180. Baseball Pain (2)

   

First you have to understand the pain of the Philadelphia fan, since that is the pain I am going to have to compete with. 

It's not a hidden pain.  The cries of old and middle-aged men, and a few women, have been sounding in newsprint and blogs for forty years.  "It hurt so much I couldn't even watch baseball for a year afterward."  "All I had to do was look at [my father's] face to know the horrible news."  "I saw those [happily printed] 1964 World Series tickets framed in my cousin Donnie's den, and I almost cried."  

Your handicap, youngster of today, is that you live in a time when teams come to the end of a season competing for ten places in the postseason playoffs.  In 1964 ten teams competed for one place.  It was go to the World Series or go home.  If you were a loser like the Phillies (17 last place finishes between 1919-1947, only two league championships in 81 years) that meant that if you missed your chance here you might go decades before getting another one.

Another possible handicap is living in a city with a lot of really good sportswriters writing about a really good team.  You won't know what it's like to be condescended to when those writers, knowing your team's record, come to town.  In Philadelphia your stadium will, after Yankee Stadium, "seem to be made of Tinker Toys."  In Cincinnati it will be "The Great American Small Park."  Your city will be "dowdy, conservative Cincinnati," and your team, though it burns holes in the base paths stealing bases (nine in one game), will be "conservative" because its square management demands haircuts.

I won't draw out the pain of 1964, since the Philly collapse, one of the two or three most famous in baseball history, is probably already known to you: the team lost ten straight and finished in a tie for second.  The game, and maybe the play, that started the losing streak is the one pictured on my theologian's blog, the one that has the catcher looking backward.

The man is looking at a baseball that has sailed past him.  The reason it is doing that is that his pitcher, Art Mahaffey, has been emotionally unsettled by the sight of Chico Ruiz running for home plate. 

"And what should be so unsettling about that?" even a European, watching the game, might wonder.  Home plate, he can see after an inning or two, is where the pitcher normally throws the ball.  The need to throw it very hard, or put various spins on it, makes throwing the ball exactly over the plate difficult, as his American host may explain, but now there is no batter there.  All Mahaffey has to do is throw the ball at moderate speed within the catcher's reach.  Ruiz has many yards to go before he gets there.  If anything in baseball is duck soup, this is duck soup.

Philadelphians know a lot now about the man who made it so ducky.  Chico Ruiz was a rookie, a fill-in, who never quite made it to journeyman.  In 1964 he apparently hadn't been around long enough to know that managers would kill you if you tried a naked steal of home (as opposed to a steal covered by a teammate stealing second) against a right-handed pitcher (one who's looking right at you).  And he'd double-kill you if you did it with a hitter like Frank Robinson up, somebody who had a good chance of bringing you in with a hit anyway.  Double-kill you, that is, if Robinson, not noticing you, hadn't swung and taken your silly head off already.

Well that's the salt the media have been putting in the Philadelphia wound for 48 years, that their heroic masters of the game were done in by a twit, and I don't want to add to it.  I just want to note the special nature of their pain: that it's nearly all retrospective.  If the 1964 Phils, after their bad spell, had gone on to win the pennant and then the World Series as the 1950 Phils had done, there would be no pain at all.  Just a little relieved wonderment, if that.

Try a little counterfactual experiment here.  In 1950 the Phillies had an even bigger lead, seven and a half games, on a comparable date, September 20.  They blew it and had to beat the Dodgers on the last day, October 1, to win the pennant that took them to a World Series victory.  Suppose they hadn't done that.  Suppose they'd lost the tiebreaker.  Philadelphians would be looking at the 1950 bad spell the way they're looking at the 1964 one now, and picking out moments, a tipping point, with an image, probably, the way they're doing now. 

We don't have any images because those moments have been forgotten, buried by the glorious successes that followed. And that prompts me to put a question to Philadelphia fans:  Would you really like to have this painful image buried?  Would you like to have Ruiz mean nothing to you, emotionally?

That's a harder question than it looks, as years of teaching good fiction have taught me.  It's a question, I think, of how much we value images that fit into a story, and how much we value stories that give us understanding.  And that's going to vary with individuals, especially when they're looking at a painful image.  I don't know about the theologian who started me on this series of posts, and I can't contact him, but my guess — based on I don't know what — is that he would not like to give up this painful image, even for a triumphant one.  Nor would certain other Philly fans, the ones who would value the same thing in fiction.  They've got a great story, it helps them understand life (that time and chance make it so cruel), and they would hate to give this up.

If anybody else can testify to this response, I'd like to hear from them. The image can be found at Chico‑Ruiz‑Steals‑Home.jpg