181. Baseball Pain (3)

Until September 23 the pain in Cincinnati was so dull it's not worth measuring.  We were out of the race and had never really been in it.  Right from the beginning it had been the Giants and Phillies, really talented teams, they had been the ones, up there jockeying back and forth for first place, May, June, July, up there where losses really hit you, up where pain was significant.  Then Philadelphia had pulled away in August and few really sharp jabs were possible.  Cincinnati had stumbled around in third or fourth place, occasionally bumping into St. Louis, down in fifth, and by mid-September all either city was feeling was the old ache of the loser.

"Then, boom, Chico Ruiz!"  That, for the sake of drama, is what I'd like to say, but no, baseball fans understand numbers too well for that.  After Chico's steal, no matter how hard the Phils are taking it (I understand that their manager, George Mauch, was walking around the locker room saying, "Chico Fucking Ruiz, Chico Fucking Ruiz") the Reds are still five and a half out.  No, the boom doesn't come until after the win on the 23rd, and then it's a small one.  We're suddenly three and a half out.  With ten left to play.  Some hope is justified.  Excitement rises.

The other two cities, I assume, are still in the dumps.  They're five back, well outside the hope circle.  San Francisco fans have probably had more pain up to this point than St. Louis fans.  On June 15 the Giants were tied for first place.  "Ho, ho, this could be the year."  The Cards were in 8th place, three games under .500.  "Guess these guys don't have it."  On August 23 they were eleven games behind.

If you're a Cardinal fan you're depressed but you're not pained.  Not sharply, anyway.   Sharp pain is what you feel when your demonstrably strong team, up there battling for first with another strong team, blows a game.  That's what the Giants did in August.  Again and again.   August 16: Error by Hart gives Milwaukee its winning unearned run.  August 18: In the eighth inning pitcher Bobby Bolin goes to second with Marty Keough's bunt, an intended sacrifice, but the runner, Chico Ruiz, Chico Fucking Ruiz, beats the throw.  Bad gamble.  Two grounders and Ruiz has scored.  Final score 1-0.  August 21: Giants give up three runs in the ninth inning and lose to the Cards 6-5.

The Phils, the team Giants fans expected to battle down to the wire, pulled away.  The expression for what happened to the Giants, the one the fans could expect to find in every season summary in the future, is "fell out of contention."  The Reds "fell out of contention in June."  It's neutral but it hurts.  On goes the writer to the teams that counted.

It's less painful to fall out of contention in August than it is in September, when you're closer to the prize.  But the city that does that is not free of pain in September.  That's the month for spectator pain, for watching, from a distance, the drama of close contention, the struggle of the last few on their feet in the arena, knowing that, if only a few things had gone differently, you could have been there.  "If only Bolin had gone to first with that ball.  If only...If only...."

But Giants fans not only had retrospective pain in September, they had immediate pain.   It was a combination, and the team made sure of it — by winning just enough to keep hopes of contention alive.  In early September they nosed into third place, and kept clawing, from fourth place, to get back into the ring.  Right up to the last week.  There were many September nights, I'm sure, when San Francisco fans could have turned off their radios feeling the pain of the August losses that put them where they were.

Would we, in Cincinnati, have found that odd, that Giants fans should be grieving because they wouldn't have a chance to be as wounded as fans in two of the three contending cities would be?  Not at all.  We had grieved that way for decades.

If you haven't put in that kind of grieving time, or if you are an outsider, you're going to find that kind of understanding hard to come by.  Maybe you could do it in a season, but you'd have to have a good imagination.  Can you imagine, in '64, what those fans of the teams under San Francisco are feeling?  Put yourself in Pittsburgh, or Chicago, or Houston, way down there, 6th, 8th, 9th place.  Where the Phils and Reds spent so many years.  Can you imagine it?

Now I don't ever want to say that watching a baseball game is dull.  With the poorest team there's always individual drama, a rookie trying to make it, a veteran trying to hang on, a marginal pitcher trying to master the pitch that will save him.  But that's the little picture, and what we're trying to understand is the pain in the big picture, particularly when it is impressed on you that your team is not in it.  And hasn't been for years.  And isn't likely to be.

(Remember here that the seventies, the years that sweetened the Cincinnati imagination forever, are still to come.)

So there's something to remember about the pain you're going to witness, or experience, in future posts: that below those feeling it are many, many others who would be glad, so glad, who would give their eye-teeth, to feel it.