels and the independent leagues more. I would rather be in some random post-industrial town watching a guy in a hot dog outfit race a guy in a hamburg outfit between innings while Jerry “the King” Lawler sings the National Anthem on all you can eat Hot Dog Night. Tickets are cheap and the townies are passionate. In the lower levels you’ve got the spectrum of those working to rise in a organization or on the decline but fighting to stay inside their dreams for one more season. The raw talent of the minors allows all those cliches of immortality, heartbreak and magic that baseball narratives lean so heavily upon (especially my shpiel). It leaves the door open for humanity and chaos to slip onto the stage. For me it’s at the lower levels I feel most connected to the game and it’s roles in my past.

As kids it was T-ball then Little League. For us it was Cota’s field on the outskirts of the village surrounded by acres of corn. A narrow valley between two parallel ridges. It smelled of manure most of the short season as the tilling and planting were taking place all around. Behind the backstop a stream ran slowly across the flats before picking up momentum once it reached the forest. I still remember standing in its knee deep water, my feet buried in the soft silt, digging out fistfuls of wet clay with my best friend. Rushing dinners of hot dogs and grilled cheese to make it there for games on weekday nights. Sharing the space on Saturday mornings with many of the kids I’d go on to grow up with but before the world sorted us into adversarial tribes. Observing how the best players among us were usually driven by the relentless barking of fragile dads. Men trying in vain to exert control over the unpredictable and ultimately teaching their kids to hate that time. The Field’s still there and has been expanded upon though I heard they were having an issue with people using it as a spot to get high and leaving discarded syringes around.

Rickey Henderson. Rickey was my favorite player. To this day if you ask me who’s the greatest to ever play the game my answer will be quick and confident. When I played on a team or with my friends that’s who I was in my head. We both were outliers batting left but throwing right. According to his autobiography that put us at an advantage because we’re already a foot closer to first when we made contact. I loved him so much that all I cared about was stealing. I just wanted to get on base so I could steal. It didn’t matter if the coach told me not to steal, I was going to. I copied the way he’d lead off the base, lifting the heel of his back foot so he was always prepared to make a dash or dive back to first. Stooped over with hands hanging low like poplar vines , so your fingertips brushed the dirt. He taught me how to sow chaos in regulated systems, to distract and disturb those who thought they were in control. Sliding into a base head first was not allowed because of concussion concerns but I always slid head first anyway because Rickey did. The other thing I took from Rickey was the idea of “giving them a show”. Even if a catch was easy to make you add some flourish, you up the drama, you make it cool. To quote what Rickey would repeat to Rickey for 3 minutes, before every game while looking at Rickey in the mirror, “Rickey’s the best. Rickey’s the best.”

*Unknown little league mom rippin butts by the fence*

Ragball was a game we invented in middle school that used a softer, cloth type ball which had some weight but less pop than a hardball. This allowed us to play pick-up style games in smaller spaces, like primarily my front yard. It wasn’t the size of a baseball field but still wide and a good chunk of distance to the passing dirt road. It could be played with a varying number of players (you’d just have to cover more ground) and an out could be made in the traditional ways but also if you threw the ball and hit the baserunner anywhere below the neck. A fifty foot pine tree rose just behind second base and stretched into center field that we called the green monster. You had to learn to field the balls hit into it’s expanse that came bouncing down in a Plinko fashion. A swamp ran across the outfield, if you hit the ball in the cattails that was usually all she wrote, hit it over and it was home run. One season some bees built their nest in the soft ground of right field which resulted in hitters trying to pull the ball and purposefully send the right fielder into them. This move was called a “My Girl”.

We played inning-less games most days every summer with whoever showed up from the neighborhood. Ragball began when many of us still had conventional ideas of how we would grow and who we would become and continued to be a constant even as we found that our interests and personalities diverged. Ragball became the game for hippies, punks, misfits, farm kids and artists who still wanted to run around in the sun and talk shit with their friends. There was the core crew that always appeared but then you never knew who else would show up. Random kids on vacation or people’s cousins, girlfriends, boyfriends, kids from school I’d never spoken to until the day they tagged along. Only occasionally would someone want to take it too seriously and get turned off by the attitudes, the incessant shit talking and the anarchist methods of dispute resolution. Most found that they loved the game and just had hated the culture around organized play. Spiritual not religious. We’d play till we stopped, summer after summer until everyone was gone. No managers, No Umpires.

