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
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