Eventually the world crossed the invisible bounds of our makeshift field and disrupted this attitude. The toxicity of aging in the culture outside of the one we’d built played out during an at bat, late summer. Richard (we’ll call him) had been friends with my older brother’s crew since the first grade. He was an athletic, nice and seemingly normal kid who we all had known forever. To me he looked like Fred Savage and so whenever he batted I would pretend to be the narrator from Wonder Years in order to distract him. I’m not sure if that’s what made him snap that day (didn’t help) but the real underlying issue was the juvenile caste sysyem. Rich was embraced and accepted by the popular kids and many of us were their enemies or targets and we didn’t hide our hatred of them. My brother and Rich had been close all through grade school and tried to hang on through middle but the same kids who now accepted Rich regularly bullied my brother. To quote Howard Zinn “You can’t be neutral on a moving train”, and the tension between old loyalties and new popularity had to inevitably give.

Rich completely cracked that day, out of nowhere and over nothing (ok maybe I was doing the voice). He started yelling at my brother, challenging him to fight, breaking stuff in the yard and throwing rocks at the house. Unlike some of us, Rich was not a fighter. He’d never had to scrap to defend himself from bullies in the halls and cafeterias or jump into a melee to protect his friends. Most of us watched with open jaws as he broke down, and then we encouraged my brother to kick his ass. Zak however was an avowed pacifist, a card carrying member of The World Unison Club and without a doubt the toughest among us. He knew them both since grade school and he wouldn’t let them fight, he held them back and pushed them down when they tried. Eventually Rich got on his bike and road off. At the time we figured he was just a preppy sellout, that we’d gotten under his skin by constantly picking on his popular friends and he couldn’t take it. In hindsight though it’s easy to see that the need to be accepted, to not be an outcast or a target and the competing needs to be with those he’d known and loved forever was breaking his heart. We made him feel ashamed and he hated us for it. He could no longer exist drama-free in both tribes and this was the result, he needed to make a break. Rich didn’t show up again to play pick up for the rest of that summer or any that followed.

A year or two after that summer we were messing around in the massive sandpit behind the high school (where Mo would later make attempts to start a Fight Club Lol), which basically entailed jumping off high outcroppings into the massive piles and starting fires, when the high school baseball team gathered along the rim and started throwing rocks at us, big ones. We sought cover and shouted insults while they continued to launch stones down around us. While they were distracted the burliest and most Irish among us, made his way through the brush and up the side of the ridge to flank them. He emerged from the bushes on their right with a long, spike handled knife drawn and inquiring if there was “a fucking problem?” Those baseball players then began to express how much they actually liked him and thought he was cool while beating a fast retreat. I share this story only to clearly distinguish our brand of youth baseball from the more organized leagues (and also cause you never forget the friends who pull weapons to defend you).

They were the Catholic church but we were the Manson Family.

The ordinary insurgencies of aging.

Nowadays during the afternoons in the bleachers, under the sun, watching my own kids try to figure it out I’ll remember those days. As a game unfolds and they try desperately to be the catalyst for a moment of transcendence. To succeed in a manner that will freeze time like the end credits of classic TV. Time is this overarching theme. It’s a game that’s played predictably by always changing characters, the only constant is time. Life will occur no matter what you do and it will blunt your sharpest edges and take your finest skills no matter how hard you resist. It will occur on a planet that is itself playing against time, that is temporary. That is already gone.

In the glare of that reality it’s the rituals that bring us back to our narratives. That let us find the doors and walk into the rooms that hold parts of us. The rituals of a game rooted in a life that allow you to reach back and touch those moments that make it matter. For example, it was those 2010 Giants’ games live, late at night in my headphones out on the East Coast. When I was the only person awake in my home, my neighborhood, isolated and overwhelmed. Tethered to the spirit and performance of a team that was too old, too weird and too defiant to fit the narrative. If they could do it there was hope for me. Rituals are trained actions, connection, the muscle memory that keeps you going when the winters are dark and the failure is palpable. And Baseball is a game rooted in failure. You fail and fail and fail until you adjust. Faith is believing that the actions and adjustments will eventually lead to a form of freedom. That failure can be defeated with perspective and strategy. Another form of renewal. And that like in life, really the only reason we have faith is because we’ve been there when it’s happened. We remember how it feels. To see the shadows of winter pass, the light return, the players rise and meet the moments. The boredom, the laughter and the flashes of grace.

“You can pick all the flowers, but you can’t stop the spring.”

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